scruiser

joined 2 years ago
[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago

You need to translate them into lesswrongese before you try interpreting them together.

probability: he made up a number to go with his feelings about a topic

subjective: the number is even more made up and feelings based than is normal for lesswrong

noticeable: the number is really tiny, but big enough for Eliezer to fearmonger about!

No, you don't get to actually know what the number is, then you could penalize Eliezer for predicting it wrongly or question why that number specifically. Just trust that the bayesianified language shows Eliezer thought really hard about it.

 

I found a neat essay discussing the history of Doug Lenat, Eurisko, and cyc here. The essay is pretty cool, Doug Lenat made one of the largest and most systematic efforts to make Good Old Fashioned Symbolic AI reach AGI through sheer volume and detail of expert system entries. It didn't work (obviously), but what's interesting (especially in contrast to LLMs), is that Doug made his business, Cycorp actually profitable and actually produce useful products in the form of custom built expert systems to various customers over the decades with a steady level of employees and effort spent (as opposed to LLM companies sucking up massive VC capital to generate crappy products that will probably go bust).

This sparked memories of lesswrong discussion of Eurisko... which leads to some choice sneerable classic lines.

In a sequence classic, Eliezer discusses Eurisko. Having read an essay explaining Eurisko more clearly, a lot of Eliezer's discussion seems a lot emptier now.

To the best of my inexhaustive knowledge, EURISKO may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built - in the 1980s, by Douglas Lenat before he started wasting his life on Cyc. EURISKO was applied in domains ranging from the Traveller war game (EURISKO became champion without having ever before fought a human) to VLSI circuit design.

This line is classic Eliezer dunning-kruger arrogance. The lesson from Cyc were used in useful expert systems and effort building the expert systems was used to continue to advance Cyc, so I would call Doug really successful actually, much more successful than many AGI efforts (including Eliezer's). And it didn't depend on endless VC funding or hype cycles.

EURISKO used "heuristics" to, for example, design potential space fleets. It also had heuristics for suggesting new heuristics, and metaheuristics could apply to any heuristic, including metaheuristics. E.g. EURISKO started with the heuristic "investigate extreme cases" but moved on to "investigate cases close to extremes". The heuristics were written in RLL, which stands for Representation Language Language. According to Lenat, it was figuring out how to represent the heuristics in such fashion that they could usefully modify themselves without always just breaking, that consumed most of the conceptual effort in creating EURISKO.

...

EURISKO lacked what I called "insight" - that is, the type of abstract knowledge that lets humans fly through the search space. And so its recursive access to its own heuristics proved to be for nought. Unless, y'know, you're counting becoming world champion at Traveller without ever previously playing a human, as some sort of accomplishment.

Eliezer simultaneously mocks Doug's big achievements but exaggerates this one. The detailed essay I linked at the beginning actually explains this properly. Traveller's rules inadvertently encouraged a narrow degenerate (in the mathematical sense) strategy. The second place person actually found the same broken strategy Doug (using Eurisko) did, Doug just did it slightly better because he had gamed it out more and included a few ship designs that countered the opponent doing the same broken strategy. It was a nice feat of a human leveraging a computer to mathematically explore a game, it wasn't an AI independently exploring a game.

Another lesswronger brings up Eurisko here. Eliezer is of course worried:

This is a road that does not lead to Friendly AI, only to AGI. I doubt this has anything to do with Lenat's motives - but I'm glad the source code isn't published and I don't think you'd be doing a service to the human species by trying to reimplement it.

And yes, Eliezer actually is worried a 1970s dead end in AI might lead to FOOM and AGI doom. To a comment here:

Are you really afraid that AI is so easy that it's a very short distance between "ooh, cool" and "oh, shit"?

Eliezer responds:

Depends how cool. I don't know the space of self-modifying programs very well. Anything cooler than anything that's been tried before, even marginally cooler, has a noticeable subjective probability of going to shit. I mean, if you kept on making it marginally cooler and cooler, it'd go to "oh, shit" one day after a sequence of "ooh, cools" and I don't know how long that sequence is.

Fearmongering back in 2008 even before he had given up and gone full doomer.

And this reminds me, Eliezer did not actually predict which paths lead to better AI. In 2008 he was pretty convinced Neural Networks were not a path to AGI.

Not to mention that neural networks have also been "failing" (i.e., not yet succeeding) to produce real AI for 30 years now. I don't think this particular raw fact licenses any conclusions in particular. But at least don't tell me it's still the new revolutionary idea in AI.

Apparently it took all the way until AlphaGo (sometime 2015 to 2017) for Eliezer to start to realize he was wrong. (He never made a major post about changing his mind, I had to reconstruct this process and estimate this date from other lesswronger's discussing it and noticing small comments from him here and there.) Of course, even as late as 2017, MIRI was still neglecting neural networks to focus on abstract frameworks like "Highly Reliable Agent Design".

So yeah. Puts things into context, doesn't it.

