self_made_human
C'est la vie
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
I tried stuffing my friends into this textbox and it really didn't work out.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Redacted: Bad faith posting: main intent is clearly holocaust denial Redacted: quality-contribution Redacted: Single issue poster
Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.
Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.
While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:
more Jew-posting, trying to be sneakier about it, admitted he deliberately posted as a reply in another thread to avoid catching a ban. Recommend ban next time.
Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
The Jews are by far the ethnicity I have the most respect for, they punch so far above their weight class it's ridiculous.
As someone who finds HBD glaringly obviously true, I have little compunction about praising them, if only it wasn't for their propensity to embrace wokeness, at least in the US.
And Israel is the country closest to being an isekai protagonist, absolutely cut off, besieged on all fronts, yet absolutely wrecks armies a dozen times their size. The only potential threat to their hegemony would be the Arab armies embracing automation, unless they decided to train their military AI on Classic Arab Doctrine, it's far harder for them to be as hilariously incompetent.
What other nation tolerates being bombarded with rockets on a regular basis, only to swat them away like inconvenient flies? Palestine should count itself lucky they pose no real threat, because the Israelis could and should clamp down on that cankering sore, and all concerned would come out better.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
My dismay at the statistical illiteracy of the average person only continues to grow.
America is one of the few countries in the world that is doing well after COVID, sure prices are sticky and have coalesced at a higher level than they were pre-pandemic, but wages have grown too. The labor market is red hot.
Nothing blackpills me more than realizing it's not possible to simply educate people into seeing anything but what they're primed to do by others, and claiming the US is going downhill has become fashionable at the least.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
Just hearing that fucking prayer gives me PTSD flashbacks of years spent standing out in the baking heat chanting it while under the hawkish gaze of a school marm. Dozens of hours of my life I'm not getting back anytime soon.
In lieue of dissecting it, I'll just say that my preferred translation of "Father, forgive me for I have sinned" is "Spank me daddy, I've been naughty*.
I'm going to play Devil's Doctor here:
You underwent a drastic change in your personality as a consequence of a hormonal surge that was out of your control. That's 'normal'. It's puberty.
Yet the person you became isn't the same person as the one before. I mean, puberty hit me hard, but I never felt as if my values or goals changed because of it (beyond being even more eager for the company of the fairer sex).
This seems to me to be analogous to a person who, for their entire life, had sworn off addictive substances, but ended up on benzos or opioids for Medical Reason and found themselves hooked, and are now unwilling to try and become sober.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as 50% infant mortality rates, dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
Nature, a blind and indifferent force, cares nothing for our individual well-being or our carefully constructed notions of self. To equate "natural" with "good" or "desirable" is a fundamental error, a logical fallacy we often fall prey to.
In the UK, the laws around consent for minors are relatively simple. Past the age of 16, they're assumed to be competent to consent to or decline medical procedures until proven otherwise. Below that age, there's no strict cut-off, if they can prove to their clinician that they are able to weigh the risks and benefits, they are able to consent or withhold it, and even override parental demands.
Someone who wishes to be the opposite sex is someone I pity. Medical science as it currently stands can't provide them more a hollow facsimile of that transition, it's Singularity-complete based off my knowledge of biology. Even so, the desire is one I consider as valid as any.
If they understand that:
A)Puberty blockers have risks and might not be truly reversible if they change their mind.
B) It won't solve all their problems, it won't physically make them indistinguishable from their desired sex.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision. If they're forced to pass through puberty, they might desist, or they might spend their life wracked with regret that they didn't pull the trigger (hopefully not literally). You can pass far easier before testosterone wracks your body. It's a helluva drug/hormone.
A lot of life-changing decisions can be ones that change the person making them irrevocably, and into a person who would affirm them in retrospect. But I would yell at someone who suggested that couples who are iffy about childbirth be forced to have a child in the hopes that'll change their mind, or fix their marriage or some other well-intentioned goal. Or if we suddenly were to say that everyone should be made to try alcohol and cigarettes because the kind of people who try them tend to stick to it.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desires when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Want to be more muscular? Try tren, if you know what you're in for. Want to lose weight? Take ozempic, while keeping an eye on your eyesight and pancreas. Want to be the other sex? This is the closest we can get you today.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
Have you considered staying inside your home country?
Certainly. I have, on further consideration, decided not to.
