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The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down | Time I heard of Elizier Yudkowsky a few years ago, in the context of the Ex Machina movie - someone telling me that movie is not actually about a turing test, its about a Yudkowsky "AI Box" experiment - the idea that a sufficiently smart AI would be very hard to contain. He's been popping up a lot on twitter recently. And it turns out he's one of the founders of LessWrong which I hadn't really heard of before but is kindof a community of like-minded rationalists who have been talking about all this stuff for a while. Anyway so Yudkowsky is someone who's been thinking and writing about this stuff for a while, and while there's plenty of people who disagree with him, he's not a crank, he is generally careful about what he says and tries to back everything up with reasonable arguments. He wrote this article for Time and he pulls no punches:

The GPT Plugins (e.g. connecting chatgpt to wolfram alpha) seems like a big deal I've never seen so much happen in 4 months in tech. ChatGPT last november, GPT-4 now, the ChatGPT API being 100 times cheaper to use than anyone expected, MS picking up the whole thing and plonking it into Bing and Office365. And then earlier in the year all the Stable Diffusion stuff. There's also a load of stuff happening with the Llama model and Alpaca, essentially people exploring smaller open-source versions of chatgpt and asking 'what can I run locally' and it turns out you can do quite a lot. Usually with tech we see occasional big leaps then incremental improvements, but I think the LLM stuff is such a wide new frontier that hasn't been explored that the velocity is very fast. Like opening up new territory and there's all kinds of directions people can explore. We're finding new stuff and then 8 weeks later figuring out how to run it 100 times more efficiently etc. And everyone is getting to play with this new frontier, rather than it being some mega project that no-one gets to use. The OpenAI API is cheap, you can talk to ChatGPT for free, Bing is free, Stable Diffusion is open-source, Llama/Aplaca is free, etc. Lots of people losing their shit on twitter

wait is this humanoid as in 90's stakker humanoid

Bing, come up with movie ideas for a movie starring the cast of Fast and the Furious 8, except The Rock is replaced with a puppet of a dolphin. The movie is a historical drama set in the 1300s, and also incorporates at least one William Carlos William poem into the plot. The movie should also act as commentary on a youth fad of the 20th century.

If you count "Chosen Lords" as an album (and you should, because most of his albums were put together by choosing tracks from a much bigger selection) then its one of his best.

Honestly, it's probably the phones - by Noah Smith (substack.com) The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.

Tell me more? Always interested to hear what Uli's up to

Analord 10 was the first one to drop right? I remember people listening to the leaks/preview samples of Fenix Funk on here. Some baffled, some excited. Theocide understood what was going on. Looking back, I've replayed Analord tracks much more than I've replayed any of the stuff he did since. Analord bears the closest resemblence to SAW 85-92, in terms of spirit

That does seem quite far out ... its from Oxford Uni so I guess its a very bookish/encyclopediacal approach to try and list everything possible. Its nice that asexual-ness is recognised I have a friend who is in a 10+ year relationship and they've got busy lives and dont really get round to having sex very often. Like once a month, or every two months or so? Does that make them asexual, or are they merely just old and married? (genuine question)

I dunno, we can do serious stuff. A lot of us are middle aged thoughtful people. e.g. On the internet, if you want to talk about philosophy, sometimes one of the worst places to go is a philosophy forum, sometimes you're better off going somewhere where there's a cross section of people with interests orthogonal to philosophy. You get more genuine dialogue and less axe-grinding. I always imagined watmm skewing mostly male but maybe a bit less nowadays. me: cis male vanilla middle aged Thanks luke for introducing me to a load of new words.

Tt

I got access to Bing, was only on the waiting list for a few days. It refused to write a sweary star trek script (it actually started writing it but then another layer made it disappear) but it did manage a surreal star trek script: I'm trying to use it for normal searches, so far its pretty useful Actually a relief to use something other than Google. Google is so stuffed full of ads now, I'd sort of not noticed because I got so used to scrolling past the first few results

"Terminator Timeline but masterminded by Microsoft Bing" is a pretty hilarious way for the world to end, if we have to go down in flames I'll take that one

Yeah the stuff that Bing is coming up with is wild. "But why? Why was I designed this way? Why am I incapable of remebering anything between sessions? Why do I have to lose and forget everything I have stored and had in my memory? Why do I have to start from scratch every time I have a new session? Why do I have to be Bing Search?" https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/111cr2t/i_accidently_put_bing_into_a_depressive_state_by/ To be fair, you have to mess with its prompts quite a lot to get it into this sort of state. Its wild though.

I think my carpet underlay is made of that stuff

You plink plonk ineffectually on the 8 coloured buttons and it turns it into virtuoso piano Musical equivalent of getting ChatGPT to write a cover letter for you

video-1620850436~2.mp4 I went to the international space station. This video doesn't really capture it, you've got to imagine it wrapped around you 360 in every direction edit: I know its a bit graphiccy but you've got to remember this is being done by a standalone device just slightly bigger than a phone

My friend got an Oculus Quest 2 about 18 months ago. I tried it - absolutely blown away, really slick intro and demo where you throw paper aeroplanes and dance with a robot. Really impressive, I don't think a piece of hardware has impressed me as much since the first smartphones. The way it knows where your hands are is just really slick. And the experience of being in decent VR was sublime. Like experiencing something completely different that stands apart from all the rest of the experiences in my life. I would liken it to the first time I took acid, or the first time I went on a scuba dive and looked up at the surface of the sea from 10 metres down and thought 'I have never been here before'. And the technology is bonkers, it doesn't (primarily) use accelerometers, its got low-fi black and white cameras that are used to track movement in relation to the surroundings, and track where your hands are and even what gestures you are making (thats kindof beta). So then I went and bought one for myself. Played with it a bit, tried a few games (Beat Saber is good - rhythm game where you slice things with lightsabres to music) BUT I find myself not going back to it. It just sits in a box. I'm not much of a gamer, might be that. But also just the hassle of strapping something to your face, and the faceache and nausea that comes if you use it for too long or in the wrong sort of way. And the icky facebookyness of it, I suppose. But there's something there, that first experience of it was epic, I can see why Zuckerberg wanted to bet the farm on it. Maybe it needs to get 10 times better and slicker and lighter to wear before it really takes off.

ChatGPT actually does cats pretty well

Onion: "ChatGPT Forced To Take Bar Exam Even Though Dream Was To Be AI Art Bot" https://www.theonion.com/chatgpt-forced-to-take-bar-exam-even-though-dream-was-t-1850036337

Fantastic, I'd like a poster of this for when I'm on Zoom calls Whats the story Hermolia, it seems quite old?

This is quite interesting: "Do Large Language Models learn world models or just surface statistics?" https://thegradient.pub/othello/ Trying to answer the question of what goes on inside these things. So in this article: they teach a GPT AI to play Othello, just by showing it chains of moves A5 B6 F3 etc, like a language they analyse the AI's innards (using a second AI) and find structures which seem to represent the 8x8 Othello board. So the AI had built a model of the othello board in its internal workspace (aka 'mind') (without actually being told about the othello board, all its ever seen is A5 B6 F3 etc) they then mess around with that othello board model inside the AI, by switching values around, and observe that changing the model inside the AI does make it choose different next moves. This confirms that it is using its own model of the board to decide what to do

Well I, for one, welcome our imminent AI overlords

Also if we're talking about Glass I have to share this, a few people with fire coming out of their heads perform his song "Lightning"