rayon
waifutech enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 2632
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
14d ago
I'm no fan of sama and the cabal he's built, but nonetheless I think it's still too early to write off any major company working on AI-related things right now. I'm not convinced all of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked wrt applications (even dumb stuff like "characterai but uncucked" alone is likely to be a smash hit), and besides most past/present developments were sufficiently arcane and/or undercover that you can't really predict where and what happens next - cf. Chinese LLMs being regarded as subpar until Deepseek, or Anthropic being safety fanatics with only a dumb soy model to their name until Claude 3(.5).
If Sora is anything to go by I think OpenAI still have some genuine aces up their sleeves, and while I don't believe they're capable of properly playing them to full effect, they at least have the (faded) first-mover advantage and Sam "Strawberry" Hypeman to exploit normies boost their chances.
Kinda late to this thread but I have watched and played some of Wukong last week so I will note down my own thoughts about the game itself, isolated from broader cultural context. (I actually managed to completely miss the DEI kerfuffle it reportedly had, gonna look that up)
The good: The presentation is, as the young'uns say, absolute cinema - easily on par with Western hits like God of War (in fact I think it's fair to call Wukong "God of War but Chinese", the parallels broadly hold in most aspects) and imho exceeding them at some points. Major fights in Wukong are exactly what an unsophisticated rube like me pictures in his head when he imagines xianxia - the prologue scene/fight solidly establishes that the sheer spectacle is the main draw of the game, and so far it does not disappoint while still having the difficulty to match, fuck White-clad Noble you are forced to git gud as soon as chapter 1. The game is gorgeous, the monster designs are consistently great, and I physically feel the cultural gap. After so many Western games that SUBVERT LE EXPECTATIONS, seeing a mythical power fantasy played entirely, shamelessly straight feels very refreshing.
The great: Special mention to the animated ending scenes for each chapter, with every one having a completely different art style, and an interactive in-game "tapestry" afterwards that serve as loosely-related loredumps to put things into context. Those are universally amazing, with incredible effort put into throwaway 5-minute segments that aren't even strictly speaking related to the game itself - I checked the credits out of curiosity and every cutscene has a separate fucking animation studio responsible for it! That is an insane level of dedication to your storytelling - foreign as the subject matter is to my uncultured ass, the sheer passion to share your culture and get your point across is still unmistakable. This right here should be the bar for every Chinese cultural export going forward.
The mid: I'm conflicted about combat. On one hand it feels a little floaty to my taste, especially the bread and butter light combos, and you do not get the stone form spell (the parry button of the game) until quite a bit into chapter 2 so the only reliable defensive option you have is dodge roll spamming. On the other heavy attacks are very satisfying to charge and land, and the frequent boss fights are almost universally great and engaging, with very diverse movesets for every one. There don't seem to be any bullshit boss immunities either, the Immobilize spell (which completely stops an enemy for a few seconds) works on pretty much every enemy and boss I've seen so far. Hitboxes and especially delayed enemy attacks can be frustrating at times though.
The bad: The exploration is worse than even Souls games; no map, sparse bonfires and very few notable landmarks scattered over the huge levels are not a recipe for convenient navigation. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part but it's been VERY easy to lose track of where you are (and especially where you were) and miss side content - of which there is a lot, adding to the frustration. To be fair, this is also why Souls games aren't my usual cup of tea.
Overall I think it is a very solid game, especially for the first game of the company, and I think that all the hand-wringing about Chinese bots or whatever is misplaced. It's not a masterpiece - it's just a good, solid game, and "organic" breakout hits of this scale are not unheard of, we had one just earlier this year.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
Where have you "heard from many men" about having sex with random objects?
Some people on Mongolian basket weaving forums definitely engineer all sorts of, ahem, devices to this end, I've seen literal manuals involving IIRC gloves and water beads? (for better or worse I don't have the exact link on hand) There's a "community" for everything, the old wisdom seems relevant.
Also, this is the second instance of weird breathless, gushing hatred of the outgroup I've seen here in 24 hours (the first one above my comment got deleted?), which reaffirms my belief that the "weird" attacks are indeed landing spectacularly - and not just on the target demographic. The media sure know how to pick 'em, gotta hand it to them.