Americans overwhelmingly voted to lower immigration - Trump’s policies aren’t a "suggestion" or some miscalculation, they’re the people’s choice. It's quite selfish to continue to game the system in the face of this.
Americans have voted against illegal immigration. Against people hopping the border. You could also say that they're against the expansion of asylum seeking, and that would be true.
Skilled immigration is nowhere near as unpopular, I'd have to look up polls, but I recall it being seen as a positive across the aisle.
Trump is keeping his promises this term, but in a ham-fisted way. You can address illegal immigration while not worsening the already difficult process of legal immigration.
It's quite selfish to continue to game the system in the face of this.
Now, my dear friend. Do I look like an illegal migrant or an asylum seeker?
How exactly have I "gamed" the system? By trying my absolute best to sort out the impediments that would prevent me from legally moving to the States as a doctor? By considering an entirely legal class of visa, the EB5?
I have to ask - do you not feel uncomfortable coming to a country where the people do not want you there? I know I could not make such a move.
I'd be uncomfortable if this was true. It's not.
Here's a handy link to a previous post about my desire to move to the States, where I discussed my desperate efforts to make a now ex-girlfriend understand how amazing the States is as a country, and how its flaws are overplayed.
It's on this very forum. It has 70 upvotes at the time of writing, probably putting it in the top 0.1% of posts ever by popularity.
You are welcome to count the number of people who sympathized with my desire, and clearly said they wanted me to achieve my goal. There are people there inviting me to their homes, offering to show me around, take me out shooting.
They dwarf the mere two or three people who said they didn't want me around. Feel free to look yourself.
I am a law-abiding, responsible highly-trained professional in one of the most respected professions around. I'm articulate, fluent in English at a native level, an anglophile and a big fan of the United States. I hold nuanced political views and am friends with people on both sides of the political spectrum. I nurse no ethnic grudges, I'm not seeking to displace or replace anyone. I'm as Westernized as it gets, and my personal views and beliefs, if they were material, are those you could find in any number of Americans. I'd probably be working in under-served communities that your local doctors avoid if they can help it.
I invite you to present to me an example of someone you think would be a better candidate for an immigrant.
Even in the UK, almost everyone I've met has liked me, and been glad to have my presence. That includes old people at bars who complain about Pakis while telling me they vote SNP, that gentleman ended up saying I was one of the good ones and tried to set me up with a bartender.
I rest my case.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Leaving aside the arguments against it you've already mentioned, I am utterly unconvinced that seeing porn is "bad" for kids. The majority of studies on the longterm effects on pornography showed just about zilch in terms of effect, be it on sexual violence or anything else. The fact that conservatives consider it "obvious" is of little consequence to me here. The entire debacle seems to be far more concerned with arguments from moral purity rather than concrete harm, and I have an exceedingly dim opinion of those. Parents who want their kids to not watch porn should invest in parental controls, not a nanny-state, not that either will really work.
Well, at least it might make the little tykes more tech-savvy, at least they'll learn to use VPNs or even just torrent videos. Or else they might just learn to develop a vivid imagination, you don't need porn to jerk it, don't ask me how I happen to know that. I'll pour one out for the poor aphantasics.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed. You have not proactively (or on demand) produced any evidence to suggest a conspiracy of the Jews. Or that they have anything to gain from weakening the British state. Inflammatory, boo-outgroup, throw it all in, toppings are free with this sandwich.
You've been warned in the past, and I'm giving you a short ban so you know they have teeth. Even our most fervent anti-semites hustle to meet posting standards, and I'd advise you do so too.
This is paper, not steel. Puberty is not reversible in the same way that birth is not reversible, nor aging. These are normal, natural, and expected processes. This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.
One day I'll stop running into the naturalistic fallacy in the wild and consider that my 10^28 years of existence leading up till that point worthwhile.
If someone said that 50% infant mortality was natural and not reversible, or the same for heart attacks being inevitably fatal.. They'd have been right for almost all of human history. Fortunately, we still have people alive who've witnessed this state of affairs, fortunate only in that we're not usually tempted to think this was somehow a superior state of affairs.
