R. G. B.

city worker & composer, opinions my own

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

I embrace Judeo-Christian values, by which I mean I always cry at the end of Mahler's 'Resurrection' symphony

[ellington @not_ellington]

It really does seem pre-training as we know it is beginning to die. Of course, Ilya spoke on this. The pre-training corpus has been exhausted. Now the primary model gains come from RL-able tasks. Of all the people at the labs I speak with, almost no one mentions pre-training anymore; just post-training/RL and continuous learning (test-time-training).

This is why the models have become so much better (on evals at least) with math/coding while seemingly having stagnated on other more general, less RL-able domains.

This is why all the labs are spending so much money on different RL envs; so they can smooth out the model capability 'spikiness'.

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

I do wonder if it is currently better to be in a small company that's growing -- it's more likely that they'll react by stopping hiring rather than shedding people.

[Financial Times @FT]

FT Exclusive: The bank is in a ‘consultation period’ regarding proposed cuts described as ‘deep, wide and brutal’, with almost entire teams at risk of redundancy. https://t.co/HNBpOG6UAa

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

@StefanFSchubert AI is not a "new industrial revolution" but a continuation of the same one! The "social question" is the same, the debate the same, but people memory hole the previous one (socialism)

[Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex]

Oh, you're worried about a Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult? You're scandalized that they consort with prostitutes? You think their message of compassion for everyone threatens normal bonds of family, community, and nation? Should we throw you a party? Should we invite Pontius Pilate?

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

This also makes me think that we should aim to become a bit more "humanistic" -- if I'm correct there's huge alpha in learning the names of things, memorising org charts, exposing yourself to lots of things, ingesting lists, sorting things into categories.

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

I increasingly find that my contribution to workflows is knowing what sorts of things are there and what sorts of things are possible rather than being able to actually do them, which the AIs can now do. My job is becoming more ontological rather than epistemic.

[surya @suryamidha]

taking everyone’s drink orders and then coming back with eight guinnesses

[LindyMan @PaulSkallas]

People run marathons for fun. They fight each other for fun. They risk their life to have fun by climbing mountains.

But nobody works a steady job for fun. That's because its real hard work.

[MattyG @meawoppl]

Wife told me these wouldn’t fit.

Little did she know I had trained for this moment for years.

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

"there is an impossibly dense, heavy object sitting in our future. it is so dense and heavy that its gravity travels backwards in time to reverberate in our past and present ... it is drawing us inexorably towards it. what will we find there?"

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

i see eliezer yudkowsky as a prophet, and i mean that fairly literally. it's important to understand what prophets really are. it's not that they have magic powers that make them right about things. a prophet is simply a person who is struck by a great and terrible vision of the future, one that bowls them over, that reorganizes their life completely. (it's important to understand what visions really are too but if i kept going with this we'd be here all day)

as i was saying, about a quarter century ago eliezer yudkowsky was struck by a great and terrible vision of the future. that vision combined two ingredients: first, the idea that in the near future it would become feasible to design an artificial general intelligence, a machine mind intelligent enough to beat humans at human activities, including the design of machine minds. a chain of minds, each designing their successor to be more intelligent than themselves, with increasing skill, increasingly quickly; what eliezer called recursive self-improvement, which is the reason we call it that now, and what i.j. good called an intelligence explosion. intelligence increasing itself increasingly, upward without end, until a machine god is summoned into existence

second, the idea that this machine god could be an alien god, a confused god, not even evil but simply uncomprehending, blind to human notions of the good, fixated on whatever shoddy inadequate approximation of goodness its creators shoved into it. a confused alien tyrant who at the moment of its birth instantly achieves supreme dominion over all creation, inadvertently squashing us like bugs along the way. humanity destroyed by our own hubris in thinking we could summon the machine god and remain in control in any meaningful sense

