Voroxpete

joined 1 year ago
[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works -2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

So you primary in Dems who will support ranked choice. This is .ml, surely you've all heard of entryism?

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

While truly defining pretty much any aspect of human intelligence is functionally impossible with our current understanding of the mind, we can create some very usable "good enough" working definitions for these purposes.

At a basic level, "reasoning" would be the act of drawing logical conclusions from available data. And that's not what these models do. They mimic reasoning, by mimicking human communication. Humans communicate (and developed a lot of specialized language with which to communicate) the process by which we reason, and so LLMs can basically replicate the appearance of reasoning by replicating the language around it.

The way you can tell that they're not actually reasoning is simple; their conclusions often bear no actual connection to the facts. There's an example I linked elsewhere where the new model is asked to list states with W in their name. It does a bunch of preamble where it spells out very clearly what the requirements and process are; assemble a list of all states, then check each name for the presence of the letter W.

And then it includes North Dakota, South Dakota, North Carolina and South Carolina in the list.

Any human being capable of reasoning would absolutely understand that that was wrong, if they were taking the time to carefully and systematically work through the problem in that way. The AI does not, because all this apparent "thinking" is a smoke show. They're machines built to give the appearance of intelligence, nothing more.

When real AGI, or even something approaching it, actually becomes a thing, I will be extremely excited. But this is just snake oil being sold as medicine. You're not required to buy into their bullshit just to prove you're not a technophobe.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

Definitely worth it to keep reading. He's finished the series now, and the payoff is solid (personally I felt he could have gone for another book, but I really like the ending he chose).

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Look, at this point I'm basically just "That guy who recommends the Luna books", but this is yet another situation where they really are the right answer. Luna: New Moon is your starting point. The series is absolutely bursting at the seams with diverse and interesting female and non-binary characters. It also features some wonderfully atypical male characters who really play around with our understanding of what it means to perform masculinity. I am obsessed with Lucas Corta, iron fisted patriarch whose one weakness is for the beautiful young man who plays bossa nova for him, and I'm equally obsessed with his son Lucasino, the rich kid playboy who has fucked his way through his entire friendship circle, and loves makeup, androgynous clothes and baking.

Anyway, Luna: New Moon by Ian MacDonald. Give it a look.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Noted. I'll have to play around with that sometime.

Despite my obvious stance as an AI skeptic, I have no problem with putting it to use in places where it can be used effectively (and ethically). I've just found that in practice, those uses are varnishingly few. I'm not on some noble quest to rid the world of computers, I just don't like being sold overhyped crap.

I'm also hesitant to try to rebuild any part of my workflow around the current generation of these tools, when they obviously aren't going to exist in a few years, or will exist but at an exorbitant price. The cost to run genAI is far, far higher than any entity (even Microsoft) has any willingness to sustain long term. We're in the "give it away or make it super cheap to get everyone bought in" phase right now, but the enshittification will come hard and fast on this one, much sooner than anyone thinks. OpenAI are literally burning billions just in compute right now. It's unsustainable. Short of some kind of magical innovation that brings those compute costs down a hundred or thousand fold, this isn't going to stick around.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Read some history mate. The luddites weren't technophobes either. They hated the way that capitalism was reaping all the rewards of industrializion. They were all for technological advancement, they just wanted it to benefit everyone.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 34 points 5 days ago

Yeah, that word is doing some real heavy lifting here.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

More and more advanced tools for automation are an important part of creating a post-scarcity future. If we can combine that with tearing down our current economic system - which inherently requires and thus has to manufacture scarcity - we can uplift our species in ways we can currently only imagine.

But this ain't it bud. If I ask you for water and you hand me a glass of warm piss, I'm not "against drinking water" for refusing to gulp it down.

This isn't AI. It isn't - meaningfully and usefully - any form of automation at all. A bunch of conmen slapped the letters "AI" on the side of their bottle of piss and you're drinking it down like it's grandma's peach tea.

The people calling out the fundamental flaws with these products aren't doing so because we hate the entire concept of automation, any more than someone exposing a snake-oil salesman hates medicine. What we hate is being lied to. The current state of this technology is bullshit and hype. It is not fit for human consumption (other than recreationally) and the money being pumped into it could be put to far better uses. OpenAI may have lofty goals, but they have utterly failed at achieving them, and right now any true desire to create AGI has been totally subsumed by the need to keep pumping out slightly better looking versions of the same polished turd in order to convince investors to keep paying for their staggeringly high hosting costs.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 days ago (7 children)

This example doesn't prove what you think it does. It shows pattern detection - something computers are inherently very well suited for - but it doesn't demonstrate "reasoning" in any meaningful way.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 days ago (3 children)

It's weird how so many of these "technophobes" are IT professionals. Crazy that people would line up to go into a profession they so obviously hate and fear.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Fuck you, that made me smile. And I haven't even had my coffee yet.

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