I can’t believe I have to keep explaining this to people, lmao

First of all, this is a math equation. Math is what computers do, they are essentially really fucking good calculators.

That math problem hadn’t been solved before, that’s true, however, if you actually read the excerpt you just shared, you’ll see that the equation was solved using preexisting theories and formulas. Ergo, humans had already manufactured every individual piece of the puzzle, and had used them in other contexts that the AI could be fed and then reuse.

Saying that AI came up with the solution isn’t the full story. That’s like saying that AI created a shitty piece of slop art. It did no such thing, it plagiarized a bunch of work from other people and essentially made it into a collage.

When MC Hammer (rather, his producer) sampled Rick James for “Can’t touch this”, did he become the bass player? No, that was still Rick James, they just took his song and altered it to make theirs.

What tedious work?

In order to answer that question, you would first need to know how to make AGI (this is not known to anyone).

In order to know how to emulate human intelligence, you would first need to understand how human intelligence is constructed (this is not known to anyone).

In order to understand how human intelligence is constructed, you would have to understand how human cognition works (this is not known to anyone).

In order to understand how human cognition works, you would need to understand how the exact mechanisms upon which human brain works in the first place function (this is not known to anyone).

I could continue, but you should get it by now.

An LLM cannot do that either.

An LLM can only ever rearrange what is put into it and shit it back out. You’re never going to get any knowledge out of it that wasn’t previously fed into it (and even then it hallucinates and doesn’t know shit because it’s literally just code).

We do not know how to make an AGI, ergo LLMs do not “know” how to make an AGI (and in fact, don’t actually know shit at all).

They’re not escaping users control, they’re fucking computer programs.

People are using them irresponsibly.

If you accidentally run someone over in your car, the car didn’t “escape your control”, you just did a shitty job of controlling the car.

It’s not the same thing.

(Fuck “AI” btw)

The limit for what?

The bottom line is that AI is both more expensive and less productive than humans for at least 99% of tasks

Wouldn’t something like that be machinery the saw company already owns?

Does slop not involve expensive machinery?

I agree, and the people at the top of the industry pushing this 100% want a slave.

They don’t know how to build the slave they want though, so they’re attempting to leverage manufactured fear about their fuckware in order to lower the value of real workers in order to push us closer to slavery.

We can’t stop them from telling these lies, but we can certainly help people know not to buy their lies.

That’s not conservative my man, it’s delusional

What information are you extrapolating this from? Just vibes?

Being below a certain employee count reduces worker protections

It does not change the cost of the slop (which is currently artificially tiny)

They can’t do AGI tho. They’re nowhere near being capable of even conceptually thinking about AGI.

They talk like they are to scare their investors into pouring more capital into their furnace, but AGI ain’t happening.

I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with that, we’re nowhere near an AI that can think or feel.

There is no path from LLM to sentience.

The concept of a computer thinking or feeling is an incredibly distant ‘in the future plausibility’ at best.

Yeah, the point of my explanation was to be simplified.

Both of your links ultimately back up what I’m saying tho.

The computer isn’t thinking, it’s doing a math equation.

Coding is like insanely well suited to LLMs by nature tho, that’s why it can actually do that.

Code is a language with stricter definitions and less verbosity than a spoken human language. Things only have one definition in code, one spelling, one syntax, etc.

There’s an element of artistry to human coding, but it’s more of a science than an art (compared to spoken human language anyhow). It’s easier to predict.

There are other promising “ai” technologies, like radiological image recognition, aren’t the same technology as LLMs, but the companies who make the LLMs constantly conflate their technology with that of more useful technologies in order to obfuscate their relative uselessness.

Even the coding models are being localized. There’s absolutely no reason to have a massive AI datacenter unless you’re making a shit LLM, and even then, the only reason to have that is to commit financial fraud essentially.

EDIT - I learned a bit more about “agentic” AI since you had mentioned it earlier, and what’s actually going on behind the scenes is wild.

So basically, an “agent” is a computer program that you give a task to. The agent then attempts to accomplish the task by engaging in a loop until the task is accomplished.

The structure of the loop is 3 steps. 1) Prompt an LLM - The agent asks an LLM what the first step in the task you asked it to accomplish would be. 2) The LLM provides a plausible answer, and the agent then attempts to carry out these instructions. 3) If the given instructions don’t work, the LLM appends the prompt to say “I tried step #1, it didn’t work, what should I try next?”. If the instructions work, the agent appends the prompt to say “I took this step and it worked, what’s the next step?”. Then the loop repeats.

So, this would work exceptionally well for code because the computer can Test and verify the code before continuing… but that’s just about the only use case for the technology

A good way to visualize this is to imagine yourself as an agent. Let’s say you need to do your laundry, that’s your task. So you ask the LLM what the first step is, and you do what it says no matter what. Then you go back, append the prompt, and prompt the AI again. This cycle repeats until either 1) you finish the laundry, or 2) you destroy the laundry, or burn down the house, or injure yourself blindly following the LLMs directions (this second outcome is the statistically probable one).

Would you do that? No, probably not. You can think, so you would know which instructions to attempt, and which to ignore. The Agent cannot think. The LLM cannot think. The agent strictly follows directions like any other computer program. The LLM is attempting to construct an answer that appears plausible, token by token. It doesn’t matter if it is plausible, or possible even, the LLM isn’t trying to give you the correct answer, it’s trying to give you an answer that appears correct.