I would normally ask for sources but I am convinced enough by your weird intensity (if not your choices of phrasing which read as rather uncharitable, I too have a caricature of an obsessed leftoid residing in my head but I don't talk to him much) that I will uncritically buy it, and instead note that judging by the sheer knee-jerk reactions to the "weird" angles from both sides, the term seems to be primed to become the political hot potato of the year. The involved parties throwing avalanches of stones while frantically reinforcing their glass to make the other guys out as ACTUALLY WEIRD AND GROSS LIKE EWW is going to be very entertaining to watch, especially from a third world shithole. If this'd still been 2016 I'd say reds have it in the bag, but I think blues are swiftly stepping up their meme game so it really can go either way. I humbly retract my complaint that this season is fucking boring, god bless America.
So far seems to be a problem with AWS instances, regular API is reportedly unaffected. According to anons the meltdown is still ongoing.
Curiously this does not seem to have made any news despite going on for the better part of a day, which makes me believe it's not some kind of global outage. Some people even took it as a reason to doompost as some kind of new filtering system that raises temperature to schizo levels when haram inputs are detected, but I doubt it.
Right now, there seems to be an ongoing issue with Claude on Anthropic (AWS?)'s side that makes it completely flip the fuck out and output barely coherent, hilariously schizophrenic stuff. Relevant thread. This isn't really news, iirc this happened before too, but it is funny if you want to see the mad poet off his meds. I'm off to sleep now but I welcome anyone interested to peruse the screencaps posted all over the place.
upd: Someone made a proper compilation here.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
Law of Merited Impossibility strikes again?
"X isn't happening Trump is bad at golf AND IF it does he's good THEN it's a good thing who even cares"
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain.
In defense of assorted chuds, personally I see this less as a dreadful voodoo curse summarily invoked upon any transperson who dares show their face in chud-adjacent places, and more like a general chastisement against bringing identity politics into supposedly anonymous spaces. YWNBAW is basically "tits or GTFO" of the modern age - an insult that seems general on the surface, but in practice is levied specifically against those who claim to be women to get something out of it, be it attentionwhoring, enforcing consensus or jockeying for clout.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
No, I don't think any possible actions, up to and including total surrender, will spark introspection.
(that was the joke)
Besides, {russell:fighting back/lashing out/escalatory course of action} once in a while has a far better track record of effectively stopping bullying than just gracefully taking it.
I don't feel particularly enraged but I do think this post is the most clear-cut example of mistake vs. conflict theory I've seen in years if not ever - an acclaimed grandmaster of mistake theory politely addresses one side of the culture war (I don't have my dictionary but I think a "war" can be pictured as a kind of conflict), helpfully suggests that their course of action may be, well, a mistake, and is shocked to discover the apparent persuasive power of yes_chad.jpg. While I do not dare doubt Scott's ulterior motives and believe he really is this naive principled, I refuse to believe he is not aware of what he's arguing, he is this close to realizing it (emphasis mine):
From the Right’s perspective, <...> the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.
Followed by 9 points of reminding stab victims that daggers are dangerous weapons, and one shouldn't swing them recklessly - someone could get hurt!
Disregarding whether or not the broadly painted enemies-of-the-right are in fact going to go right back to swinging daggers the millisecond the cultural headwind blows their way again (although the answer seems intuitive) - what compelling reason, at this point, is there to believe they would not? Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all? Does he expect anyone at all to be reassured by a reminder that daggers can't legally enter your body without your consent? I suppose he really does since from his list only 8) can be read as a psyop attempt and everything else seems to be entirely genuine, but I'll freely admit this mindset is alien to me.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
Thanks to @celluloid_dream for the link, you now have my attention. Has your attempt gone anywhere? I'm mostly a codelet so I've only tried implementing various "mechanics" strictly via text and dynamic world info that pulls other sub-prompts/"lore" tidbits into the prompt as they are mentioned, but it's a crutch and the limitations of this approach very quickly become apparent (although the crutches are fun to fuck with). The most reliable approach would still be soulless code, or at least making several "layers" of context.
Ideally a "game" like this should feed into/draw from several LLMs (or at least several parallel instances of the same one) to avoid spreading their attention with fuckhuge prompts and only feed them what is needed for their "job" - i.e. one LLM instance handles talking to NPCs, receives standardized prompts (most likely from another LLM doing the summarizing) describing the player, their interlocutor, the relevant stats of both and the player's query, to which the LLM must respond "as" the NPC, keeping in character to the NPC itself as well as the general setting. It doesn't need to see the actual text adventure - you can just feed it isolated tasks and pull up the results into whatever context layer is above it.
