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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I may or may not be an AI skeptic by your definition - I think it's quite likely that 2030 is a real year, and think it's plausible that even 2050 is a real year.

Absolutely not, at least by standards! You acknowledge the possibility that we might get AGI in the near-term, and I see no firm reason to over index on a given year. Most people I'd call "skeptics" deny the possibility of AGI at all, or rule out any significant chance of near-term AGI, or have modal timelines >30 years.

I agree that LLMs are missing something, but I'm agnostic on whether brute-force scaling will get us to undisputable AGI. It may or may not. Perhaps online learning, as you hint at, might suffice.

Still, LLMs have a tendency not to actually coin new terms, and to fail to use the newly coined terms fluently in the rare cases that they do coin such a term (which is probably why they don't do it - if coining a new term was effective for problem solving, it would have been chiseled into their cognition by the RLVR process).

I wonder if RLHF plays a role. I don't think human data annotators would be positively inclined towards models that made up novel words.

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