Well your main assertion was a wildly incorrect definition of sentience.

You go on to say that (and I’m paraphrasing) “sentience is in the eye of the beholder”, which is also wrong.

There’s also the implication that you do think computers are sentient, but you haven’t typed that specifically; I know you said you didn’t want assumptions, but this is a fair inference. Someone who wasn’t emotionally invested I the idea of chatbot sentience wouldn’t push back so hard with basically 0 facts to back them up.

Your final assertion is that the Wikipedia article doesn’t immediately contradict you, which again, it does in the first sentence. You can see my previous comment for that information tho, I’m not retyping it.

First of all, thank you for the compliment. I try not to be insulting or condescending if the other party remains civil, so I’m glad to know that my effort is not going unnoticed.

I would have to look into who’s funding AISI to take a guess at that (which I’m open to doing, but I think you may have misinterpreted my meaning, so I will start by addressing that).

While I don’t think that most media is being truthful about AI, but I do think that they might not know they’re lying? They seem to just parrot whatever the tech oligarchs tell them to say without question; I don’t think they actually have the requisite knowledge to determine if what they’re being told is true or not.

AISI presents itself as a sort of regulatory/research entity. I don’t currently have good reason to disbelieve them, and based on the article you shared it doesn’t sound to me like they’re one of the people lying for money.

They do mention early in the article that for this research they didn’t put these models into sandboxes, they were intentionally allowed access to the internet. They also mention that they’ve turned off all of the safety features of the models before prompting them. With those given parameters, this isn’t a scenario that would organically occur in real life.

So, that’s the 1st half of the misinterpretation. The 2nd half has more to do with how LLMs (and all software) function.

When you prompt an AI, you aren’t dictating every step of the process to it, you’re asking it to complete a task, essentially. So, any time you prompt any LLM at all, with any objective, things are happening inside of the computer that you aren’t necessarily aware of, and that you definitely didn’t ask it to do explicitly. A good analogy for LLMs specifically is d20 dice. Essentially, the LLM has a separate 20 sided die for every single token (a token is basically a fraction of a word). So if the first token is “the” the computer picks up the die labeled “the” and rolls it. This die has the 20 most statistically likely tokens to follow “the” on it, one on each side. So, for this example let’s say that the “the” die lands on “re”. The AI now has the text “there” ready to print. It sets down the “the” die, and instead picks up the “re” die, and rolls that to determine the next token. This process repeats over and over again until the LLM is ‘confident’ that it’s assembled a plausible looking answer, and then it prints that answer to your screen. That is the extent of the thinking that an LLM does.

You didn’t ask the LLM to do any of that, you just asked it how to get cheese to stay on a pizza, and it told you “glue”. You didn’t observe any of the things it did without your explicit direction to get to “glue”, but they happened.

That’s not exactly how all programs work (most programs are deterministic, which is what you want a computer to be. That’s why most programs don’t hallucinate like AI does).

A more palatable example might be a computer game. When I fire up my emulator, and load up a Sonic the Hedgehog ROM, the CPU takes that ROM file and copies it into my system’s RAM. I did not tell the emulator to do this, it did it on its own, because it is programmed to do so… there’s a bunch of other steps in that process that I also didn’t explicitly request, but you get the point. (Hopefully anyway, let me know if I’ve done a poor job explaining this and I’ll try again).

EDIT - i’m listening to the most recent episode of the podcast “Better Offline” right now. Serendipitously, the topic of discussion is directly addressing exactly what you’re asking me about. I’ve only listened to the first third of the podcast so far, but I’m fairly confident that it will explain what I am currently trying to explain to you, but much more effectively.

Fair point

I think the reason that my focus is on LLMs is because they keep showing up in annoying ways in my life, and I know I’m not the only one.

All of the evil actions you’re referencing were undertaken to prop up chat bots who cannot do any of the jobs (outside of some coding) that they are advertised as being able to perform.

To me the strength of the argument I’m trying to make is that they’re doing all of this damage in order to have something that’s effectively worthless. Perhaps I’m not doing a good job communicating what I’m attempting to communicate.

… also, I probably need to stop responding to all of these dumbasses and/or trolls who are constantly contradicting themselves in the first sentence of their assertions, lol

China has 500 data centers, America has 5,000, there is no AI race.

I understand that you’re impresssed that it can sometimes slop together functional code. That does not make it intelligent or dangerous.

The don’t do anything without being prompted, you are just regurgitating oligarchic propaganda.

They put an AI in a flawed sandbox, it’s not really that impressive

So you prompt the AI to do a task, and then it does the task, and somehow you see this as an unprompted action?

That actually completely proves my point, they don’t act unprompted.

AI is dangerous in many contexts, especially the surveillance state they’re building with all the IR cameras and shit. It’s dangerous when evil people use it to evil ends, but that’s true of most anything.

AI is not at all dangerous in the way you might imagine after watching Terminator 2.

In this scenario, why would companies start attempting to make big expensive chatbots again after they caused the worst financial fallout of all time? That would be likely the least advisable business move ever.

Similar to you, I would concede that my information sphere is influenced by my contempt for the technology (as well as by my love for computers in general)… thank you for being open to have a real conversation with me about this by the way. Most of the time I just end up getting attacked because pro-AI people don’t like what I have to say.

I would note tho, that there’s only a profit motive involved in one of these competing narratives, and that would be the narrative being pushed by the oligarchic techbro fascists.