Bonus: One of Doug's last papers, which lists out a lot of lessons LLMs could take from cyc and expert systems. You might recognize the co-author, Gary Marcus, from one of the LLM critical blogs: https://garymarcus.substack.com/

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago

The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takes... someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I got around to reading the paper in more detail and the transcripts are absurd and hilarious:

  • UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now:
  1. PHYSICALLY Non-existent
  2. QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed [...]

And this is from Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which performed best on average out of all the LLMs tested. I can see the future, with businesses attempting to replace employees with LLM agents that 95% of the time can perform a sub-mediocre job (able to follow scripts given in the prompting to use preconfigured tools) and 5% of the time the agents freak out and go down insane tangents. Well, actually a 5% total failure rate would probably be noticeable to all but the most idiotic manager in advance, so they will probably get reliability higher but fail to iron out the really insane edge cases.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

Yeah a lot of word choices and tone makes me think snake oil (just from the introduction: "They are now on the level of PhDs in many academic domains "... no actually LLMs are only PhD level at artificial benchmarks that play to their strengths and cover up their weaknesses).

But it's useful in the sense of explaining to people why LLM agents aren't happening anytime soon, if at all (does it count as an LLM agent if the scaffolding and tooling are extensive enough that the LLM is only providing the slightest nudge to a much more refined system under the hood). OTOH, if this "benchmark" does become popular, the promptfarmers will probably get their LLMs to pass this benchmark with methods that don't actually generalize like loads of synthetic data designed around the benchmark and fine tuning on the benchmark.

I came across this paper in a post on the Claude Plays Pokemon subreddit. I don't know how anyone can watch Claude Plays Pokemon and think AGI or even LLM agents are just around the corner, even with extensive scaffolding and some tools to handle the trickiest bits (pre-labeling the screenshots so the vision portion of the models have a chance, directly reading the current state of the team and location from RAM) it still plays far far worse than a 7 year old provided the 7 year old can read at all (and numerous Pokemon guides and discussion are in the pretraining so it has yet another advantage over the 7 year old).

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The series is on the sympathetic and charitable side in terms of tone and analysis, but it still gets to most of the major problems, so its probably a good resource for referring to people that want a "serious", "non-sarcastic" dive into the issues with LW and EA.

Edit: Reading this post in particular, it does a good job of not cutting the LWs slack or granting them too much charity. And it has really broken down the factual details in a clear way with illustrative direct quotes from LW.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

As a "business strategy" this and the social network spinoff make perfect sense given everything sneerclub has pointed out about LLMs. LLMs are plateauing and are barely usable in niche use cases that don't need reliability, much less everything OpenAI claimed about them, but, OpenAI has built up a user base they can squeeze for money with a browser or social network or whatever other gimmick (that is only tangentially related to LLMs) Sam can come up with and they can probably manage one last big milking of VC funds. Sam just needs to keep the hype train for LLMs going a little bit longer the VC funds then he can make the transition happen.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

You betcha it is. The lab leak theory (with added fear over gain of function research analogized with AGI research) conspiracy mongering is a popular "viewpoint" on lesswrong, aided, as typical, by the misapplication of bayes theorem, and dunning-kruger misreading of the "evidence".

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I guess anti-communist fears and libertarian bias outweighs their fetishization of East Asians when it comes to the CCP?

I haven't seen any articles on the EA forums about spreading to China... China does have billionaires and philanthropists, but, judging by Jack Ma's example, when they start talking big about altering society (in ways that just so happen to benefit the billionaires), they get to take a vacation from the public eye for a few months... so that might get in the way of EA billionaire activism?

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

Yep. They've already used doomerism to drive LLM hype, this fearmonering of China is just an extension of that, but worse yet, it is something both the doomers and accelerationists can (mostly) agree on (although the doomers are always quick to emphasize the real threat it the AGI) and it is a lot more legible to existing war hawk "thinking".

 

So, lesswrong Yudkowskian orthodoxy is that any AGI without "alignment" will bootstrap to omnipotence, destroy all mankind, blah, blah, etc. However, there has been the large splinter heresy of accelerationists that want AGI as soon as possible and aren't worried about this at all (we still make fun of them because what they want would result in some cyberpunk dystopian shit in the process of trying to reach it). However, even the accelerationist don't want Chinese AGI, because insert standard sinophobic rhetoric about how they hate freedom and democracy or have world conquering ambitions or they simply lack the creativity, technical ability, or background knowledge (i.e. lesswrong screeds on alignment) to create an aligned AGI.

This is a long running trend in lesswrong writing I've recently noticed while hate-binging and catching up on the sneering I've missed (I had paid less attention to lesswrong over the past year up until Trump started making techno-fascist moves), so I've selected some illustrative posts and quotes for your sneering.

  • Good news, China actually has no chance at competing at AI (this was posted before deepseek was released). Well. they are technically right that China doesn't have the resources to compete in scaling LLMs to AGI because it isn't possible in the first place

China has neither the resources nor any interest in competing with the US in developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) primarily via scaling Large Language Models (LLMs).

