Panagiotis Grontas

Zero Knowledge

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Why is the AI backlash growing?

Outside of coding (where there is clear value), and a handful of other domains (e.g. brainstorming), Generative AI has been a net negative for society.

GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.

Simultaneously it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility.

I don’t think we are better off than we were four years ago.

Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation). Most of this was predictable.

Almost none of it is good.

All that said, I honestly believes some future form of AI might be great. But Generative AI has hurt more than it has helped, and been managed irresponsibly.

It’s no wonder many people have had enough.

[David Wong @cryptodavidw]

I got many fines when I was a kid taking the bus or the subway, often because I forgot to use a ticket, once it happened on my birthday and I cried. Anyway, since I was a kid I was wondering why the bus/subway was not free, and I never got a good answer

[JP Aumasson @veorq]

don't trust everything on internet
don't trust proofs in cryptography papers

[Computer Science @CompSciFact]

'Projects promoting programming in 'natural language' are intrinsically doomed to fail.' -- Edsger Dijkstra

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

Wow, Palantir has gone full Nazi.

[Orr Dunkelman @CryptoOrrDun]

I believe we are ready to have at the end of a Ph.D. defense a small ceremony, where the newly appointed Ph.D. turns around and throws a signed copy of the thesis to the audience, and the one catching it, is expected to graduate next.

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@PRESEGAS Αληθεια, πληρεί το στάδιο του Αγ. Κοσμά όπου ο γυρω χώρος μοιάζει με εργοτάξιο προδιαγραφές ασφαλείας για τους εκατοντάδες αθλητές και συνοδούς που θα μαζευτούν εκεί για τους διασυλλογικούς αγώνες; @PRESEGAS

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

Θα κάνει κάτι επιτέλους κάποιος από τον @PRESEGAS για την απαράδεκτη κατάσταση που επικρατεί στον Αγ. Κοσμά; Δεν μπορείτε να διοργανώνετε αγώνες εκεί. Είναι ντροπή για τους αθλητές και τους συνοδούς τους. Υπάρχουν και άλλα στάδια στην Αττική.

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@dionyziz Don't forget the dog!

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@awesomekling VLC

[Łukasz Chludziński @lukasz_app]

Managers have been vibe coding forever by @thekitze :D

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@fchollet This is the view of an explorer, an honest scientist. A businessman, however, will be far more interested in paying other scientists to build an artificial human so that they can put them to work and maximise their profits. I am afraid you can't have the one without the other.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Software engineers shouldn't fear being replaced by AI. They should fear being asked to maintain the sprawling mess of AI-generated legacy code their employer's systems will soon run on.

Because that one will actually happen.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

To solve any problem, you don't have to be super smart. You just have to 1) be able to break down problems into subproblems, 2) be slightly smarter than the hardest of the atomic subproblems.

The real challenge is that the process can take a very long time.

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@headinthebox What do you think about it as a first programming language (for students I mean - not professionals)?

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@0xLewis_gg @lightcoin @EliBenSasson Are you worried that a meteorite will land on your head tomorrow. A ZK proof has less error probability by orders of magnitude.

[Eli Ben-Sasson | Starknet.io @EliBenSasson]

ZK Story time: What I heard from Shafi Goldwasser, co-inventor of ZK (and Turing award winner).

It didn't start as "proofs". The ZK paper was rejected 4-5 times from peer reviewed conferences. Mathematicians strongly objected to calling these things "proofs".

The details:
She wasn't trying to define a new model for proofs. Not at all. She and her co-authors wanted to solve the problem of playing a game of poker using the telephone. (Happened to so many of us)

By then, it was already known how to *shuffle* a pack of cards between two people talking over the phone (with no trust assumptions and no trusted third party).

The problem was that two players with no trust assumptions need to follow the *rules* of the game, without information being revealed. This is what she set out to solve. And they ended up with a protocol for the two players to "prove" to one another that they drew the next random card correctly.

They didn't immediately realize it's a form of proof. This was suggested to them by Michael Sipser when they described it to him. But it's a very strange notion of "proof". It must rely on randomness. It has a small probability of error. If you've ever seen a "proper" mathematical proof (say, for the infinity of prime numbers) than you'll naturally revolt against such a messy and error-prone kind of "proof".

Which is why, for a very long time, when Shafi and Silvio and many others presented these magical ZK proofs to the world, folks fought back against it.

It's a famous piece of lore in theoretical computer science, one that you share with your peers after your amazing submission to STOC or FOCS (S-tier conferences) got rejected again. You'll say "did you know that the ZK paper got rejected 5 times, and 2 of the co-authors ended up getting the Turing award?"

I'll end by saying that the STARK paper got rejected 4 times, FRI rejected twice. Just sayin ;-)

[Aggelos Kiayias @sol3gga]

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[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Knowledge is like an ocean, vast and infinite. The further you venture, the deeper you realize it goes. Yet, if you only stand at the shore, you may falsely believe you've seen its entirety.

[Panagiotis Grontas @pgrontas]

@Nick_in_ABZ Ο αδικαιολόγητος σαρκασμός δεν είναι ωραίος για κανέναν οπότε χάρηκα για τη συζήτηση.