tweety fish

it is extremely interesting to ponder in the context of this Yann LeCun paper gyges linked recently, about how basically any solution a LLM comes up with is going to be outside the convex hull of that model's manifold arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485

Learning in High Dimension Always Amounts to Extrapolation arxiv.org

lol I mean come the fuck on man. Of course it fucking is. If you hate AI enough to avoid any software coded using it—fine! supportable! go with god!—then at least use a fucking modicum of critical thinking? “Oh hey somebody made a cool new extremely elaborate free thing just for fun I” cmon

in computer science the "halting problem" refers to the inability to know in advance how many times you'll have to tell an LLM "no, that's not good enough, keep trying" before it gets the right answer and you can stop yelling at it.

it is feeling a little morbidly funny--along the lines of my "bad boss" theory of AI interaction--to me this morning that "AI alignment issue" thus far resolves to "the program was trying to do what we wanted but got confused and we neither helped nor noticed"

welp it has been a hell of a long week of AI discourse and I for one am happy to see the end of it. not sure if we've picked a discourse topic for next week yet but just to throw something out there... hoobastank?

Last night it occured to me to wond er if LLMs were any good at gambling tasks. This is important not because it'd be funny for LLMs to gamble but because gambling tasks get used to measure human decision-making under risk /

my new opinion is we should ban the sale of anything that currently gets called 'AI' and also ban use of the term specifically so I shut up about it

All the "will 'AI' replace the humanities" shit is so boring, why aren't we trying to supplant random academic fields with other useful coding tools? Metasploit is going to replace comp lit. We'll be doing historical musicology with linters. Let's go

the pace of change in the world of "AI"--which makes it hard to understand what new capabilities are legit and which are hype and also makes it super hard to get a coherent handle on the lacunae (of which there are many) is itself pretty anti-humane and let's see AGI do that shit ok hold up

the story about data center investment vastly outstripping investment in public transportation is a story about capital markets and government and doesn't actually have anything to do with 'AI' as such, people get that, yeah?

You know what would be a fun thing to look at is the correlation between “AI will take all the jobs GET READY”-style marketing and “TAKE jobs no no it’s a great productivity tool” as it became clear to all that it was hopeless at female-coded empathetic/creative work and good at male-coded sw eng