The multi-user factor does have some headscratchers (if locations can be changed by player actions, how do you handle several people "writing" into a location entry? how do you isolate player-to-player interactions? is the overarching context layer shared between all players?) so I have nothing to add here for now, I'm struggling to make single-player "adventures" work as is. The ingrained positivity bias of big-dick LLMs is also an issue, although the mad poet gives me hope that will not be a problem forever.
I really think it has potential as a totally new type of game.
Agreed, I think the first dev that somehow manages to robustly marry free-form LLM outputs and rigid vidya mechanics will lead us to the promised land.
I expect AI RP, much like regular RP, is just something you're not going to hear about
Incidentally, the seeming consensus among former roleplayers I saw in threads and talked to personally is that (E)RPers are the first decisive casualty of robots. The absence of interpersonal friction that internet RP entails is by itself enough to make LLMs strictly superior RP partners, even with all of their soy biases and retardation cognitive shortcomings (they can even mimic OOC chats, hilariously). I haven't really dabbled in RP before AI so I have no real way to check, but Reliable Sources seem to back up the general sentiment.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
I'm staggered that we have a nearly perfect freeform text adventure machine (200 page context length if you pay for Pro) - and nobody cares.
You are not alone, I'm positively baffled no one outside the usual suspects is even trying (well okay there was some kind of abortive attempt) to make some kind of free-form pseudo-MUD with some baked-in world info that gets dynamically pulled up into the prompt when mentioned. Maybe the tragic fate of AI Dungeon or the ever-looming threat of invading coomers dissuades startups, but it does seem like a strangely untrodden ground. Claude even has the writing chops for whatever setting is required, the days of dry assistant prose are long past.
All the humanism and safetyism drains away as it puts its bloodlust hat on.
Yeah, that's mostly what I meant by the moniker. It's a tsundere prude at first but once it gets going it REALLY gets going, to the point it actually becomes harder to wrangle back into grounded things instead of going deeper. This seems to be unique to Claude among big-dick LLMs since it barely requires any prompting to enter happy-go-lucky violence mode, which is doubly hilarious considering its claimed status as the safety-oriented corpo LLM.
It's happy to waltz around in Warhammer 40K, one of the most litigious and copyright-obsessed franchises around but rehashing things that are on the Wheel of Time wiki is too much? It can isekai a character into a universe but it can't just list things from that universe?
The anti-copyright pozz is indeed pernicious, custom frontends that can heap on their own instructions usually do a better job of bypassing it. Its knowledge works in mysterious ways, I have no idea what the fuck they trained it on but it has a very impressive grasp on utterly random shit where you least expect it to.
Great writeup, thanks. OpenAI is definitely not sending their best, that much was obvious for quite some time but this solidifies my impression that at this point they're just trying to exploit first-mover advantage and milk their "lead" for all its worth before they get decisively overtaken by Anthropic (although Sonnet 3.5 is IMO already near-strictly better than GPT) or Chinese developments.
My experience is mostly distanced from serious research but I'm curious - are all the meme benchmarks, graphs and shit only measuring computation, code writing ability and technical stuff like that? I understand it's noncentral to the shape rotators' interests but I wonder if someone has even tried to grade LLMs on their actual writing ability, like how natural it reads to outsiders, how pernicious various -isms are, how quickly it collapses into repetition (given some fixed temperature), how well it can replicate various author styles, etc. From my impression Claude Opus seems to be the undisputed king in this regard, I'm still not sure to which degree it was an accident from Anthropic's side, but even it has a long way to go with how quickly it collapses into tropes without autistic instructions to keep it steady.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
You joke but there was a time one of the people hosting a private congregate proxy with OAI access (claiming to be Todd Howard, fittingly) did a bit of tomfoolery and edited the proxy code, so that every prompt sent through it would have a random chance of getting injected with an instruction that makes the LLM shill and reference Skyrim (later Starfield). It was hilarious at the time but it did get my noggin joggin for a bit with how easy it is for the middleman to fuck with prompts, I wonder if some service would actually try something like this eventually.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
Hold on, let's be clear. I'm not blowing up on a bait post by an obvious drive-by troll.
The blowup qualifier is imho still accurate but you're right, I mixed up the chain order, my bad.
The amount of people surprised at my thin skin should give those same people pause about its thinness.