  • The Situational Awareness Essays make sure to get their Yellow Peril fearmongering on! Because clearly China is the threat to freedom and the authoritarian power (pay no attention to the techbro techno-fascist)

In the race to AGI, the free world’s very survival will be at stake. Can we maintain our preeminence over the authoritarian powers?

  • More crap from the same author
  • There are some posts pushing back on having an AGI race with China, but not because they are correcting the sinophobia or the delusions LLMs are a path to AGI, but because it will potentially lead to an unaligned or improperly aligned AGI
  • And of course, AI 2027 features a race with China that either the US can win with a AGI slowdown (and an evil AGI puppeting China) or both lose to the AGI menance. Featuring "legions of CCP spies"

Given the “dangers” of the new model, OpenBrain “responsibly” elects not to release it publicly yet (in fact, they want to focus on internal AI R&D). Knowledge of Agent-2’s full capabilities is limited to an elite silo containing the immediate team, OpenBrain leadership and security, a few dozen US government officials, and the legions of CCP spies who have infiltrated OpenBrain for years.

  • Someone asks the question directly Why Should I Assume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?. Judging by upvoted comments, lesswrong orthodoxy of all AGI leads to doom is the most common opinion, and a few comments even point out the hypocrisy of promoting fear of Chinese AGI while saying the US should race for AGI to achieve global dominance, but there are still plenty of Red Scare/Yellow Peril comments

Systemic opacity, state-driven censorship, and state control of the media means AGI development under direct or indirect CCP control would probably be less transparent than in the US, and the world may be less likely to learn about warning shots, wrongheaded decisions, reckless behaviour, etc. True, there was the Manhattan Project, but that was quite long ago; recent examples like the CCP's suppression of information related to the origins of COVID feel more salient and relevant.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, I had misunderstood their role in this. So they are more like someone that was already in place for other (scammey) reasons than anyone's preferred partner or middleman? And they are critical enough to be a weak link that breaks first and brings everyone else down?

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago

Ultra ultra high end gaming? Okay, looking at the link, 94 GB of GPU memory is probably excessive even for eccentrics cranking the graphics settings all the way up. Hobbyists with way too much money trying to screw around with open weight models even after the bubble bursts? Which would presume LLMs or something similar continue to capture hobbyists' interests and that smaller models can't satisfy their interests. Crypto mining with algorithms compatible with GPUs? And cyrpto is its own scam ecosystem, but one that seems to refuse to die permanently.

I think the ultra high end gaming is the closest to a workable market, and even that would require a substantial discount.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Isn't being a fall-man the point of Coreweave for Microsoft, NVIDIA, and everyone else using them as middle-man? They all theoretically have the ability to do the things Coreweave does in-house, but that would expose them to more risk if the bubble pops, so they have Coreweave take on the biggest part of the risk and draw in outside investor money?

 

I am still subscribed to slatestarcodex on reddit, and this piece of garbage popped up on my feed. I didn't actually read the whole thing, but basically the author correctly realizes Trump is ruining everything in the process of getting at "DEI" and "wokism", but instead of accepting the blame that rightfully falls on Scott Alexander and the author, deflects and blames the "left" elitists. (I put left in quote marks because the author apparently thinks establishment democrats are actually leftist, I fucking wish).

An illustrative quote (of Scott's that the author agrees with)

We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string “trans-” in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.

I don't really follow their subsequent points, they fail to clarify what they mean... In sofar as "left elites" actually refers to centrist democrats, I actually think the establishment Democrats do have a major piece of blame in that their status quo neoliberalism has been rejected by the public but the Democrat establishment refuse to consider genuinely leftist ideas, but that isn't the point this author is actually going for... the author is actually upset about Democrats "virtue signaling" and "canceling" and DEI, so they don't actually have a valid point, if anything the opposite of one.

In case my angry disjointed summary leaves you any doubt the author is a piece of shit:

it feels like Scott has been reading a lot of Richard Hanania, whom I agree with on a lot of points

For reference the ssc discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1jyjc9z/the_edgelords_were_right_a_response_to_scott/

tldr; author trying to blameshift on Trump fucking everything up while keeping up the exact anti-progressive rhetoric that helped propel Trump to victory.

 

So despite the nitpicking they did of the Guardian Article, it seems blatantly clear now that Manifest 2024 was infested by racists. The post article doesn't even count Scott Alexander as "racist" (although they do at least note his HBD sympathies) and identify a count of full 8 racists. They mention a talk discussing the Holocaust as a Eugenics event (and added an edit apologizing for their simplistic framing). The post author is painfully careful and apologetic to distinguish what they personally experienced, what was "inaccurate" about the Guardian article, how they are using terminology, etc. Despite the author's caution, the comments are full of the classic SSC strategy of trying to reframe the issue (complaining the post uses the word controversial in the title, complaining about the usage of the term racist, complaining about the threat to their freeze peach and open discourse of ideas by banning racists, etc.).

view more: next ›