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New ultimate grift dropped, Ilya Sutskever gets $2B in VC funding, promises his company won't release anything until ASI is achieved internally.
Architeuthis
joined 2 years ago
Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow's enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.
Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I've had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.
Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I've been managing to read them all the way through.
What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?
That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely can't be helping DoNotPay's bottom line.
i think yud at some point claimed this (preventing the robot devil from developing alignment countermeasures) as a reason his EA bankrolled think tanks don't really publish any papers, but my brain is too spongy to currently verify, as it was probably just some tweet.
I don't think him having previously done undefined PR work for companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.
Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he's playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.
It's adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.
Is this… the perfect grift?
Surely the free market would never allow this.
So many of the prominent eugenics enjoyers name-dropped in the article have being regulars in ACX in common, as well as having been personally sanewashed by siskind on numerous occasions, that it's becoming increasingly absurd how he keeps flying under the radar when modern racism and eugenics are being discussed in major outlets.
Like, I don't see how Cremieux/Lasker/TP0 ever breaks into the mainstream enough to be notable by The Guardian without Siskind making rationalist spaces super friendly to people like him as well as deferring to him and endorsing his writing.
Should be noted that it's mutual, Hanania has gone to great lengths to suck up to siskind, going back to at least the designer mouth bacteria thing.
And GPT-4.5 is terrible for coding, relatively speaking, with an October 2023 knowledge cutoff that may leave out knowledge about updates to development frameworks.
This is in no way specific to GPT4.5 but remains a weirdly undermentioned albatross about the neck of the entire LLM code-guessing field, probably because the less you know about what you told it to generate the likelier you are to think it's doing a good job, and the enthusiastically satisfied customer reviews in social media that I've interacted with certainly seemed to skew toward less-you-know types.
Even when the up-to-date version release happened before the cut-off point you are probably out of luck, since the newer version is likely way underrepresented in the training data compared to the previous versions that people may have been using for years by that point.
Nothing in my experience with LLMs or my reading of the literature has ever led me to believe that prompting one to numerically rate something and treating the result as meaningful would be a productive use of someone's time.
17
New article from reflective altruism guy starring Scott Alexander and the Biodiversity Brigade
(reflectivealtruism.com)
81
SBF's effective altruism and rationalism considered an aggravating circumstance in sentencing
(www.citationneeded.news)
original is here, but you aren't missing any context, that's the twit.
I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespear... but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse that that. When Shakespear wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate -- probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.
edited to add this seems to be an excerpt from the fawning book the big short/moneyball guy wrote about him that was recently released.
Transcription:
Thinking about that guy who wants a global suprasovereign execution squad with authority to disable the math of encryption and bunker buster my gaming computer if they detect it has too many transistors because BonziBuddy might get smart enough to order custom RNA viruses online.
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Huggingface cofounder pushes against LLM hype, really softly. Not especially worth reading except to wonder if high profile skepticism pieces indicate a vibe shift that can't come soon enough. On the plus side it's kind of short.
The gist is that you can't go from a text synthesizer to superintelligence, framed as how a straight-A student that's really good at learning the curriculum at the teacher's direction can't really be extrapolated to an Einstein type think-outside-the-box genius.
The world 'hallucination' never appears once in the text.