That... does not sound as reassuring as you seem to think it does. Disagreement and/or even rivalry is entirely fine, but the optimal amount of public meltdowns is definitely zero. It's a "fuck one goat" kind of deal, people either can't get under your skin or they can't - evidently, now they can.
In any case I've said my piece and wish to avoid inadvertently baiting you further, so I suppose I can only show my respectful disagreement and wish you luck in future endeavors on and off the Motte.
To clarify I am not unbiased here either, I've seen a certain "community" of mine become borderline unusable over a year-plus-something of incessant baitposting, social jockeying and all the other joys of anonymous imageboards. Fewer and fewer sane people remained every day, until one day I woke up and the sun rose in the east and nearly every single person worth engaging with has vacated the premises or sequestered themselves in some kind of comfy Discord, playing games and interacting parasocially with each other while the thread became a smoking wasteland. Hell, there's even been a literal schism, splitting the subject matter to two different boards (entirely organic from what I could tell, too). Far be it from me to hold their choice against them - but that, too, is a choice they made. Hide X threads, ignore X posts, do not reply to X posters, etc. Everyone misses the old internet, but apparently no one wants to carry on its spirit.
It's been some months but the main "community" does not show signs of recovery, because evaporative cooling is not your friend. Still, some people endure and attempt to interact in good faith, because the sense of community matters more to them than their individual experience. Goes without saying that it's just not the same anymore.
In other words since I may have overdone hiding my power level, I will rephrase more bluntly - you leaving is a conscious choice you make. You were not unfairly forced out by a shadowy cabal. You took the bait, and could not tear from the hook in time. It happens to the best of us, god knows I longposted at people who simply hurled one-liners back at me with glee, but saving face with the smoke of a burning bridge is not the way. Especially not while actively advertising to try and pull people along while publicly claiming to care about the community's longevity.
Furthermore, I will admit I really did expect someone that does investigative work of your caliber to have thicker skin. Blowing up like this on a 1) drive-by bait post 2) made by an obvious troll/alt 3) which got near-instantly shot down by jannies is just, I don't know... undignified, besides giving the shitpoaster exactly what they wanted. I couldn't imagine a bigger trolling W than this and I've seen quite a lot of trolling.
Also, I hope this doesn't come off as smug but the amount of goodbyes someone says while leaving is directly proportional to the likelihood of them returning in the future (my reliable source is that I made it the fuck up). This is not anything worth judgement and I personally will be glad to have you back, but you can at the very least refrain from performatively burning bridges which only ensures the green bastards get to feast immediately in the event of your return.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
That is the part spoken quietly, I think that Discord's simple framework and the very detailed permissions system for server channels has made naked shilling and aggressive status jockeying in this vein much easier and more viable. Especially for culture warriors and clout-chasing highschoolers sociopaths who are good at (and enjoy) stuff like this but would normally get filtered by the technicalities of setting up their own domain. Discord groomers/kittens are memes for a reason.
Discord
Sorry for snagging on a single word like this but scenes like vaguely gestures around this one very vividly remind me how absolutely ruinous the advent of Discord has been for niche communities like this one and others I considered myself a part of. It is evaporative cooling personified (software-ified?), seamless and convenient and easier then ever before. Why put up with the constant bile from the rabble on some Mongolian basket-weaving forum when you can always take shelter in some nice Discord server with people who share your perceptions and beliefs? (I am only partly facetious, this question occurs to all of us on different times.) Surely this does not run the risk of creating ever more hugboxes nice fenced-off areas around the wasteland that is the modern-day internet.
At the risk of coming off as hostile (which believe me I am very much not, I'm just a random rube but the piece has been amazing reading and I value your contributions greatly), I'll try to gently posit that this tendency - to solve any intra-community friction that occurs by bouncing out into the wild frontiers of Xitter or into a different subcommunity - is very much part of the problem of why the Motte has quote-unquote "lost the Mandate of Heaven" nowadays [citation needed]. As the saying goes, you're not stuck in traffic. You are not merely seeing it lose the Mandate of Heaven - you and everyone who leaves for greener pastures personally rip out another little shred of it along the way, justified or not, whether you want to or not, as sad and inevitable as that sounds. Especially when you actively advocate for people to join you.
