I would also like to understand under what definition ChatGPT can be classified as "connection technology".

Wait, they're still drinking coffee, and it takes 58 minutes? Jeez, my genai quantum robot does that in 58 seconds and summarizes the gustatory experience into 3 bullet points for me. Get with the times.

160,000 organisations, sending 251 million messages! [...] A message costs one cent. [...] Microsoft is forecast to spend $80 billion on AI in 2025.

No problem. To break even, they can raise prices just a little bit, from one cent per message to, uuh, $318 per message. I don't think that such a tiny price bump is going to reduce usage or scare away any customers, so they can just do that.

From McCarthy's reply:

My current answer to the question of when machines will reach human-level intelligence is that a precise calculation shows that we are between 1.7 and 3.1 Einsteins and .3 Manhattan Projects away from the goal.

omg this statement sounds 100% like something that could be posted today by Sam Altman on X. It's hititing exactly the sweet spot between appearing precise but also super vague, like Altman's "a few thousand days".

If the companies wanted to produce an LLM that didn’t output toxic waste, they could just not put toxic waste into it.

The article title and that part remind me of this quote from Charles Babbage in 1864:

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

It feels as if Babbage had already interacted with today's AI pushers.

I hate this position so much, claiming that it's because "the left" wanted "too much". That's not only morally bankrupt, it's factually wrong too. And also ignorant of historical examples. It's lazy and rotten thinking all the way through.

"Shortly after 2027" is a fun phrasing. Means "not before 2028", but mentioning "2027" so it doesn't seem so far away.

I interpret it as "please bro, keep the bubble going bro, just 3 more years bro, this time for real bro"

So much wrong with this...

In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that's it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.

Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it's even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea "let's make music making simple". Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.

Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead.

Lol. This is perfect. Can we please adopt this everywhere.

As for the OpenAI statement... it's interesting how it starts with "We are now confident [...]" to make people think "ooh now comes the real stuff"... but then it quickly makes a sharp turn towards weasel words: "We believe that [...] we may see [...]" . I guess the idea is that the confidence from the first part is supposed to carry over to the second, while retaining a way to later say "look, we didn't promise anything for 2025". But then again, maybe I'm ascribing too much thoughtfulness here, when actually they just throw out random bullshit, just like their "AI".

With your choice of words you are anthropomorphizing LLMs. No valid reasoning can occur when starting from a false point of origin.

Or to put it differently: to me this is similarly ridiculous as if you were arguing that bubble sort may somehow "gain new abilites" and do "horrifying things".

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble's foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We're on the level of "arrival of an alien intelligence" now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?