I moved here recently and for the love of God I do not understand what the hype is about.

This is such a weird take imo. We’ve been calling agent behavior in video games AI since forever but suddenly everyone has an issue when it’s applied to LLMs.

Frankly, I think this is giving them too much credit. They don’t have goals, and their grievances are manufactured so as to be too vague to be addressed (where there are real grievances, solutions or even band-aids are unacceptable for… (((reasons))))

They’re literally just trolls who like to be angry and will find reasons to be angry. I’d say breaking the government in the process is seen as a side bonus for them, but I don’t think they’re even aware it’s happening.

These people are fucking morons.

Frenworld was one of the bigger cutsey fascist communities on reddit, coming from 4chan. Any time you see “fren” Memes it’s a pretty glaring red flag

What are you talking about? This sounds cool as hell

I’ve definitely seen that before but I can’t remember where. Cocoon (1985) comes to mind, but I’m not sure

Not that shocked

My love of doo wop probably didn’t help

No kidding. Back in college I was kicking around the idea with my friends of dumping a few student loans for semester into bitcoin to buy quality mdma. It was like $0.50 a coin at the time.

I rest easy knowing that I would have sold it for beer money well before the price went absolutely nuts. I was never going to make real profit off of it

You should use line breaks more often.

Annika Hansen is the given name of popular Star Trek: Voyager character Seven of Nine, before she was assimilated into a cyborg hive mind.

I might just be in denial, but I’ve always felt like Tarantino’s problematicity was overblown

Oh shit what game is this?

In a more diplomatic reading of your post, I’ll say this: Yes, I think humans are basically incredibly powerful autocomplete engines. The distinction is that an LLM has to autocomplete a single prompt at a time, with plenty of time between the prompt and response to consider the best result, while living animals are autocompleting a continuous and endless barrage of multimodal high resolution prompts and doing it quickly enough that we can manipulate the environment (prompt generator) to some level.

Yeah biocomputers are fucking wild and put silicates to shame. The issue I have is with considering biocomputation as something that fundamentally cannot be be done by any computational engine, and as far as neural computation is understood, it’s a really sophisticated statistical prediction machine

We all want to believe that humans, or indeed animals as a whole, have some secret special sauce that makes us fundamentally distinguishable from statistical algorithms that approximate a best fit function according to some cost metric, but the fact of the matter is we don’t.

There is no science to support the idea that biological neurons are particularly special, and there are reams and reams of papers suggestin that real neural cognition is little more than an extremely powerful statistical machine.

I don’t care about what “most reasonable people” think. “Most reasonable people” don’t have an opinion about the axiom of choice, or the existence of central pattern generators. That’s not to devalue them but their opinions on things this far outside of their expertise are worth about as much as my opinions on the concept of art. I am a professional in neural computation, and I put it to you to even hypothesize about how animal neural computation is fundamentally distinct from LLM computation.

Like I said, we are wildly more capable than GPT, because our hardware is wildly more complex than any ANN, but the fundamental computing strategy is not all that different.

I could never really afford it anyway. Cars are expensive, rockets are very expensive, and microblogging is a fundamentally bizarre concept to me.

I guess I could not use his fake trains?

In a way, it’s impressive this guy shitposted his way to the king of exploiters, but there’s nothing to boycott

So for context, I am an applied mathematician, and I primarily work in neural computation. I have an essentially cursory knowledge of LLMs, their architecture, and the mathematics of how they work.

I hear this argument, that LLMs are glorified autocomplete and merely statistical inference machines and are therefore completely divorced from anything resembling human thought.

I feel the need to point out that not only is there no compelling evidence that any neural computation that humans do anything different from a statistical inference machine, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence that that is exactly what real, biological neural networks do.

Now, admittedly, real neurons and real neural networks are way more sophisticated than any deep learning network module, real neural networks are extremely recurrent and extremely nonlinear, with some neural circuits devoted to simply changing how other neural circuits process signals without actually processing said signals on their own. And in the case of humans, several orders of magnitude larger than even the largest LLM.

All that said, it boils down to an insanely powerful statistical machine.

There are questions of motivation and input: we all want to stay alive (ish), avoid pain, and have constant feedback from sensory organs while a LLM just produces what it was supposed to. But in an abstraction the ideas of wants and needs and rewards aren’t substantively different from prompts.

Anyway. I agree that modern AI is a poor substitute for real human intelligence, but the fundamental reason is a matter of complexity, not method.

Some reading:

Large scale neural recordings call for new insights to link brain and behavior

A unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognition

a comparison of neuronal population dynamics measured with calcium imaging and electrophysiology

The last thing he put out was “The World of Tomorrow” trilogy between 2016 and 2020. It was pretty good.

I also highly recommend “It’s such a beautiful day” if you haven’t seen it

Even if you buy that premise, the output of the robot is only superficially similar to the work it was trained on, so no copyright infringement there, and the training process itself is done by humans, and it takes some tortured logic to deny the technology’s transformative nature

Lol. That’s a skin suit