This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I looked at the clip where he says this, he says there's no more reason to think ASI is close than there was 15 years ago. He says people are fooled by the interface changing from computer-friendly to human friendly, our brains think it's qualitatively different.
The man is fundamentally unserious. I don't care what papers he's written or what expertise he has. It doesn't matter if Major-General Augustus Smythe fought against the whirling dervishes of Sudan with distinction, if he thinks a bayonet charge is going to beat a machinegun, he's a fool. Augustus Smythe doesn't really think this, it's more that he looks down upon all this low-class and crass engineering taking the limelight from his glorious, romantic cavalry regiments. He's not going to actually charge a machine-gun nest with his saber, he's not really confident in what he's saying. Jeremy Howard is no different, he admits the progress on benchmarks and the progress of recent years albeit in an understated way. What benchmarks of AI coding were there 15 years I wonder? He doesn't truly believe the nonsense he's saying, he wants to express a sober, mature, classy, balanced position like Yann LeCun and the others. It's a reaction to style and taste rather than anything substantial. Gary Marcus does the same thing and is infamously wrong in so many of his predictions.
It's perfectly understandable to oppose the nerdy, icky AI doomers or eager non-technical singularitarians or the slick, snake-oil-seeming marketers. It's very seductive to be 'the adult in the room'. But you can't let that get the better of you and mislead people on a very serious matter.
There is a qualitative difference, a stark and obvious qualitative difference to asking a question and getting an immediate answer from an AI, not just in a single domain but in so many domains, at considerable depth where the 'question' might be laying out the setting for a fictional universe and the 'answer' could be a thousand words of a story. It is obvious that huge strides towards superintelligence have been made since 2010. Coding, vision, reasoning, plotting, extended pursuit of abstract tasks... ASI is much, much closer than in 2010, where all there was was IBM Watson and Siri.
No they haven't. The shift to reasoning models happened 6-9 months ago. The new R1 came out a matter of days ago. It's super cheap and a massive leap up in writing, I haven't even tried it on code since Claude is so good. 'Progress is slowing' is ironically enough a real mental illusion as old benchmarks are saturated. There's been next to no progress on MMLU because we've moved on from that to new challenges.
More options
Context Copy link