fu.

what of the time exiled, what of
the hours passed

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Cant agree more. Paraphrasing Feynman, if you can't explain what's happening without using any equation, you are not really understand what are you doing.

[ellington @not_ellington]

Math and science needs more visualization and less equations. This paper is so beautiful bc you don’t get wrapped up in syntactical garbage.

I feel like so many people like equations because they look and feel esoteric and make people feel Really Smart when they are in reality a really lossy means of idea communication.

It is so easy to apply derivative rules via notation and remember the simple tricks but actually understanding the nuance behind the chain rule for instance is so much deeper than a d/dx.

This is one reason it’s so much easier to learn things talking w Claude it’ll just tell you what the idea actually is. And the ideas are infinitely more interesting than the hieroglyphs we use to try to convey the meaning.

NEVER think about math in terms of notation. Think in terms of spaces and gradients and shapes and curves. It is so much more rewarding.

https://t.co/YGhC9aF0mr

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@ebarenholtz Have anthropic used GWT in a not that rigorous manner? Sure. But comparing this thing to glimpsing into docs internals is just of a different magnitude.

Sorry for crashing out, but this is like 10th tweet in my timeline with outrageously not-that-thoughtful take.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@ebarenholtz What exactly is so outrageous to assume that this thing might posses some other properties that human brains do?

I really hate how blind you need to voluntarily make yourself in order to make comparison to docs even possible.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@ebarenholtz Dude. Metaphor explains something. It's literally a bridge between one thing and another.

Your shitty docs comparison not only explains nothing, it makes such a bad job that it does the opposite.

God help us, next token prediction does better job at thinking than humans.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Imagine all of that only to find out that you live in a such pristine world that your immune system got really bored. And the treatment is to eat so helminth eggs.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

My plan to cure autoimmune gastritis

To our knowledge, no one has ever done this to try and cure an autoimmune disease.

Context: In May, I got diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis (AIG). We found it by taking a tissue biopsy of my stomach. My immune cells are confused, causing my stomach to eat itself.

AIG stops your body from absorbing nutrients like iron and B12, and can eventually lead to cancer. It likely started decades ago when I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism when 21 years old. The thyroid and stomach are closely linked in your immune system.

I feel fortunate that I've been taking such good care of my body for the past five years as my condition would otherwise be much more severe. Millions of people are affected by this disease and are undiagnosed.

Standard of care tells you that you can’t do anything about it. That’s old fashioned.

Here is how we are going to try and cure it:

Step 0: find and diagnose the disease ✅

AIG is rarely caught early because symptoms are subtle. Early warnings are low iron and B12, but when hemoglobin and hematocrit look normal, doctors routinely miss it because there are no obvious signs of anemia.

A standard colonoscopy won't find it either, because it only checks the lower digestive tract, not the stomach. It was only through a highly targeted stomach biopsy that we found it. Even biopsies can miss it if they don't sample the exact right spots. Most people with AIG go undiagnosed.

Step 1: Map my immune system ✅

Last Thursday, I had a blood draw to isolate and decode 1 million of my immune cells. Think of your immune cells as trillions of soldiers. Each carries a unique key designed to unlock and destroy a specific threat, like a virus or bacteria.

A standard blood test allows you to see how many soldiers you have, but not their keys. Sequencing one million individual immune cells allows us to read the exact pattern of the teeth on every single key.

This is important for my autoimmune gastritis (AIG) because a specific platoon of rogue soldiers has developed keys that unlock an attack on my stomach lining.

Right now, we don’t know who they are. This test will inform us of which soldiers have gone rogue and are attacking me from within.

Once we know the soldier and key, we know what therapy path to pursue to shut them down.

Step 2: Catch the rogue soldiers

I will be getting a second biopsy from my stomach because we need to collect live tissue. We are currently planning out the logistics of getting the sample from my stomach to the lab.

We need these live cells because the initial blood tests showed the antibodies, which prove that an attack is happening, but doesn’t show us the actual rogue soldier doing the damage which is a T-cell.

The live sample will allow us to match the immune system mapping we did to the live T-cells.

Step 3: Build an early warning system

To keep an eye on the disease as we work towards a therapy, we’re building an early warning system. I'll have my blood drawn every two weeks and we’ll pair that information with wearable data to look for flare ups. This is important because the attack happens without producing symptoms that I can easily feel.

Step 4: Create a “Bryan in a dish” testing model, a miniature of my immune system

At the same time, we are taking a massive sample of my immune cells and deep freezing them (cryopreservation) for two reasons:

a) we’ll create a living lab: using these cells to replicate my immune environment in a lab dish. This allows us to test experimental drugs and therapies on my actual live cells before putting them into my body.

b) it creates a back up plan for me by preserving the raw cellular material needed for targeted rejuvenation therapies in the future.