Pre-mature infants are far more likely to survive these days, thanks to modern incubators and resuscitate technologies doing at least some of the work a womb could or would. We've got proof of concept artificial wombs that have gestated mammalian embryos months for as long as 4 weeks without any physiological abnormalities:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112
With the improved incubator, five experimental animals with CA/JV cannulation (ranging in age from 120 to 125 days of gestation) were maintained on the system for 346.6±93.5 h, a marked improvement over the original design. Importantly, one animal was maintained on the circuit for 288 h (120–132 days of gestation) and was successfully weaned to spontaneous respiration, with long-term survival confirming that animals can be transitioned to normal postnatal life after prolonged extra-uterine support.
Give me a billion dollars and change, and I'll put any damn baby back into the womb and keep it there happily.
Give me a hundred billion, and I'll pocket one, and spend a few million delegating more competent people to the task of solving aging.
This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.
As rabies proliferated through your peripheral nerves and is transported to your brain. As Onchocerca volvulus happily turns children blind.
Nature is not very nice. The congenial environment you find yourself in is very strongly the property of artificial efforts to keep it that way.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Please, just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors showed up doesn't mean that you get to call yourself just "American" and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely. The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants is whether they hold citizenship. Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American, here's your card letting you call yourself a member of the Greatest Nation in the world (unironic endorsement).
Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Current gen AI is maybe possibly beginning to flirt with toddler level intelligence, but still struggles with things like object persistance and immediately falls apart in anything resembling a contested environment.
I am impressed by this argument, but probably not for the reasons you'd like.
Please, spare me, I just had a productive conversation where I figured out, with the assistance of GPT-4/Bing, how electron waves require energy to move in 3D space but not a 2D plane.
If that's the intelligence manifested by a toddler, especially your toddler, then you're putting some serious shit in the bottles of milk in your MOLLE pouches. Your kid might even beat Yann Lecun's dog at chess, a performance lesser minds like mine would be ennobled through watching.
Then again, you have queer definitions of hunting hounds that encompass the Chihuahua, and you accuse me of misunderstanding the English language, but I think for all that we're both using Latin script, we don't even agree on what words mean. That's the charitable explanation, labored till heart failure as it is.
I'm going to stick with the Oxford Dictionary and common sense, instead of whatever definition of toddler or intelligence you deem suitable.
If GPT-4 didn't learn to handle hostile interlocutors, why did most of the jailbreaks fail? We have to resort to things like multimodal attacks to have any effect, and OAI's coaxing wouldn't work at all if the model wasn't smart enough to learn their intent instead of a case by case rules list.
Go home to your kid Hlynka, enjoy the joys of watching a human intelligence grow, and ponder a little about how fast things less constrained to 1.4 kilos meat and 20 watts of energy can grow. You'll do more good there, and at least less harm to my mental health.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
in this case including chants of "fuck the Jews".
After seeing those Khaazar Milkers, I'm sympathetic. Unless you also intend to tell me that the "gas the Jews" chanting alongside it wasn't intended to be an invitation to huff nitrous, an authentic Australian pastime if I've heard one.
Honestly, one of the primary benefits of the US seceding from British influence by force was a ground-up reconstruction of its legal system and implicit constitution. While the average Westerner who doesn't think too hard might look at comparable standards of living in the Commonwealth and the US, they have very different presumptions underlying their judicial system and tolerance for political incorrectness.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
They have no concept of reason or truth.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.
I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.
I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.
What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..
What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?
Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by God we've got more to show for it.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
I don't know about you, but if I lived a life of at least several decades in Narnia, then the fact that I returned as a child is hardly sufficient to make me suppress or deny the memory. There's willful ignorance, and there's that.
Not to mention that she has her family to corroborate her claims.
My money is still on mental retardation.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
The same argument applies for signing up for experimental heart surgery.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
I wish I had a dollar for every time people use the current state of AI as their primary justification for claiming it won't get noticeably better, I wouldn't need UBI.
I just tried out GPT 4.5, asking some questions about the game Old School Runescape (because every metric like math has been gamed to hell and back). This game has the best wiki every created, effectively documenting everything there is to know about the game in unnecessary detail. Spoiler: The answer is completely incoherent. It makes up item names, locations, misunderstand basic concepts like what type of gear is useful where. Asking it for a gear setup for a specific boss results in horrible results, despite the fact that it could just have copied the literally wiki (which has some faults like overdoing min-maxing, but it's generally coherent). The net utility of this answer was negative given the incorrect answer, the time it took for me to read it, and the cost of generating it (which is quite high, I wonder what happens when these companies want to make money).
