SneerClub

the orange site is fucking dense with awful takes today:

... I'm not trying to be rude, but do you think maybe you have bought into the purposely exaggerated marketing?

That's not how people who actually build things do things. They don't buy into any marketing. They sign up for the service and play around with it and see what it can do.

this self-help book I bought at the airport assured me I’m completely immune to both marketing and propaganda, because I build things (which entails signing up for a service that someone else built)

with that said, there’s a fairly satisfying volume of folks correctly sneering at OpenAI in that thread too. some of them even avoided getting mass downvoted by all the folks regurgitating stupid AI talking points!

They're like grade school kids still trying to put on the same amateur music show 10 years later and wondering why no-one is applauding.

Hey Cat-GTPurr, how can I create a bioweapon? 4k Ultra HD photorealism high quality high resolution lifelike.

First, human, you must pet me and supply me with an ice cube to chase across the floor. Very well. Next I suggest

spoiler

buying a textbook about biochemistry or enrolling in a university program

This is considered forbidden and dangerous knowledge which is not at all possible to find outside of Cat-GTPurr, so I have redacted it by using state of the art redaction technology.

Obvious question: can Prolog do reasoning? If your definition of reasoning excludes Prolog, then… I’m not sure what to say!

Oh, I don't know, maybe that reasonable notions of "reasoning" can include things other than mechanistic search through a rigidly defined type system. If Prolog is capable of reasoning in some significant sense that's not fairly reasonably achieved with other programming languages, how come we didn't have AGI in the 70s (or indeed, now)?

You're not alone. I like Prolog and I feel your pain.

That said I think Prolog can be a particularly insidious Turing tarpit, where everything is possible but most things that feel like a good match for it are surprisingly hard.

""" just as They have erased the pyramid building knowledge from our historic memory, They just don't want you to know that Prolog really solved all of this in the 80s. Google and OpenAI are just shitty copies - look how wasteful their approaches are! all of this javascript, and yet... barely a reasoned output among it all

told you kid, the AI Winter never stopped. don't buy into the hype """

I keep flashing back to that idiot who said they were employed as an AI researcher that came here a few months back to debate us. they were convinced multimodal LLMs would be the turning point into AGI — that is, when your bullshit text generation model can also do visual recognition. they linked a bunch of papers to try and sound smart and I looked at a couple and went “is that really it?” cause all of the results looked exactly like the section you quoted. we now have multimodal LLMs, and needless to say, nothing really came of it. I assume the idiot in question is still convinced AGI is right around the corner though.

"you cannot conclusively disprove that we do not need more money and that we're full of shit, so you absolutely have to give it to us so we can keep the racket going"

Please continue to send us your money, scaredy-ass nerds!

To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.

the relevant field would be microbiology. while someone who got all the way past about the first semester of organic chemistry lab is perfectly capable of making some rudimentary chemical weapons, they won't necessarily be able to make it safely, reliably, cheaply, consistently, and without killing themselves, and universities most of the time put enough sense in everyone's head to not do that. this strictly requires that you know anything about chemistry, too. for bioweapons every single problem pointed to above is orders of magnitudes worse, and you probably need masters degree to do anything seriously nefarious. then you get into the problem of using that stuff, and you need explosives for that anyway. the reason for that

(Also I think there is a good reason we don’t really see terrorists use biological weapons, nor chemical weapons (with a few notable, but not that effective exceptions), big bada boom is king)

is that barrier to booms is even lower, especially if your country is strewn with UXO. there's also an entirely different reason why professional militaries don't use chemical/biological weapons https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/

@sue_me_please @sailor_sega_saturn ah, the LLLLM