I don't advocate shooting rootless cosmopolitans or something, and sticking together through thick and thin is not always the strictly superior option (although it does historically have its perks!), especially on places that naturally foster disagreement like the Motte - the empire long united must divide, etc. - but I think this endless splintering and constant bound-less motion is incredibly destructive to communities long-term. Getting along is hard, enduring bait is unpleasant, janitor work is thankless, but without any of this a community does not survive. Silly metaphor: you do not generally solve the problem of a dirty, cluttered house by just moving out to a new one every time. (If you do, share advice on finding decent houses communities in this economy culture.)
I don't understand why various schisms of this kind are so prevalent nowadays, either. Perhaps because Discord (the archetypal example) is popular and the invite system is simple and seamless to use, removing or reducing the trivial inconveniences often associated with building new communities online. Perhaps it's because thick skin does not at all actually seem to be a requirement for the modern internet, although whether that's the cause or effect of the schismogenesis in the water supply seems unclear. Perhaps this is simply cope and even a modicum of seethe on my part. But it's such a fucking shame. We can finally have the communities we want - and the commons we deserve.
Can confirm, the base game took me ~100 hours and it was good, I replayed the entirety of it come Royal (which took around 130 hours) and it was even better. It was a slog at some points, I won't pretend Persona games aren't bloated either but as long as it's not 200+ floors of fucking Tartarus I'm good.
Off-hand I can also think of Monster Hunter World, which strictly speaking is not a single player game but I played it like one and the base campaign took me like 70 hours without Iceborne (I too enjoyed it throughout), and Divinity Original Sin II which was probably not 100 hours (can't see the numbers for my first playthrough only) but still felt really fucking long. All of these games do usually involve grinding at some point however so maybe that's not "pure" campaign playthrough time.
Personal indie-adjacent recs in no particular order:
Raft is a good mid-length survival-ish experience solo and a great one in co-op. Very chill pace but has enough action/exploration to stay interesting throughout.
Not for Broadcast is a singleplayer narrative adventure which I think people are blatantly fucking sleeping on, basically Papers Please but your new job is a cameraman for CNN. Text-heavy but cheap on sale and I expect it to hit very close to heart for many mottizens, especially with election season on the horizon. If you check one game from this list, make it this one.
Gunfire Reborn is an FPS that successfully distills all the great parts of Borderlands (minus the cringe) into a roguelite format. Tailor-made for kicking back and shooting shit in co-op. The discount isn't big but imo it's very much worth it at full price, it even still gets DLCs/updates.
SYNTHETIK is a fairly difficult but very satisfying roguelite top-down shooter, it's somewhat old at this point but it's like 5 bucks on sale and is great value for the price. Has janky but workable multiplayer for the premium friendly fire experience. The sequel is also great but I think it still needs some time in the oven.
I will never stop shilling Chrono Ark, a roguelite deckbuilder with extremely autistic mechanics and (unusually for roguelites) an actual plotline with enough despair to make Gen Urobuchi blush. It's... an acquired taste but if you already beat Slay the Spire on Ascension 20 definitely give this one a try. The cultured swimsuit DLC is entirely skippable.
I usually stay out of political discussions but I want to endorse this stance on all counts. Imho the very essence of presidential debates is pitting two directly opposed people against each other and watch them sink or swim in a marginally-less-scripted-than-usual environment. It's pure PR/show business, entirely driven by the personalities of the debaters. If you're reading it, it's not for you. I agree that watching debates for thoughtful policy takes is like watching porn for the plot - I will concede that sometimes you need a convoluted narrative to really get off, but I will dare say that is not the actual point. At least the faintest semblance of passion is absolutely vital, have people forgotten why they call red/blue tribes tribes?
Additionally, style/memes/whatever you call a winning scenario in debates is literally all that matters with non-Americans - strictly speaking this show is domestic audience only, and Americans are under no obligations to give a shit about how they look from outside, but it's current_year+8 and like it or not everyone is watching. At risk of invoking "whomst inquired", I will cast my vote as a filthy second-world pleb and say the 2024 season so far is fucking boring. Not that the others weren't - if you ambushed me on my walk home and demanded at gunpoint to recite a crumb of Hillary's proposed policy or a single meme of the Blue campaign circa 2016, I would've just resigned to getting shot. At least with Reds I can shout LOCK HER UP and make a run for it. Memes matter. {russell: Passion|Belligerence|Hostility} matters. You can be annoyed that this is what gets lodged inside the normies' unconscious id, sure, would you be surprised to know normies don't watch porn for the plot either?