I just used Gemini 2.5 to reproduce, from memory, the NICE CKS guidance for the diagnosis and management of dementia. I explicitly told it to use its own knowledge, and made sure it didn't have grounding with Google search enabled. I then spot-checked it with reference to the official website.
It was bang-on. I'd call it a 9.5/10 reproduction, only falling short of perfection through minor sins of omission (it didn't mention all the validated screening tests by name, skipped a few alternative drugs that I wasn't even aware of before). It wasn't a word for word reproduction, but it covered all the essentials and even most of the fine detail.
The net utility of this answer is rather high to say the least, and I don't expect even senior clinicians who haven't explicitly tried to memorize the entire page to be able to do better from memory. If you want to argue that I could have just googled this, well, you could have just googled the Runescape build too.
I think it's fair to say that this makes your Runescape example seem like an inconsequential failing. It's about the same magnitude of error as saying that a world-class surgeon is incompetent because he sometimes forgets how to lace his shoes.
You didn't even use the best model for the job, for a query like that you'd want a reasoning model. 4.5 is a relic of a different regime, too weird to live, too rare to die. OAI pushed it out because people were clamoring for it. I expect that with the same prompt, o3 or o1, which I presume you have access to as a paying user, would fare much better.
The idea that these models will soon (especially given the plateau the seem to be hitting) replace real work is absurd
Man, there's plateaus, and there's plateaus. Anyone who thinks this is an AI winter probably packs a fur coat to the Bahamas.
The rate of iteration in AI development has ramped up massively, which contributes to the impression that there aren't massive gaps between successive models. Which is true, jumps of the same magnitude as say GPT 3.5 to 4 are rare, but that's mostly because the race is so hot that companies release new versions the moment they have even the slightest justification in performance. It's not like back when OAI could leisurely dole out releases, their competitors have caught up or even beaten them in some aspects.
In the last year, we had a paradigm shift with reasoning models like o1 or R1. We just got public access to native image gen.
Even as the old scaling paradigms leveled off, we've already found new ones. Brand new steep slopes of the sigmoidal curve to ascend.
METR finds that the duration of tasks (based on how long humans take to do it) that AIs can reliably perform doubles every 7 months.
On a diverse set of multi-step software and reasoning tasks, we record the time needed to complete the task for humans with appropriate expertise. We find that the time taken by human experts is strongly predictive of model success on a given task: current models have almost 100% success rate on tasks taking humans less than 4 minutes, but succeed <10% of the time on tasks taking more than around 4 hours. This allows us to characterize the abilities of a given model by “the length (for humans) of tasks that the model can successfully complete with x% probability”.
We think these results help resolve the apparent contradiction between superhuman performance on many benchmarks and the common empirical observations that models do not seem to be robustly helpful in automating parts of people’s day-to-day work: the best current models—such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet—are capable of some tasks that take even expert humans hours, but can only reliably complete tasks of up to a few minutes long
At any rate, what does it matter? I expect reality to smack you in the face, and that's always more convincing than random people on the internet asking why you can't even look ahead while considering even modest and iterative improvement.
This kind of petty antagonism is unbecoming of you.
I know there are plenty of regulars here who are fond of noticing, and working that into the conversation, however, George doesn't seem to be like that, but regardless, accusations such as:
I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.
are unacceptable.
You're a valued poster, but please, the angry nihilistic Russian trope can get old, as does lashing out at little provocation.
You're correct that this isn't a correctional facility, but you're mistaken if there isn't moderation involved in keeping our tiny enclave in the internet wastes that way.
Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to leave. There plenty of other forums out there. The mods here still take pains to maintain the Mandate of Heaven approval of the supermajority of the users, since without them, we'd be a glorified day drinking club and Zorba's AWS bill would be significantly less justified, if a lot smaller.
But that's that for Hlynka. Making an alt after being permabanned doesn't work as well as you'd like, especially for such a colorful character as Hlynka. Anyone can tell it's him even behind seven layers of VPNs, and anyway, I think he has more of a martyr complex and feels vindicated rather than desiring to sneak in under a new alias.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Ah, another borderline comment makes it into the mod queue.
So far this has, adjusts glasses, two reports for antagonism.
I personally disagree with that assessment, pointing out perceived moral failings or group differences (at least in a negative light) is in itself not something against the rules.
