> Elon Musk came to a California federal court on Wednesday to argue that Sam Altman and his co-founders “stole a charity.” He left having admitted, under oath, that Tesla is not currently pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI)— directly contradicting a tweet he’d posted just weeks earlier.
Apparently there is a mushroom that makes most people have the same hallucinations of "little people" or similar fantasy figures. Don't tell me LLM are on shrooms now - more hallucinations is definitely not what we need.
> Scientists call them “lilliputian hallucinations,” a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures
Seems to be several different species that have been known about for quite some time in parts of SE Asia and Oceania. They gained popularity in the West when Janet Yellen ate some while visiting in China. But she ate them cooked as part of a meal. When cooked, they don't have hallucinogenic effects
"Forward Deployed Engineering" is a Palantir-coined buzzword that is nothing but military-branded marketing fluff. Maybe it sounds 'fancy', but it simply is the same old practice of "on-site" engineers that places engineers directly within a customer’s location / infrastructure.
There’s nothing revolutionary about it other than the little spin for a standard industry role to make the sorry plantir bros feel more appreciated while helping tech-fascists destroy democracies.
Honestly, Hassabis and Amodei are the 2 last beacon of hopes for me in the AI race. What they have for them is that they both are scientists and not 'business-bros'. But are they genuine? Will they not be corrupted by power or pressure from shareholders?
The main problem is that in capitalism private companies have only the mission to serve their shareholders/owners.
Public institutions have the mission to serve the public.
The only real solution is to make AI a public good/utility which should be regulated on an international level and overseen by trustworthy institutions.
I agree with your feeling about Hassabis, but Dario gives me the creeps. YMMV of course. But I always have to think about him, grinning like a smurf at the WEF in Davos , telling everyone that their jobs will inevitably be eliminated by a machine of his creation. But that he is team human of course and deeply concerned (hahaha). In some weird sense, I even like Altman more.
You prefer Altman -- someone who will lie and cheat and backstab and work on autonomous military drones and video generators and adult chatbots, give his entire life and being, in order to amass as much power and influence as he can -- because you don't like Dario's smile?
I don't know any of them personally, so its all based on feelings anyway, created by internet consumption and the opinion of others. So who am I to judge anyway?
However, I have a weird feeling about Dario and every time I see his interviews, I get the creeps and he begins to really annoy me. And yes. His smurfy smile is certainly a factor, yes.
What irks me about Amodei is his insistence in his public communication and speeches for the role of AI in defense and in providing a strategic advantage over "the enemies of the US". Not sure how much it is political talk to appease this particular administration but it seems more prominent and reiterated than I'd like.
> The only real solution is to make AI a public good/utility which should be regulated on an international level and overseen by trustworthy institutions.
There is a precedent for this in nuclear weapons. It did not work. All it takes is a sufficiently resourced nation-state to defect from whatever agreements there are and the whole thing collapses. If the incentives point toward doing so, it is an inevitable outcome.
There was no nuclear weapon used in warfare anymore since WW II. I think the regulation and oversight worked incredibly well over the past 70-80 years, despite the game-theoretic challenge you mention.
I'm referring specifically to preventing additional countries from becoming nuclear powers. There was massive effort and coordination expended to this end. It failed repeatedly. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968. 5 more countries armed themselves thereafter.
People doing frontier research in knowledge representation & reasoning are worrying that soon, with the merging of LLM and knowledge graphs, automated 'everything' from research to production, will be possible. This implies that 'human cleverness' will get you nowhere any more and the only limits will then be computation - a resource Big Tech is hard at work completely walling normal people out of.
What exactly is 'merging' here? Existing formal knowledgebases with LLMs? I don't think that's anywhere near human knowledge and thus ability to make novel connections. And autoformalization is... basically not happening soon, so we're still ultimately bottlenecked there.
Not a fan, but unfortunately a "digital proof of citizenship" seems to inevitable due to the en-shitification of the internet, autocratic state actor's doctrines to destabilise free societies through disinformation that matches well with social media's en-rage-ment business model, and the more recent AI slopification / AI bots running wild.
The question is whether citizens can build enough pressure for such verification systems to be state-based and truly zero-knowledge (akin to the EU's) versus having the private sector 'verify' each user to siphon data, profit off it (Thiel's Persona) and fortify surveillance-capitalism and autocratic administrations.
At the moment in the UK (where any mention of digital ID sends half the population mental) you have to email a whole raft of ID docs and personal data to estate agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors etc. to get an ID check done. Or use a private ID service that can have a cost associated and may not be any more secure than my passport scan sitting in someones M365 mailbox. You can't know.
I'd be happy to have a government service replace all that nonsense, where a one-time challenge code could verify my ID. There is now a UK.gov "One Login" authentication used by other government services that is essentially a digital ID as far as I can see. It just needs to be made mandatory for ID checks by law.
Such a service can also be used for age verification with the correct privacy controls in place, far better than all the dodgy age verification services that exist now.
Digital ID and age verification are going to be a part of the internet going forward. I'd rather have a government service that (in a functioning democracy) has accountability to the citizens that use it. ID verification is also a natural monopoly, so the government picks a winner anyway.
> Data for sale included people’s gender, age, month and year of birth, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, mental health, self-reported medical history, cognitive function, and physical measures.
If this is not traceable back to individuals, it would probably good to be made public. But I assume the UK Biobank only gives access to trusted partners since - as we know in our 'data analytics' day and age - with enough general data quantity you can trace back anything to anyone if you have the resources. And the capitalist-surveillance econonmy certainly provides the profit-motive.
> if we don't support truly independent, objective, investigative journalism, who will?
Like Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros and countless other billionaires through their "charities"? https://theguardian.org/
Just because they are liberal and non-profit doesn't mean they are independent, that only appears this way if you only think in the narrow confines of the Overton Window between "conservative" and "liberal" of mainstream discourse.
> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.
reply