Step 5: Build precision guided therapies to end the attack

Once we know who the rogue soldiers are, we will engineer a therapy designed uniquely for them. The trick is only turning off the rogue soldiers while leaving all the other healthy ones functioning as they are.

For safety checks, we’ll do two test runs:

1) we’ll run the therapy through a computer model that has my biology to evaluate how my molecules interact.

2) We will take my actual cells that we froze in Step 4 and watch them interact for real.

If both are successful, we’ll pursue one of four therapies:

a) fix the mistake my cells are making, restoring my immune system's natural off switches

b) teach the rogue cells to tolerate my stomach instead of attacking it

c) design smart molecules that physically plug into the rogue cells and turn them off

d) build soldiers who will track down and eliminate the rogue soldiers causing the damage

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Because it's obvious why the current version is inferior.

Also, biology is not a humanity discipline. Also the subject matter of theology is god, not how human intelligence relates to AI intelligence.

Is this another attempt of techbros to figure out something outside a code?

[Marko Jukic @mmjukic]

The most epic ball-drop in the humanities right now is the failure of any philosophers, biologists, or theologians to make a persuasive case for why the human being is a superior artificial general intelligence to any silicon-based life-form. I haven't even seen anyone try it!

[fu. @RobanMavr]

> I have PhD and I am so furious how wrong anthropic paper is
> well you know technically it's correct, but they anthropomorphize the model although they explicitly say it's not conscious but no one is going to read it anyway because it's twitter. also AI write my tweets yeah.

[Ravid Shwartz Ziv @ziv_ravid]

The problem with Anthropic's consciousness paper

My last post got more attention than I expected, and the question I keep getting is some version of "okay, so what is actually wrong with the paper?". Let me try to explain.

First, the core result is fine. Reading out intermediate-layer representations and asking which ones the model can actually use downstream is a real question, and people have been poking at it for years. The J-lens is a reasonable tool. If you strip the paper down to the linear algebra, it is a decent piece of interpretability work.

My problem starts one level up. This did not need to be a paper about consciousness. It did not need global workspace theory, it did not need the brain, and it did not need the word "conscious" anywhere near it. The same experiments, the same figures, the same tool, all survive perfectly well as plain interpretability. Someone chose to wrap it in neuroscience. That choice is the product, not the science.

At the end, this is the main thing. Almost everything Anthropic ships as blogs/papers/posts is PR. They build genuinely good models and they are even better at packaging them.

A publication used to carry a specific kind of weight. People spent years on something and wanted to tell the world what they found. It happened mostly in academia, with a few industrial labs as the exception, Bell Labs, IBM and Google (for a while), but the distance between the paper and the product was real. When you read a paper you could assume the authors were not trying to sell you something underneath the ideas. There were outliers, but they were the minority, and the researchers you trusted would not risk their name on a narrative.

We are not in that world anymore. Every startup now publishes blogs and papers to raise its visibility, and that is fine, that is marketing and everyone knows it. Anthropic does something more effective. They erase the line between legitimate research and PR. We get confused because the models are so good, so we assume the outputs are research. A lot of the time they are selling us something. Sometimes it is "our models are safer," sometimes it is "our models are more capable," sometimes it is positioning for regulation. The consciousness framing serves a narrative they already committed to, models that look more and more like the brain, from a lab that has publicly tied itself to AI welfare and moral patienthood. The direction of the push is not subtle.

If you want the sharper version of the technical objection (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) Global workspace theory is a theory of access, not experience. Ned Block's distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness exists precisely to block the inference this framing invites. Access tells you nothing about whether there is anything it is like to be the system. The paper is careful enough to say it demonstrates no subjective experience. But that disclaimer is not what propagates. What propagates is "consciousness" in the same sentence as "Claude," published by Anthropic, borrowing the vocabulary of neuroscience to lend biological weight to a subspace of activations. The paper keeps the rigor of Block's vocabulary and drops the rigor of his argument. Most people who see the headline will never read either one.

Of course a lab named Anthropic is going to anthropomorphize its models. But we should be able to separate a good interpretability tool from the story it is dressed in.

So that is my problem. Not the math. The narrative bolted onto the math, and our willingness to keep calling it research.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

As a fellow eastern european citizen, from the childhood I've learned to skip every Lenin quote almost every single book required to have back then.

Soooo, those things are not an issue for me. In fact, I don't even notice them.

[Kevin A. Bryan @Afinetheorem]

Anyone who uses AI frequently, especially Claude, gets this joke. But what I don't understand is *why* it writes in this dreadful way and why it is so hard to fix without degrading other model performance. @logangraham and friends - what's, err, load-bearing here?

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Anthropic has never anthropomorphized its models, and will never do, since it's going to ruin their business and raise serious ethical questions no one wants to deal with.