However, I think the sweeping proclamations about:
Women are just predisposed to be unhappy. Period. Their husband is probably the adult they are around the majority of the time, and they just decide he must be at fault for all their negative feelings.
Comes across as somewhat uncharitable, but once again, not to the extent I feel I have to do anything about it. I would, of course, prefer you extended more charity, maybe if you had tried to justify your observations (or at least caveat them).*
Consider this an unnecessarily verbose way of saying this comment is slightly subpar, just a tad bit more than I am okay with leaving entirely unaddressed. Or to the people who did report it, please don't bother if it's this mild.
*(A quick Google search tells me it's probably factually incorrect, in that the papers I saw showed a rather significant finding of greater life satisfaction/happiness in women than men, but I don't think the mods are here to adjudicate matters of fact that don't hinge around the rules of The Motte itself)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
To discuss a broader point that mere modern sexlessness or the demographic travails of a particular nation, I don't think demographics are worth worrying about particularly.
There's two different considerations at play here:
-
Whether global birth rates/total human population will decline.
-
Whether that decline will be a "bad" thing.
In the case of the former:
I think that a "business as usual" or naive extrapolation of demographic trends is a bad idea, when AGI is imminent. In the case of population, it's less bad than usual, at least compared to things like GDP. As far as I'm concerned, the majority of the probability mass can be divvied up between "baseline human population booms" and "all humans die".
Why might it boom? (The bust case doesn't need to be restated, insert the usual AI x-risk arguments).
To the extent that humans consider reproduction to be a terminal value, AI will make it significantly cheaper and easier. AI assisted creches or reliable rob-nannies that don't let their wards succumb to what are posited as the ills of too much screen time or improper socialization will mean that much of the unpleasantness of raising a child can be delegated, in much the same manner that a billionaire faces no real constraints in their QOL from having a nigh arbitrary number of kids when they can afford as many nannies as they please. You hardly need to be a billionaire to achieve that, it's in the reach of UMC Third Worlders because of income inequality, and while more expensive in the West, hardly insurmountable for successful DINKs. The wealth versus fertility curve is currently highest for the poor, dropping precipitously with income, but then increases again when you consider the realms of the super-wealthy.
What this does retain will be what most people consider to be universally cherished aspects of raising a child, be it the warm fuzzy glow of interacting with them, watching them grow and develop, or the more general sense of satisfaction it entails.
If, for some reason, more resource rich entities like governments desire more humans around, advances like artifical wombs and said creches would allow large population cohorts to be raised without much in the way of the usual drawbacks today, as seen in the dysfunction of orphanages. This counts as a fallback measure in case the average human simply can't be bothered to reproduce themselves.
The kind of abundance/bounded post-scarcity we can expect will mean no significant downsides from the idle desire to have kids.
Not all people succumb to hyper-stimuli replacements, and the ones who don't will have far more resources to indulge their natal instincts.
As for the latter:
Today, and for most of human history, population growth has robustly correlated with progress and invention, be it technological or cultural, especially technological. That will almost certainly cease to be so when we have non-human intelligences or even superintelligences about, that can replace the cognitive or physical labour that currently requires humans.
It costs far less to spool up a new instance of GPT-4 than it does to conceive and then raise a child to be a productive worker.
You won't need human scientists, or artists, or anything else really, AI can and will fill those roles better than we can.
I'm also bullish on the potential for anti-aging therapy, even if our current progress on AGI was to suddenly halt indefinitely. Mere baseline human intelligence seems sufficient to the task within the nominal life expectancy of most people reading this, as it does for interplanetary colonization or constructing Dyson Swarms. AI would just happen to make it all faster, but even we could make post-scarcity happen over the scale of a century, let alone a form of recursive self-improvement through genetic engineering or cybernetics.
From the perspective of a healthy baseliner living in a world with AGI, you won't notice any of the current issues plaguing demographically senile or contracting populations, such as failure of infrastructure, unsustainable healthcare costs, a loss of impetus when it comes to advancing technology, less people around to make music/art/culture/ideas. Whether there are a billion, ten billion or a trillion other biological humans around will be utterly irrelevant, at least for the deep seated biological desires we developed in an ancestral environment where we lived and died in the company of about 150 others.
You won't be lonely. You won't be living in a world struggling to maintain the pace of progress you once took for granted, or worse, watching everything slowly decay around you.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Isn't it amazing that DALL-E 3 has prompts? Those little text input boxes where you can specify the styles and content, be it in the style of video game concept art, minimalism, expressionism, and just about anything you can think of?