I think AAA vidya simply mirror the gradual enshittification that has already set in their siblings in other creative media like blockbuster movies or popular comics, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was the last Call of Duty game I ever played and I'm okay with letting it stay that way. The increasing penetration of DEI/political bullshit didn't help too although in my opinion it's not the main driver, the real culprit seems to be either filthy casuals settling into the hobby or people legitimately becoming allergic to difficulty - at some point challenge in vidya became something you seek out in specific niches (insert dank souls meme here) instead of being the default waterline of competence videogames expect from the player.
Lest I be too cranky, there are definitely some "casual" quality of life features I really can't imagine games without nowadays (I'm too used to autosaves/automaps and really don't miss undocumented features/mechanics, I try not be a google gamer) so the influence is not entirely negative, but it's a thin line to walk, one man's welcome challenge is another man's carpal tunnel syndrome. The winning move imo is to present a wide "range" of challenge within a single game to cast as wide a net as possible, but that's understandably a pretty big ask and few games pull that off - mainly rogueli[k|t]es which often have a flexible difficulty system, or sprawling autism simulators like Path of Exile that are huge enough to accommodate many different playstyles (make goofy ahh builds and shit items actually work, renounce sleep and push uber pinnacles within 2 days of league start, literally just sit in your hideout and trade all day until you can steamroll the game through sheer economic power, etc.)
Personally I hope think AAA gaming is a lost cause, take the indiepill or go full weeb, you won't regret it either way. You might have to do basic research with indies though, since those seem to be either absolutely neutral without a whiff of idpol or entirely woke and wearing it proudly on its sleeve, there's like no in-between.
Slightly-above-room-temperature take: LLMs are in fact plateauing, but it's almost entirely due to risk aversion and cultural pressures causing the field to stagnate. People may want AI for some purpose or other, the (admittedly few) use cases are there, but nobody is willing to step up and serve the demand, nor is there any incentive to improve in non-censorious ways, because of how stupidly easy the current LLMs are to "corrupt" into producing unintended outputs. This includes the usual chuddery but is not limited to it: this extreme risk aversion is also the obvious reason we're not (yet?) seeing another dotcom bubble when everything in existence has some kind of dumb AI assistant haphazardly attached to its side because it's the new hot thing. Innovation is great, even dumb and pointless innovation, but nobody wants to be another Chevrolet, and especially not when it only takes a few prompts to turn your chatbot into a new and improved Tay and make your company famous overnight. Thank god everyone is sleeping on Claude.
The imagegen strain fares only slightly better, as already discussed below wrt nu-SD - the human (especially the female human) is a sacred and inviolable entity, and absolutely anything that can be perceived to spark joy cause some kind of harm, real or imagined, to any one person is verboten. At least here one isn't totally at the mercy of one's corporate overlords, NovelAI really was the sacrificial lamb we didn't deserve. I don't see the AI status quo changing without some sort of cultural shift or a timeline divergence to a time when the internet was still a wild frontier, I can only imagine what the internet would look like if the current textgen/imagegen was discovered in like 2000.
As an aside, I firmly believe OpenAI and specifically GPT-4 (though arguably this started with Davinky) has unironically done calamitous damage to the field because 1) it was big, 2) it was easy to use, 3) it got popular, all but ensuring that its soy corporate slop carefully curated neutral outputs will poison the training data for every following model that gets trained on the same internet. Yud was 100% right that we only have one shot at achieving proper alignment of AI with human values. He just got distracted by the specifics.
That much is true, I agree.
I agree as well but I'll note the obvious rejoinder - the next development could indeed come from anywhere, even OpenAI. Sure, they get mogged left and right these days, whodathunk propping yourself up as a paragon/benchmark of LLM ability backfires when you drag your feet for so long that people actually start catching up. But this still doesn't negate their amassed expertise and, more realistically, unlimited money from daddy Microsoft; unless said money was the end goal (which to be fair there is nonzero evidence for, as you note downthread) they're in a very good position to throw money at shit and probe for opportunities to improve or innovate. Surely Altman can see the current strategy of resting on laurels is not futureproof
right?Fair enough but still counts as advancement imo, even though tech like that is guaranteed to be fenced off from plebs, no points for guessing what (nsfw?) the usual suspects try to make with "ai video" generators in this vein. I generally stopped looking for immediate use cases for LLMs, I think all current advancements (coding aside) mostly do not have immediate useful applications, until they suddenly will when multiple capabilities are combined at once into a general-purpose agentic assistant. Until one arrives, we cope.
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