andy99

7 jam yang laludiscuss

Do you know what Poe’s law is?

7 jam yang laludiscuss

Just for reference, that hasn’t worked for years (the interviews say 2024-25 I think, that kind of attack was patched very early in all the mainstream models) and when it did, you would get bullet point lists GPT 3.5 Turbo style

- first research methods for building effective explosives

- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb

- ...

andy99

8 jam yang laludiscuss

The NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.

andy99

8 jam yang laludiscuss

Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.

andy99

9 jam yang laludiscuss

  You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.

I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensored model.

I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.

andy99

23 jam yang laludiscuss

Pretending there is any equivalence between the atomic bomb and LLMs is playing right into the hands of the companies who want to pretend it’s so dangerous that (a) only they can have it (b) the government should give them money to “win” a “race” against China. Playing that game is the only part that has any atomic bomb level geopolitical consequences (because those involved have real bombs).

The analogy to sugar or cigarettes I get, ten years from now our brains will have atrophied so much it will probably show on a MRI. But the acute danger is BS and just some people looking for power plus hangers on that want to imagine they’re in a sci-fi novel.

andy99

kemarindiscuss

To be fair it’s been pretty useful for me for finding jobs by looking for a relevant person and messaging them. I don’t do it very often and have probably > 50% rate of a cold message leading to further discussions (just to indicate I’m not spamming and only doing it when there’s a real possibility of a fit).

I agree the actual “job search” functionality is useless, maybe it has some value for more junior people.

That aside I used to scroll it fairly often to see updates or relevant posts. But it’s some combination of algorithm and LLMs, the feed is now useless, it’s all just people I don’t know posting slope about someone “just said the quiet part out loud” or whatever, with the obligatory GPT slop photo. It’s unrecognizable vs a few years ago.

andy99

kemarindiscuss

  Curated. Not exhaustive.

  Every package is hand-picked.

Somehow I’m not convinced.

Anyway, if this works for someone, great. I’m a novice Pi user which I think would be the target audience, I don’t see why I would use this, both because it appears to be LLM slop and because it bedazzles up a tool that I started using in the first place because of its minimalism, but to each his own.

andy99

kemarin duludiscuss

Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.

andy99

kemarin duludiscuss

There is no obligation to do that. I think the landscape would be very different now if one of the big labs had released an earlier “frontier” model under copyleft that requires sharing fine tunes. I hope it still happens.

andy99

kemarin duludiscuss

Is it just me or does all that* seem pretty tame by today’s standards? Not saying it’s right, but it barely raises eyebrows. Sounds like a pretty typical startup demo.

* Based on the first comment in the link that claims to summarize the video.

andy99

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Has nothing to do with demand, it’s a question of the most efficient way to train a good model. Narrower models are in general worse than general purpose ones, so you’re better using the largest general purpose model that fits in your compute budget vs trying to somehow remove capability or knowledge and assume the model stays as capable for the task you want.

andy99

3 hari yang laludiscuss

> Why would knowing about 2019 internet memes help you in any way at coding?

99.99% of the knowledge an LLM has is useless for a given scenario, the hard part is knowing what the .01% that’s needed is. Knowing as much as it can means the model can handle edge cases, turns of phrase, etc.

Put another way, it avoids overfitting. That’s basically the insight that’s given way to the current AI boom.

andy99

4 hari yang laludiscuss

General purpose models are always more robust and generally better than smaller narrower models. My bet is that compute will catch up and any “small” model will still be generally capable, just smaller than sota, rather than intentionally narrow. The exception would be for very well defined tasks where the data distribution never varies, but these are rare and don’t really need “AI” anyway when they do exist.

andy99

4 hari yang laludiscuss

I see the same thing, and believe that ironically AI is going to bring about the return of good search engines as we’re currently drowning in slop and need a real way to filter it.

andy99

4 hari yang laludiscuss

In Canada if you go to a drug store, the shelves are literally filled with literal homeopathic medicine. You have to carefully confirm that what you’re buying isn’t water, and there is no signage or other differentiation between actual medicine and magic.

Completely unrelated, I noticed recently that tire detailing spray that makes your tires look black, and the recommended lubricant for my garage door weather stripping, which both cost $15 or more for a little bottle, are just silicon oil that costs pennies for that amount. I have no moral problem with charging higher prices for convenience plus clarity of what the use is. I do think it’s amoral, obviously, to be involved in snake oil sales and unbelievable that the government allows it.

Edit: this is the first result from a Canadian pharmacy searching for cough medicine. Worse it’s for kids: https://well.ca/products/homeocan-kids-0-9-cough-cold-day_88...

andy99

4 hari yang laludiscuss

What is your view on how experience and problem space relate to subjective experience.

For example will inexperienced or experienced users see a bigger jump in subjective quality?

andy99

5 hari yang laludiscuss

I think it’s pretty clear that they are repeating without “comprehension” - both mechanistically (as in there is no facility for comprehension in their formulation) and in the ways they fail. The standard rs in strawberry, should I walk or drive to the car wash, etc all play on the fact that they don’t have any real world model or thoughts against which they can judge their output, as do many of the jailbreaks which basically play on the fact that the model has memorized patterns.

There are people who argue semantics, that we can call the pattern matching that LLMs do “understanding”, or the moronic “how do we know that’s isn’t all we do” but for the normal use of comprehension, LLMs at a fundamental level don’t.

andy99

5 hari yang laludiscuss

Engineering is a regulated term, afaik that’s what underlies the debate, it’s not about whether English has changed.

andy99

6 hari yang laludiscuss

I think it’s just as well he was opinionated and realized it wasn’t going to work. Ironically, if this was actually the start of the job, I think bailing might have made more sense. Given that it was just a one week work trial, I feel like there’s little downside in just toughing out the remaining couple days and then deciding. Personally, if I found out the Typescript thing was a secret test of adaptability (which seems extremely unlikely) I would move on, I wouldn’t want a place that plays those kind of games.

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[untitled]

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