Recent posts

#1

Off the Record / Re: Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-2...

Last post by Tamas - Today at 02:23:12 PM

So it looks like Ukraine is doing the "okay we'll agree, with only a few minor details to hammer out" thing... so now Russia can reject the peace proposal again and Trump can do whatever he's going to do in response.

This dance is much better than forcing Ukraine to surrender, but also very tiresome. Trump is, by far, the worst world leader of any consequence during my lifetime. Somebody like Boris Johnson is a towering avatar of statemanship compared to him. Heck, I'd take Lizz Truss as US President over him.

#2

Off the Record / Re: Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-2...

Last post by Jacob - Today at 02:16:04 PM

So it looks like Ukraine is doing the "okay we'll agree, with only a few minor details to hammer out" thing... so now Russia can reject the peace proposal again and Trump can do whatever he's going to do in response.

#3

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Jacob - Today at 02:08:56 PM

The title of the article is knocking down a strawman.  People who think LLMs have some artificial intelligence don't equate language with intelligence.  They see language as one of the "outputs" of intelligence.  If you build a model that matches one mode of output of intelligence well enough, then it's possible that under the hood that model had to have evolved something functionally analogous to intelligence during training in order to do that.

I am happy to agree that you don't think that. And equally happy to agree that thoughtful proponents of LLM don't think that.

But the idea is out there, and certainly some of the hype propagated by some of the relevant tech CEOs (who are some of the richest and most powerful men in the world, and who absolutely have a role in shaping the public discourse) certainly seems to imply it if not outright state it at times.

So I don't agree it's a strawman. It's a thoughtful and well-argued counter argument to a line of thought that is absolutely being made, even if it's not being made by you.

#4

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Legbiter - Today at 02:01:02 PM

And all day I've seen lots of far-right content creators ("Yookay aesthetics" etc) verified accounts earning money for the engagement on their content that appear to be based in India or South America

Yeah seems half the traffic on twitter is thirdies posting ragebait for the elonbux. The big pro-Z/russia accounts are mostly based out of the subcontinent.

This one is my current favorite.

#5

Off the Record / Re: Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-2...

Last post by Jacob - Today at 01:59:26 PM

The world is catering to Trump's ego because he sits at the top of the world's most powerful military, and the world's biggest economy.

If there was any type of cosmic justice someone as morally repugnant as Trump would not be in that position, but the US finds itself in a situation where its levers of powers have been captured by the corrupt, the self-serving, and the straight up evil.

[The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own.]

#6

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 01:35:37 PM

Language and intelligence are two difference things:

Large Language Mistake: Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

Some excerpts

The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence. We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs.

Delighted that only 30 years after the Sokal affair, STEM is finally acknowledging that Derrida was right

#7

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 01:33:02 PM

I think some of it seems to be IP address derived as well.

On the trusting X and their systems now - yes in relation to the blue ticks. My understanding is that users are not anonymous to Twitter if they have blue ticks and are getting money for their content. I've mentioned before that X is repeatedly rolling over on identifying people following law enforcement requests (it's happened a lot in Turkey and also in the UK following the Southport riots) so I think they must have reasonable data on this (at least for verified accounts).

In the UK with Southport the interesting thing was that a lot of the far-right verified accounts (that were British) were probabl verified because they loved what Musk was doing with the platform, but what he was also doing was gutting their legal team and not fighting any disclosure requests. So his biggest fans were providing him with the data that could be used to prosecute them. He vocally complained about it but it feels very "thoughts and prayers" when it's his company unmasking people for the police.

[The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own.]

#8

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by DGuller - Today at 01:31:05 PM

Language and intelligence are two difference things:

Large Language Mistake: Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

Some excerpts

The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence. We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs.

The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we're on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even "superintelligence" that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we'll have AGI. Scaling is all we need.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

...

Take away our ability to speak, and we can still think, reason, form beliefs, fall in love, and move about the world; our range of what we can experience and think about remains vast.

But take away language from a large language model, and you are left with literally nothing at all.

An AI enthusiast might argue that human-level intelligence doesn't need to necessarily function in the same way as human cognition. AI models have surpassed human performance in activities like chess using processes that differ from what we do, so perhaps they could become superintelligent through some unique method based on drawing correlations from training data.

Maybe! But there's no obvious reason to think we can get to general intelligence — not improving narrowly defined tasks —through text-based training. After all, humans possess all sorts of knowledge that is not easily encapsulated in linguistic data — and if you doubt this, think about how you know how to ride a bike.

In fact, within the AI research community there is growing awareness that LLMs are, in and of themselves, insufficient models of human intelligence. For example, Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner for his AI research and a prominent skeptic of LLMs, left his role at Meta last week to found an AI startup developing what are dubbed world models: "��systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." And recently, a group of prominent AI scientists and "thought leaders" — including Yoshua Bengio (another Turing Award winner), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and noted AI skeptic Gary Marcus — coalesced around a working definition of AGI as "AI that can match or exceed the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult" (emphasis added). Rather than treating intelligence as a "monolithic capacity," they propose instead we embrace a model of both human and artificial cognition that reflects "a complex architecture composed of many distinct abilities."

...

We can credit Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for our notion of "scientific paradigms," the basic frameworks for how we understand our world at any given time. He argued these paradigms "shift" not as the result of iterative experimentation, but rather when new questions and ideas emerge that no longer fit within our existing scientific descriptions of the world. Einstein, for example, conceived of relativity before any empirical evidence confirmed it. Building off this notion, the philosopher Richard Rorty contended that it is when scientists and artists become dissatisfied with existing paradigms (or vocabularies, as he called them) that they create new metaphors that give rise to new descriptions of the world — and if these new ideas are useful, they then become our common understanding of what is true. As such, he argued, "common sense is a collection of dead metaphors."

