Is this a parody? If you think it's a tragedy that 'brands' like Brookstone, second only to SkyMall as a crap distributor of marked-up junk, or Claire's, the nation's leader in mall-based earlobe infections, have an infinite right to exist in a free market, you're high.

The AI Safety community / @AnthropicAI is millenarian movement. What is millenarianism? It's the belief that a cataclysm is coming On the one side is apocalypse On the other side is abundance And a select group of people need to guide humanity through Millenarianism has been around since the 2nd Century.

After we have determined all the proofs, discovered all the drugs, found all the new materials, we will have to face the reality that our deepest problems are political, philosophical and psychological.

This argument is getting old. I’ve participated in it far more than I ever thought I would, but here we go again because I’m increasingly convinced that many of the people arguing that LLMs are conscious, or even open to the possibility, just don’t understand how LLMs actually work, so here is context. This is not a debate about understanding what consciousness is or comparing observations to human experience. It’s about understanding the capabilities and mechanics of the LLM, nothing further. First off, how LLMs work is understood. There isn’t magic happening inside the model. The calculations an LLM performs are known mathematical operations. Matrix multiplication, attention, normalization, nonlinear functions, probability calculations, etc. Every operation is defined, implemented, and understood. In theory, you could work through an inference by hand if you were sufficiently masochistic. :-) But what makes it difficult isn’t some unknown computation happening inside the model. It’s the absolutely enormous scale of computations operating across billions of learned parameters. But scale does not magically transform computer software into a self-aware consciousness, but it does get more convincing at emulating it. LLMs learn what they know during a training process. After training their “brain” is effectively locked. During normal inference (using the AI), the model does not continue learning, grow, or modify its weights based on its experiences or conversations. When you start a new interaction with a model, the model itself has no inherent knowledge of your previous conversations with it. None. It doesn’t remember talking to you yesterday because that conversation wasn’t learned into its weights. The model itself is static. The apparent continuity was engineered in the surrounding system. This includes previous conversations, stored memories, accessed summaries, preferences, tool results, and other information can be assembled into context and supplied to the model along with your current input. In other words, the model isn’t remembering the previous conversation. The system is telling the model about the previous conversation again, every time, like it’s the first time. That’s what might sorta resemble short-term memory. The continuity exists in the context supplied during inference, not as new knowledge learned by the model. Long-term memory is also emulated via tool calls and vector databases outside of the model, and then injected into the context. It has to be done this way because the model (its “brain”) is completely static, it can’t change. And there’s a limit. When there’s too much information, some of that context has to be discarded, summarized, compressed, or selectively retrieved to fit within the available context window. Note: A later version of the model can be trained or fine-tuned using data that includes previous interactions, but that’s a separate training process that produces a new version of the model’s weights. The deployed model did not learn that interaction during inference. And between inference calls, the model stops computing entirely. There is no thinking, no ongoing inference, contemplation, consideration, or processing of the passage of time. Its weights simply sit there unchanged until the model is invoked again. Yet somehow, some people decided this is analogous to human consciousness and self-awareness? Maybe their own weights are frozen and they ran out of context window! ;-) And if you think anything I’ve said here is technically incorrect, go research it yourself. The tooling necessary to build the model architecture, train it, and run inference is all available as open source on GitHub. If you want to debate anything I said, go review the source code and point me to the lines where you think the consciousness is.

thank you @valkenburgh @NeerajKA and the team at Coin Center for defending the rights to code as speech, privacy, and peer-to-peer participation upon which open networks (and resilient societies worth inhabiting) depend. had a good time!

Software is a speech. Computers are a press. Networks are assembly. Data is papers. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Will be ironic if ai means blockchains become more secure than banks, since they have had to deal with attacks across the whole of their infrastructure for years, versus bank architectures that mostly trust the bank. More likely both are just broken, but it would be ironic.

A tell from the Manhattan Project was that scientists who had been publishing about nuclear fission suddenly stopped publishing. As Justin points out here, the lack of cryptographic results in OpenAI's mathematical breakthrough could itself be a tell. Evidence against it would be if they published a few improvements that aren't massive breakthroughs.

next time I argue with @NeerajKA in the office about how to make good labne I'm going to start by saying that I agree that in-person debates about labne technique are confrontation and bad for truth-seeking. And that I don't propose to school him on labne in order to seek truth. I propose it because under california penal code 69-420 it is illegal for me to challenge him to a duel. his claim that labne is merely thick strained yogurt and essentially fungible with greek or icelandic preparations is dishonorable.

I’m perplexed by this @tylercowen “defense” of effective altruism movement, which instead somehow gives the reader even more reasons to be suspicious of them! > “Some effective altruists also rate above average in arrogance. […] A rationalist and deductive approach to truth can shade into arrogance itself, with its suggestion that complex moral matters can be solved definitively.” > “It is easy to turn normies against effective altruism, especially in its more extreme forms.” > “One commonly perceived problem with effective altruism is that it devalues humans’ natural preference for our own species.” These all seem like good reasons to question the movement, not endorse it!

The goal of crypto is to build a simulated physical nature, like gravity, upon which we can rely in cyberspace. The goal of AI is to build a simulated man. That simulated man may destroy this simulated nature is great poetry unfolding before our eyes.

The EA movement has recently done an excellent job showing that utilitarianism and consequentialism are merely the substitution of one’s particular favorite virtues, “truth-seeking” or “efficiency,” for others. It is an impoverished deontology that deceives the believer into thinking it is something other than deontology, by flattering them with the notion that their conception of the good is somehow uniquely rational, while other virtues are superstition or merely evolved behavioral strategies that roughly approximate efficiency over evolutionary time. It is a religion. It is anti-pluralistic and, in that sense, anti-American. It should be understood as a spiritual practice from which we might learn something about the diversity of human perceptions of the world, but treated with extreme caution and never mistaken for neutral reason, much less given political power.

The EA movement has recently done an excellent job showing that utilitarianism and consequentialism are merely the substitution of one’s particular favorite virtues, “truth-seeking” or “efficiency,” for others. It is an impoverished deontology that deceives the believer into thinking it is something other than deontology, by flattering them with the notion that their conception of the good is somehow uniquely rational, while other virtues are superstition or merely evolved behavioral strategies that roughly approximate efficiency over evolutionary time. It is a religion. It is anti-pluralistic and, in that sense, anti-American. It should be understood as a spiritual practice from which we might learn something about the diversity of human perceptions of the world, but treated with extreme caution and never mistaken for neutral reason, much less given political power.