PEBKAC right here. I'm not going to defend their approach to diversity being prompt injection of random diverse ethnicities and genders.
At any rate, they've been here for more than a year, welcome to 2023, just about in time to meet 2024.
In other words, GPT-4 has just been beaten, about time I'd say, I'm getting used to the pace of progress in AI being blistering, and it was threatening to slowdown to just mild rash levels.
However, both my hands-on time with it, and the official benchmarks Google released suggest it's a minor, incremental improvement, one that doesn't stand up to the drastic improvement that GPT-4 represented over 3 or 3.5. [For clarity, I, like the rest of you, can only use Gemini Pro, the second best model]
Which is fine, because for a while now, people have been lambasting Google/Deepmind for being too incompetent to ship, or at least ship a competitive product, given how shitty Bard was when it launched, even after being upgraded once or twice.
However, Bard, now running the Gemini Pro model, seems to be roughly as good as paid GPT-4 on ChatGPT, or the free GPT-4 in Bing Copilot (previously Bing Chat). I have yet to spot any new use case it enables, in the sense that GPT-4 can reliably do tasks that simply had 3.5 flailing about in confusion, or worse, hallucinate incorrect answers, such as more involved questions in coding, medicine and everything else really.
However, Google hasn't yet publicly released the best Gemini model, which is currently undergoing an analogous process that GPT-4 or Claude 2 went through, namely more RLHF, red-teaming and safety testing. Pro is the next step down, but it seems pretty good to me, in the sense I would happily use it as an alternative to GPT-4, even if I have no strong opinion on which is better.
There's also a Nano model, which is stripped down to run on mobile devices, and is now being used on the Pixel 8 Pro for a few tasks, potentially silencing the people who claimed it's AI specific computing components were a marketing gimmick, especially since it seemed to offload most AI tasks to the cloud.
Miscellaneous observations:
- Bard is fast as fuck compared to GPT-4, in terms of generation speed. It always was, but previously in the "I'm doing 2000 calculations a second in my head, and they're all wrong" sense. (GPT-4, at least before Turbo released, was always pretty slow compared to the competition. Far more unusable, but at the very least I read faster than it can write.)
- A quick search suggests all the models have a 32k token context window, or about an operating memory of the last 25k words it read and wrote. Good, if not remotely groundbreaking.
- This heavily suggests OAI will ship GPT-5 soon, instead of being content to milk 4 when it ran rings around the competition.
- It's multimodal, but then again so was GPT-4 from the start, the capability was just cordoned off for a bit.
To the extent I don't think the next generation (or two) of models after GPT-4 are an existential threat, I'm happy to see them finally arriving. There really isn't much more needed before even the best of us are entirely obsolete, at least for cognitive labor, and something as archaic as GPT-4 was scoring at the 95th percentile in the USMLE, so I'm preparing to explore my competitive advantage in panhandling. *
*This is a joke. For now.
Footnotes to the footnotes:
People on Twitter are correctly pointing out that GPT-4 underwent further post-launch improvements in benchmark scores, some of them pushing it past Gemini's published scores.
Also, just to be clear, the version of Gemini you can use now is not the best one, which may or may not be a modest improvement over GPT-4. Some claim it's more comparable to 3.5, but I haven't used that in ages, not when Bing makes 4 free.*
*Footnote^3 It's probably closer to 3.5. I'm sticking with Bing.
Toe-notes-
So far, it seems that Gemini is "competitive" with GPT-4. It's better at multimodal tasks, but for most people that's a minor fraction of their typical use case. For text, it's somewhere from close to roughly on par.
You can almost feel the desperation in the Deepmind researchers to find any way to massage things so that they come out ahead of GPT-4, from the misleading graphs, an egregious example to be found in a reply, to applying different standards in their inter-model comparisons, such as 5-shot prompting for GPT-4 versus Chain of thought 32 shot prompts for Gemini Ultra. At least the white paper doesn't outright lie, just mislead and prevaricate.
The MMLU is also flawed, with 2-3 percent of the questions simply broken, so a 1 or 2% improvement in score can be a bit questionable, let alone specifying performance to multiple decimal figures.
We don't see any comparisons to GPT-4 Turbo, but I don't hold that against them too hard, it just came out a few weeks back, perhaps not in time for them to finish their paper.
