[–] 7 points 4 days ago

A Scandal at the Center of the Economy

This scandal holds an irony that’s especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industry’s No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valley’s AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating China’s AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.

This is the type of warped incentives that the AI race produces. Playing the game necessitates embracing preposterous risk to justify an idealized future outcome. To run this race requires its participants to withstand intense cognitive dissonance and behave in ways that make them appear ever more inscrutable and reckless to those who are not involved. If nothing else, Huang is a useful example to understand what happens when the fortunes of countries and many of its most powerful citizens are all tied up in one progressively intricate technological and financial bet. In this way, Huang is the AI boom personified, a hyperobject of a man who has wound his way into the center of the economy and whose influence, depending on how you look at it, may usher in either prosperity or untold doom.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge, then fired leaders who objected, Colorado lawsuit alleges

    Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    I think he's out on a thin limb.

    If there's one thing people who espouse "reasonable pro-AI" views push, is that the US has to go ahead building chatbots because otherwise the Chinese will beat us.

    In the current point in time, AI is under perceived attack by the Democrats (I doubt they'll go against the lobbyists but w/e) and the US Right has realized that no-one really likes Big Tech - they're convenient scapegoats for all sorts of things. Sure they want billionaires in charge but people like Sam Altman aren't really their kinds of people.

    Throwing the book at Jensen would help both sides.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I think they're saying that stopping a datacenter won't do squat to stop AGI takeoff

    at least this a reading of

    Efficiency gains from AI are absolutely massive, and while they don't apply to training, they do apply to inference, and even accounting for endogenity, state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.

    so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal's wager:

    1. if I stop a datacenter near me, the world will still be taken over by a superhuman intelligence, albeit 9 days later, and my local environment will be moot
    2. if I stop a datacenter, and no superhuman intelligence appears, I won't have a datacenter near me

    I'm not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.

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  •  

    current difficulties

    1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
    2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
    3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
    4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
    5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
    6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
    7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
    8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
    9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
    10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
    11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
    12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
    13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
    14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
    15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
    16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
    17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
    18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
    19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
    20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
    21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
    22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
    23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
     

    Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

    1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
    2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
    3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
    4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
    5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
    6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
    7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
    8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
    9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
    10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
    11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
    12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
    13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
    14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
    15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
    16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
     

    “It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

     

    The grifters in question:

    Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

    Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

    Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

    The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

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