means to an end.”

The end is “get enough money for just one more training run bro” both because they hope to reach recursive self improvement magic AGI God in the next training run and because their entire value proposition is centered around releasing “better” models.

Well obviously they wouldn’t bother calling themselves, that never accomplishes anything. They will instead raise money for a new lobbyist think-tank.

“Since you [Ms. Congresswoman] can’t manage an international total ban on all AI progress, the only alternative is to bail out my company so we can maybe have a small chance at inventing a friendly AI before the Chiense invent skynet. Obviously the Chinese are behind us and have only gotten as far as they have by distillation attacks to steal our models’ training (that we trained with honestly-and-totally-fair-use acquired scrapes of the entire internet), BUT if you just make us stop, the Chinese will catch up in 6 months and then we will have Chinese skynet, or worse yet, an AI aligned to communism and the CPP!”

Well, they’ve also reached model sizes where scrapes of the entire internet aren’t sufficiently large enough to train the model, so they also need more data. But yeah, they compute cost of actually training the models are prohibitively large.

or they are the ultimate politics understanders.

A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are. Others have ideas that are extremely simplistic, like there are lots of lesswrong post proposing one cool trick to get trump on their side or get normies to understand AI doomerism.

The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.”

Yeah, they have all these big brain plans for research programs into aligning AI, not getting that if they actually get the public or any major political figures to really believe their doomer ideas “shut that shit down” with maybe a side of “throw some people in jail” is the common sense response.

They are capable of ignoring Eliezer’s instructions, but only when it means making an even worse decision.

Okay, actually, Eliezer used GenAI to slop out the picture for the visual novel we mocked recently, so I guess they just don’t care about trying to make an individual stand?

This has a lot of “are we the baddies” energy! I’m almost surprised there aren’t more tech workers that quit like this person apparently did? I say almost, because it doesn’t seem that hard for the existing pattern of jaded cynicism and/or greed to cover LLM companies.

On the upside, they probably won’t actually succeed at anything novel. On the downside, having workers breed anthrax (or something along those lines were the information is out there, if not necessarily publicly well known) under a chatbot’s instructions will still be bad.

What happened to the mythical cybersecurity abilities of Claude Mythos?

No, see, AI is only good for asymmetrically advantaged at generating headlines and marketing copy finding non-issues and known issues offensive cyber operations.

https://xkcd.com/808/ . I think the XKCD undersells the ability of capitalists to chase dumb ideas, especially in the short term. Like Theranos was only a step or two up from Homeopathy in terms of bad science?

VR did get a preemptive attempt to enshittify it with the Meta-verse, and the tech isn’t quite there, but it is coming along. 3d printers are nice, haven’t been fucked up yet as far as I known.

It was something stupider and sillier yeah. The link explains, but to tldr; exp(some complicated term) where the “some complicated term” has a division by a number that eventually goes to 0. I think it was… them trying to represent “horizon time” (as in that one stupid METR graph that gets repeated everywhere) increases happening faster and faster?

Actually it was literally an asymptote in the first version of their models they posted to github. They had a term that they were dividing by that ends up going to zero, so the entire equation breaks! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models

So, now we can answer the question from before: what time horizon does the red curve above predict for 2030?

Well, if you plug it into wolfram alpha, you get a time horizon of “-2542 - 11372i”

Yes, that is negative, and that is an imaginary number in there.

What’s actually happening is that when the term in the brackets above hit zero, we end up dividing by zero, and hit infinity. Beyond that, we get a negative number to the power of a non-integer, which gives nonsensical complex numbered answers.

The infinity point for this equation happens at a time of t = To/alpha, and will always occur at some point, no matter what initial parameters you use.

In fact, this infinity point is completely independent of both the time horizon and the SC threshold. If you keep the same alpha and doubling time, you could start with a time horizon of a nanosecond, and have a superhuman coding threshold of 1 trillion years, and the curve will still claim that superhuman coding will arrive before the end of 2029.

And indeed, reddit user mambo-12345 tried modifying the simulation parameters to drop the initial time horizon to 15 nanoseconds instead of 15 minutes, and the resulting curve still had a peak for the estimated superhuman coder arrival at 2026.5 years and a median at 2035. Credit to them for inspiring me to take a closer look here:

Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can’t distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.

Is this the thing where the baked an asymptote to infinity into their “model”? It was both bad modeling and also made all of their other input “data” completely irrelevant. I remember someone pointing this out at the time AI 2027 dropped, but there was so many other problems with it in the sneer spaces we didn’t talk about it too much among all the other problems. And someone on lesswrong actually pointed it out, but somehow, “we accidentally baked an asymptote into our model that is supposed to be detailed and carefully thought out” wasn’t a breaking point for lesswrongers.

I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are.

I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won’t work.

Lesswrongers go full panpsychism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wCY4oNHpH2HGYGSoP/the-user-in-the-llm-might-be-a-moral-patient-too-a-strange

To try to TLDR this multilayered bit of crazy… lesswrongers already theorize LLMs might be sapient and/or have morally meaningful internal experiences. Except… LLMs obviously “behave” wildly differently when prompted differently and especially when put into different “agent harnesses”… so the big brain follow-up thought is what if the different personas an LLM can exhibit are all different “people” (for the purposes of utilitarian accounting and/or what their internal experiences are like… the exact “theory” can vary by lesswronger). The even more insane full galaxy brain follow-up thought: what if the user’s input to the LLM is forming yet another “person”, like a copy/reflection/simulacrum of the user!

TLDR for the TLDR: What if not only the LLM was sentient/sapient, but also held a sentient/sapient simulacrum of the user inside!

Yep, so many of their favorite tropes and assumptions fail when an actual expert breaks them down. Like their belief in the possibility of Drexler-style nanotech has been taken down quite firmly several times (here is a good takedown that got posted to the EA forums), Drexler’s ideas pretty firmly ignore how things actually work at the molecular level…

What fullsquare said, they’ve got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.

One of the classic sequence posts plays with the concept: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message

But in a uno reverse twist, its the humans that are a metaphor for AI, with them manipulating out thinking the aliens from within the simulation.