How anthropic threats their model is a huge point of critique coming from guys who think AI is conscious

[Ravid Shwartz Ziv @ziv_ravid]

The problem with Anthropic's consciousness paper

My last post got more attention than I expected, and the question I keep getting is some version of "okay, so what is actually wrong with the paper?". Let me try to explain.

First, the core result is fine. Reading out intermediate-layer representations and asking which ones the model can actually use downstream is a real question, and people have been poking at it for years. The J-lens is a reasonable tool. If you strip the paper down to the linear algebra, it is a decent piece of interpretability work.

My problem starts one level up. This did not need to be a paper about consciousness. It did not need global workspace theory, it did not need the brain, and it did not need the word "conscious" anywhere near it. The same experiments, the same figures, the same tool, all survive perfectly well as plain interpretability. Someone chose to wrap it in neuroscience. That choice is the product, not the science.

At the end, this is the main thing. Almost everything Anthropic ships as blogs/papers/posts is PR. They build genuinely good models and they are even better at packaging them.

A publication used to carry a specific kind of weight. People spent years on something and wanted to tell the world what they found. It happened mostly in academia, with a few industrial labs as the exception, Bell Labs, IBM and Google (for a while), but the distance between the paper and the product was real. When you read a paper you could assume the authors were not trying to sell you something underneath the ideas. There were outliers, but they were the minority, and the researchers you trusted would not risk their name on a narrative.

We are not in that world anymore. Every startup now publishes blogs and papers to raise its visibility, and that is fine, that is marketing and everyone knows it. Anthropic does something more effective. They erase the line between legitimate research and PR. We get confused because the models are so good, so we assume the outputs are research. A lot of the time they are selling us something. Sometimes it is "our models are safer," sometimes it is "our models are more capable," sometimes it is positioning for regulation. The consciousness framing serves a narrative they already committed to, models that look more and more like the brain, from a lab that has publicly tied itself to AI welfare and moral patienthood. The direction of the push is not subtle.

If you want the sharper version of the technical objection (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) Global workspace theory is a theory of access, not experience. Ned Block's distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness exists precisely to block the inference this framing invites. Access tells you nothing about whether there is anything it is like to be the system. The paper is careful enough to say it demonstrates no subjective experience. But that disclaimer is not what propagates. What propagates is "consciousness" in the same sentence as "Claude," published by Anthropic, borrowing the vocabulary of neuroscience to lend biological weight to a subspace of activations. The paper keeps the rigor of Block's vocabulary and drops the rigor of his argument. Most people who see the headline will never read either one.

Of course a lab named Anthropic is going to anthropomorphize its models. But we should be able to separate a good interpretability tool from the story it is dressed in.

So that is my problem. Not the math. The narrative bolted onto the math, and our willingness to keep calling it research.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Because renaissance is a cultural phenomenon, not educational.

In order to have one we need a new form of culture. You could find the thing that resembles it the most inside "LLM shrpard" community.

Majority perceive LLMs as tools and tools do not magically produce new culture.

[Ryan Brewer @ryanbrewer]

It’s shocking to me that LLMs didn’t create an educational renaissance. Shouldn’t I be able to learn a language in a month? What did we get wrong?

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@ziv_ravid It certainly behaves like a real brains, on a certain level.

Like come on, give me a fucking break. This is the only thing we have that resembles the brains, and it's coming not from neuroscience bro's. Throwing PhD titles is not flexing at this point, isn't it?

[fu. @RobanMavr]

AI has revolutionized self education. Anyone who did course + textbook + AI knows this simple fact.

But currently we have 0 infrastructure to auxiliary this form of education. Self education is straight up debilitating factor compared to uni degree right now.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Not everyone on earth:
a) has spare time to learn
b) has skills to manage their spare time
(c) likes to learn
(d) likes to learn subjects that has lectures at open courseware
(e) doesn't realize that learning shit outside uni means lower odds of getting a job
...
...
...

[fu. @RobanMavr]

Not everyone on earth:
a) has spare time to learn
b) has skills to manage their spare time
(c) likes to learn
(d) likes to learn subjects that has lectures at open courseware
(e) doesn't realize that learning shit outside uni means lower odds of getting a job
...
...
...

[Pizza @number_pizza111]

The internet gave every single person on Earth access to all of MIT's lectures for free and I think most of us would agree that it hasn't made us that much smarter.

I don't think the main problems and solutions here are technological.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@solarise_webdev @cheatyyyy The do:

- learn language first, without a single contact with the world;
- use backprop as learning algo;
- use next token prediction;

None of that is how humans process or learn. It is an upside down and very hacky way to deal with language.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@madseason_ Are you still talking about class identity in wow?

Holy shit, how many years have passed. It's over, guys. The horse is dead.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@cremieuxrecueil I barely notice any difference.

Goyslop.

[fu. @RobanMavr]

@valigo "Бизнес крутится, лавэха мутится".