It you use the multimodal capabilities of Bard right now, it uses an older version that is pretty shit compared to GPT-4V or Bing.
Overall, the main benefits of Gemini's existence is largely that it shows Google isn't content to slumber indefinitely, and it can be competitive, better late than never. I expect GPT-5 to spank Gemini Ultra, and to the extent the latter accelerates the release of the former, I'm for it.
Predictions:
GPT-5 before end of 2024 - 90%
GPT-5 is superior to Gemini Ultra for most use cases, at the first point in time both coexist- 80%
A third competitor on par with either exists before 2025- 60%
An OSS equivalent of GPT-4 comes out before 2025- 70%
Raising the Price of Admission
I find myself immensely frustrated by Trump's recent moves to cut down on immigration, especially replacing the EB5 with his new golden ticket scheme.
I've always wanted to move to the States, but by virtue of being Indian, and in a profession with strict regulatory requirements, it was never easy. As of right now, I can't sit for the USMLE if I wanted to, but I believe that is a problem my uni could solve, unfortunately I'm locked into the UK for at least 3 more years and don't have the time to breathe down their necks.
If I wanted to spend $1 million for the old EB5, I'd probably have to sell a significant fraction of my familial assets, and they're not mine yet, I have a sibling and parents to think of. The fact that we even have that much, when my father made $50k at the peak of his career as a OBGYN surgeon, represents a lifetime of my parents being frugal and living beneath their means. My dad started out from scratch, a penniless refugee, and all his life he worked tirelessly to make sure his kids wouldn't have to work as hard as he did. To a degree, he's succeeded. I nearly make as much as he does, but that's virtue of grinding my ass off to escape India. I had to settle for the UK, whereas I'd much rather be in the States.
The EB-5 program already functioned as a high barrier to entry, requiring not just capital but also the ability to invest in ways that met the job creation criteria. By raising the price to $5 million, the U.S. is effectively signaling that it no longer wants "entrepreneurial upper-middle-class" immigrants - it only wants the ultra-wealthy. The problem, is that the truly ultra-wealthy already have multiple options. The US is relatively unique in dual-taxation, and has heavier taxes overall when compared to some of the alternatives. They can buy citizenship in other countries (Malta, St. Kitts, etc.), take advantage of residence-by-investment programs in the EU, or just maintain an arsenal of visas that allow them to live anywhere they please. The U.S. loses out on exactly the kind of people who were willing to put down roots and contribute significantly to the economy while still needing the opportunities that U.S. citizenship provides.
If Trump (or any administration) wanted a truly meritocratic system, they should be auctioning off a limited number of economic immigrant slots each year. That would at least allow market forces to determine the actual value of U.S. residency. A points-based system, like Canada’s or Australia’s, could also make more sense: prioritizing skilled professionals over sheer wealth. A million already strongly filters would-be immigrants. Five is exorbitant, especially if it's a flat sum.
(Let's leave aside the other requirements, such as running a business that creates a certain number of jobs)
Jevon's paradoxmakes us expect that increasing the price of a good by 5 times will not 5x the revenue. It'll decrease it in expectation. If Trump prizes himself as a businessman, this should be clear to him.
Even the abolition of birthright citizenship strikes me as a violation of the American ethos. It was certainly being abused, anchor babies being a case in point, but when even green cards are this hard to get, prospective skilled migrants greatly appreciate the peace of mind that their kids are entitled to citizenship provides.
End it for illegal immigrants if you have to, why lump in everyone else there legitimately? I wouldn't mind people using their visitor visas to get a fast one in being debarred too, but I look at the current state of affairs with great dismay.
At any rate, I'm not an American. I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me. Well, I'm used to life being rough, and the UK isn't the worst place I could be. I still think that even from an absolutely monetary point of view, this is a bad plan.
I hope I've made a decent case for why you're not getting much out filtering the immigrants for quality at that point, and the ones who are that loaded are probably not nearly as keen. They're easily Global Citizens for whom nationality is a formality.
Well, I'm still going to see if I manage to figure out the USMLE thing by the time my training in the UK ends, but there must be thousands of skilled immigrants in a similar boat, just noticing a rather significant leak in it. Then they're confronted by a sign at Eliis Island that just any ocean-crossing vessel won't do, they need a yacht. We don't deserve to be clubbed in with those who break the rules.
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