Architeuthis

joined 2 years ago
[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Distilling is supposed to be a shortcut to creating a quality training dataset by using the output of an established model as labels, i.e. desired answers.

The end result of the new model ending up with biases inherited from the reference model should hold, but using as a base model the same model you are distilling from would seem to be completely pointless.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The 671B model although 'open sourced' is a 400+GB download and is definitely not runnable on household hardware.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Taylor said the group believes in timeless decision theory, a Rationalist belief suggesting that human decisions and their effects are mathematically quantifiable.

Seems like they gave up early if they don't bring up how it was developed specifically for deals with the (acausal, robotic) devil, and also awfully nice of them to keep Yud's name out of it.

edit: Also in lieu of explanation they link to the wikipedia page on rationalism as a philosophical movement which of course has fuck all to do with the bay area bayes cargo cult, despite it having a small mention there, with most of the Talk: page being about how it really shouldn't.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

NYT and WaPo are his specific examples. He also wants a connection to "a policy/defense/intelligence/foreign affairs journal/magazine" if possible.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

Today on highlighting random rat posts from ACX:

poster thinks the future of llm training is contingent on focusing early on philosophical and theological text because they match the causality of human experience

(Current first post on today's SSC open thread)

On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump's term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

wrong thread :(

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The zizian angle makes this so weird. Like, on top of probably being stopped for driving while trans, they might have instigated the shootout to prove to the basilisk that their parallel universe selves/simulated iterations/eternal souls can't be acausally blackmailed.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It's another one of those things that the further you read the worse it gets, isn't it?

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

Does anyone know who or what is Ziz in this context? Google says jewish mythological beast.

edit: found this:

The Zizians were a cult that focused on relatively extreme animal welfare, even by EA standards, and used a Timeless/Updateless decision theory, where being aggressive and escalatory was helpful as long as it helped other world branches/acausally traded with other worlds to solve the animal welfare crisis.

They apparently made a new personality called Maia in Pasek, and this resulted in Pasek's suicide.

They also used violence or the threat of violence a lot to achieve their goal.

This caused many problems for Ziz, and she now is in police custody.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago

They basically invent a special new type of mental impairment to apply to brown people to sidestep the need to explain why entire swaths of the global south aren't desolate wastelands of barely functional people trying to converse in grunts, as predicted by Lynn's research.

That the statistics of a mean IQ of nothing imply that you should be able to fit every current African university graduate in a room together seems pretty valid as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole affair, surprised I didn't see it mentioned before.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

That’s a problem in itself, don’t you think? It’s all very “Feminists hate sex and they want to erase the differences between the genders”. Julia gets a taste of freedom and her right place in the world by putting on makeup and girly clothes and having a lot of sex.

It's been to long for me to be able to tell if that applies to the general context of Orwell's views (which apparently I'm not sufficiently aware of) or if it's also a significant issue with 1984. In principle having the woman character employ cargo cult femininity in a desperate attempt at self expression shouldn't be unsalvageabl. Being the only woman with a speaking part and also a ditz less so.

Winston being a self-aggrandizing tit who needs things explained to him a lot so the author can soapbox was the sum of my reaction to the character, that he was also supposed to be relatable beyond the basics of his clash with authoritarianship certainly puts a different spin on things.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Why

Hot take time, I think when siskind was at the age that he decided there are some things he will never again change his mind about he happened to be downstream of some flavor of transhumanism that favored gene editing instead of cybernetic augmentations and brain uploads, and things kind of escalated from there.

Spotlighting eugenics-based IQ-maxing is probably his version of going all in on summoning the acausal robot god to fix everything, and also the substack money is pretty good.

 

Would've been way better if the author didn't feel the need to occasionally hand it to siskind for what amounts to keeping the mask on, even while he notes several instances where scotty openly discusses how maintaining a respectable facade is integral to his agenda of infecting polite society with neoreactionary fuckery.

 

AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding

Getting full value out of AI workplace assistants is turning out to require a heavy lift from enterprises. ‘It has been more work than anticipated,’ says one CIO.

aka we are currently in the process of realizing we are paying for the privilege of being the first to test an incomplete product.

Mandell said if she asks a question related to 2024 data, the AI tool might deliver an answer based on 2023 data. At Cargill, an AI tool failed to correctly answer a straightforward question about who is on the company’s executive team, the agricultural giant said. At Eli Lilly, a tool gave incorrect answers to questions about expense policies, said Diogo Rau, the pharmaceutical firm’s chief information and digital officer.

I mean, imagine all the non-obvious stuff it must be getting wrong at the same time.

He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record,” with no contradictory or duplicate information.

Please stop feeding the thing too much information, you're making it confused.

Some of the challenges with Copilot are related to the complicated art of prompting, Spataro said. Users might not understand how much context they actually need to give Copilot to get the right answer, he said, but he added that Copilot itself could also get better at asking for more context when it needs it.

Yeah, exactly like all the tech demos showed -- wait a minute!

[Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said] “If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was,” he said. “You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.”

Nevermind that that's exactly how we've been marketing it.

Oh well, I guess you'll just have to wait for chatgpt-6.66 that will surely fix everything, while voiced by charlize theron's non-union equivalent.

 

An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards

"some workloads may generate images, text or video of a mature nature", and that any adult content generated is wiped from a users system as soon as the workload is completed.

However, one of Salad's clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.

Investigation link: https://www.404media.co/inside-the-ai-porn-marketplace-where-everything-and-everyone-is-for-sale/

 

For thursday's sentencing the us government indicated they would be happy with a 40-50 prison sentence, and in the list of reasons they cite there's this gem:

  1. Bankman-Fried's effective altruism and own statements about risk suggest he would be likely to commit another fraud if he determined it had high enough "expected value". They point to Caroline Ellison's testimony in which she said that Bankman-Fried had expressed to her that he would "be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be like more than twice as good". They also point to Bankman-Fried's "own 'calculations'" described in his sentencing memo, in which he says his life now has negative expected value. "Such a calculus will inevitably lead him to trying again," they write.

Turns out making it a point of pride that you have the morality of an anime villain does not endear you to prosecutors, who knew.

Bonus: SBF's lawyers' list of assertions for asking for a shorter sentence includes this hilarious bit reasoning:

They argue that Bankman-Fried would not reoffend, for reasons including that "he would sooner suffer than bring disrepute to any philanthropic movement."

 

rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.

This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).

Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.

Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.

I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.

There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.

ssc reddit thread

quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments

pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD

pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.

rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.

edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.

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