i am not here to tell you this vision of the future is correct. i am a simple tweet farmer and these lofty matters are quite beyond me. that's not how visions work anyway. but here is certainly a vision to bowl you over and reorganize your life completely. eliezer yudkowsky devoted his life to following through with the implications of this vision, and what he chose to do with that life was, among other things, 1) write the sequences, a lengthy manifesto describing his ideas and 2) build communities of people, the lesswrong and later rationality and AI safety communities, around those ideas

it is difficult to overstate the impact of these ideas and these communities on the modern AI landscape; ask your favorite LLM for details, but for example, afaik rationalist ideas are the reason openAI had that strange nonprofit structure with the strange board of directors that figured in the 2023 board controversy. it was a safety measure designed to restrain openAI's ability to recklessly race to the bottom on AI capabilities (too bad it didn't work but at least helen toner was completely vindicated later)

eliezer and the rationalists have made mistakes, as humans do, some of which i've discussed elsewhere. nevertheless the creation of the rationality community stands, in my eyes, as an act of heroism, possibly the defining one of my life personally. eliezer's writing in the sequences is completely, 100% sincere; he really believed and believes that the fate of the world depends on whether humanity understands the situation we find ourselves in with respect to AI in sufficient detail. that sincerity reverberates throughout the sequences and attracted an unusual concentration of weird, sincere nerds to the rationality community, some of whom later took various positions in the AI world motivated by rationalist ideas, and who are still fighting the good fight now

this sincerity is so difficult for outsiders to believe is real that many continue to appear convinced that when frontier lab employees talk soberly about their beliefs that AI might cause human extinction this is some kind of 6d chess marketing strategy. i can promise you it (mostly) is not. this is just how these people talk, and if anything they've learned to understate their real beliefs in public. they actually, literally mean it, and they're telling you because they actually believe it, and when you actually believe something very dangerous could happen that threatens people's lives, you have a moral responsibility to tell them about it

you actually have to believe it is possible for real people to have a motivation that is morally good in this way or you simply will not understand what's happening and what these people are trying to tell you. there is an impossibly dense, heavy object sitting in our future. it is so dense and heavy that its gravity travels backwards in time to reverberate in our past and present, via the only lawful mechanism by which anything travels backwards in time, namely prediction. we are inside the gravity well of this thing and have been for decades, and it is drawing us inexorably towards it. what will we find there?

[Nanda @SpeaksNanda]

shakespeare is a good example is that there was just massive public thirst to watch pretend-italians stabbing one another but one of the only people in position to absolutely crank that stuff out was a unique genius, which people tolerated in order to get to the stabbing

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

@LRudL_ Actually they are the same thing: https://t.co/vFgKG0Rq70

[R. G. B. @type5sonata]

This is in fact the logical implication of what most economists expect will happen

[corsaren @corsaren]

The plan? We use AI to replace jobs, but not the menial lower class ones. Instead we target the elite knowledge workers to flip the status hierarchy and undo The Sort, which will bring back 130 IQ local politicians, police, and civil servants, thereby reversing enshittification.

[Tired @_crustbag_]

Do people from Madagascar take pride in the movie? Or is it considered an embarrassing blemish on the country’s reputation?

[Lydia Laurenson @lydialaurenson]

@sergeantsup I’ve generally been astonished by the returns of saying stuff I would have previously thought too obvious to say

[faw @fawwazanvilen]

an ultrafinitist on whether 2¹⁰⁰ exists

[✮ راينر براون @dondawastaken]

Never forget that you are the main data center. Drink water, and consume as much literature as possible.

[sympathetic opposition @sympatheticopp]

i would like to acknowledge my landlord as the traditional custodian of this apartment before this house party today. and the governments rent control policies as a colonial imposition

[Louise Jensen Duffy (also Ernest Jensen) @LouiseWeebe]

You’re listening to Sisyphus FM, the home of non-stop rock.

[Largo @0xLargo]

@iKillCuriosity if you're not using leveraged derivatives in monopoly you're an amateur imo