As currently conceived, an AI system that spans multiple cognitive domains could, supposedly, predict and replicate what a generally intelligent human would do or say in response to a given prompt. These predictions will be made based on electronically aggregating and modeling whatever existing data they have been fed. They could even incorporate new paradigms into their models in a way that appears human-like. But they have no apparent reason to become dissatisfied with the data they're being fed — and by extension, to make great scientific and creative leaps.

Instead, the most obvious outcome is nothing more than a common-sense repository. Yes, an AI system might remix and recycle our knowledge in interesting ways. But that's all it will be able to do. It will be forever trapped in the vocabulary we've encoded in our data and trained it upon — a dead-metaphor machine. And actual humans — thinking and reasoning and using language to communicate our thoughts to one another — will remain at the forefront of transforming our understanding of the world.

The title of the article is knocking down a strawman.  People who think LLMs have some artificial intelligence don't equate language with intelligence.  They see language as one of the "outputs" of intelligence.  If you build a model that matches one mode of output of intelligence well enough, then it's possible that under the hood that model had to have evolved something functionally analogous to intelligence during training in order to do that.

#9

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Josquius - Today at 01:29:14 PM

I do hope as the bubble pops, backlash builds etc... We can see more attention given to good uses for LLMs and related data crunching rather than just generating fake docs.

I've no idea on costs. I've worked in marketing adjacent areas but not in that side of things.
But for sure one company absolutely dominating the market to such a degree is not healthy.
Breaking up Google would indeed weaken the power they can bring to bare and give would've competitors a chance - as I say even meta failed when it had a try let alone a startup.

Well that's the thing.  As Joan pointed out, traditional monopoly analysis examines the companies ability to extract rents, to charge higher than the free market price.  When talking about monopolies "not healthy" means exactly that.

Discussions of "power" tend to be circular.  They have power because they are a monopoly.  They are a monopoly because they have power.  Have you considered the possibility they are just better?  From the link I posted Meta has close to Google's share of online advertising.  Ergo they have roughly the same "power."  It's not logical that they failed to compete with Google in ad exchange or publisher ad server (whatever that is) because they had less power.

Yes. Google are "better". But that's no defence.
A monopoly isn't necessarily created by anyrhing devious. The fact that they've been in the game so long that they've established an unassailably deep and wide position is enough.

A quick search shows those in the know do indeed suggest googles monopoly is allowing them to get away with high pricing.

And no. Meta does not have the same share as Google at all. As said Google has around 90%. Meta cut their losses when they couldn't make enough to even break even.

#10

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 01:27:35 PM

I have a slight sense of foreboding that the budget might be a bit of a disaster. I'm a little concerned that moving to the smorgasbord approach of lots of little tax rises will possibly backfire in a day or two - I could be wrong I just feel it might go the way of the pasty tax/omnishambles budget of being a bit too clever by half.

Meanwhile the OBR (who should not be this important) is apparently going to downgrade its growth forecast for every year to 2031 which will have an impact on "headroom" in future budgets (thisis all a ridiculous prospect). But also not particularly great in a government that has said it is "laser-focused on growth".

Speaking of growth the government task force on nuclear reported back yesterday with a realy highly praised report that made a lot of actionable recommendations that seemed to make a lot of sense. So inevitably I see Robert Peston today giving an update

Robert Peston
@Peston

John Fingleton's review for the government of how to reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for nuclear power development is a tour de force, a compelling road map for how to accelerate important infrastructure investment in the UK - which is the sine qua non of improving growth and living standards (read John's nutshell below).

For the last eight weeks he was assured that the prime minister and chancellor would accept and implement the recommendations in full. He even tweaked an important clause at the government's request, to give them a bit more flexibility over the means to implementation.

I understand he has now been told that at the budget tomorrow the welcome will be conditional, subject to further work and review - because the Chancellor has been nobbled by a legal and planning adviser, who claims the Fingleton recommendations somehow breach the UK's environmental, trade  and human rights obligations.

He and his colleagues believe this is nonsense. They examined the legal considerations in their assessment.  But they fear that yet again the dead hand of official caution has squashed - potentially for months and years - important growth-enhancing investment.

At some point this parliament I hope the government will discover they have a majority in a sovereign parliament and can just do things

Semi-relatedly having delayed defence spending announcements for a year while they did another Strategic Defence Review...

Starmer promised to spend big on defense but Britain's arms industry is still waiting

Six months after a major inquiry into how the U.K. would meet geopolitical threats, many in the industry complain they haven't received the certainty they need about where the British government plans to invest. 

https://www.politico.eu/article/keir-starmer-britain-arms-industry-defense-whitehall-armies-sdr-nato/

I've complained about this before but I think the commitment on defence (which took a big fight by the MoD v the Treasury) is still incredibly inadequate for the European security situation:

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour Party has made a lot of noise on defense since entering government last year, plundering the aid budget to get defense spending to reach 2.6 percent of GDP by 2027 and a promise of 3.5 percent by 2035.

Industry figures complaining of repeated deferrals, decsions not being taken, actual contracts not being awareded - which all seems like a repeated pattern with this government. They don't actually seem to like choosing and making decisions.