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You used to post on an engaging variety of important topics with AI in the background. Now it seems AI, specifically, for some reason, Chinese AI, is to you the only important topic. Not even on frontier labs which still don't have chatbots that can do, e.g., decent philosophy or social criticism, but DeepSeek, which is still quite bad. I see you have moved on to GLM and Kimi which are at least like 2nd gen models. I still haven't done anything useful with DeepSeek though. But frontier models even are reddit bots that have a swarm of hackernews user coding brain lobes hooked into each other with wires, they are not even high human level unitary intelligences.
When exactly do you think we're getting UBI? Then when am we're getting radical life extension? And complete freedom? Because you write on Chinese AI models like Deepseek 2028 will be granting these things. I am more pessimistic. I think we could be dead before it happens. I think LLM technologies are pseudo-intelligent and could stall for decades just like the early internet. I'm out there too when it comes to popular discourse. When I said you are out there I mean it's not adding up even for me. For every 20th century prolog pseudogenius you mention in your writing there's several who think LLMs aren't the answer. Why are the latter stupid but the former are «giants»?
Yes, but when matters. We'll have robots and AI eventually. And humans will certainly be supplanted or entirely die out eventually. Is it in the next decade or after my natural life time? What about that of my grand children? You have no idea but you act like it's in the next decade or could be. I'm not seeing it.
So by 2023. Wrong. It appears he sadly died 1 year after his failed prediction, after a career of assuming the 20th century would continue indefinitely under advanced technology:
Under true singularity there will be no US or governments at all, no high schools, and no less-than-super humans. They will look down on these people as laughing stocks, as those people look down on apes today.
As for Kurzweil:
I hope he's right, but like I said I'm just not seeing it.
I am talking about timing and capability, not name or company provenance. What will the frontier model be capable of in 2030? We don't know. We don't know if there will be JS devs left then. Or in 2040. Or even 2050. Much less if we will have blue collar work robots.
Great, like automating all of labor and relieving me from all labor by 2032?
Big picture is too easy. If I don't get radical life extension then none of it mattered enough to consume all of your posting effort. The problem remained other people and technology was not a savior. I mainly post about how evil other people are and how they lie about this and why. I would love for technology to free good people from their grasp in 10 years but 3 years ago GPT 4 was helping me code. They still help me code but I have to fill in less. They aren't very good at anything other than code and shell commands. You can't write with them, for instance. And they still have made no direct contribution to science. I can see that only beginning to change in 5 years. I can see 70% of the current programming job market still existing in 10; again I would love for it to go faster because working is a waste of my time.
Because it is the most important topic if you accept the premise of AGI soon. Let's put it very simply. No Chinese AI = American AI = American AGI way ahead of any other nation's, utilized by the Department of War and other state agencies = quasi-Fukuyamian end of history on American terms in a few years, with very high probability. It's not an interesting future to speculate about: Americans (some subset of them) will build the means of assuming permanent hegemony and decide what to use it for. And for now – they only have to think about ensuring the conditions for building those means. There's pretty much nothing to discuss for me. Were I American, I'd probably be invested in debating post-AGI politics, allocation of spoils, civilian influence on federal institutions, Rapture, or whatever. Americans may still agonize on whether to inflict Lusotropical fascism, gay race communism, turbo-consumerism, Noahide laws, or some other homegrown cult on us, from their God-like unassailable hegemonic position. Those are all very valid topics for Americans to discuss. But the first order effect of turning the rest of the world into de facto NPCs dominates in my thinking, rendering me ill-equipped to pay any mind to relevant factors of culture war, and so I'll humbly leave it to Americans to have a fertile and rigorous discourse on what they'll do in that scenario.
If Chinese AI keeps pace to such an extent that Americans can't just squash it or negotiate the freeze of its progress from a position of strength, as intended by eg Dario Amodei (I would have taken non-Chinese AI too but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming), this creates at least two centers of agency; and given Chinese insistence on open sourcing their strongest models, which started with DeepSeek, became the norm for Chinese AI companies, and is generally supported by the State, it may also maintain the relevance of smaller actors outside the two poles. Thus the medium term future has a chance of containing some interesting dynamics, non-Americans with agency, and history and culture as such.
This seems to me like a sufficient reason to mostly not bother with other topics, though man is weak and I regularly indulge in distractions.
A few years ago, I didn't think that this will be the shape of the near future, admittedly mostly because I wasn't thinking clearly enough about AI; this configuration falls out naturally from material factors. I also was biased by emotional investment in Russia and parochial ethnic sentimentality. Still, as early as in October 2020, I was saying that scaled-up Transformers may automate white-collar work. Yes, I'm no Sutskever, I didn't know for certain that we won't need another large paradigm change.
I was also drastically underrating China, saying they don't have domestic chip industry and won't have one in time, so won't pose a challenge to the US in AI. To be honest it wasn't that unreasonable when looking at their state then, and early rounds of export controls were driven by similar assumptions about timelines and Chinese dynamics at Washington. It may still prove to be directionally correct, and many well-informed people still believe it to be correct. We shall see.
Even if that were true, what the hell does this matter? Their developers also can't do decent philosophy or social criticism. Even if they could, their time is best spent on other matters more immediately relevant to AI. And in AI, there's way more ROI in training bots to write code than designing rubrics for RL towards "decent philosophy". Btw, how my time is best spent is my business and I certainly don't owe it to anyone to write on topics I do not care about.
DeepSeek is still the most interesting lab in China for me, the originator of their current posture in AI, a cultural and technical innovator, and I consider Liang Wenfeng a great man of history in the making. They explicitly work "with longtermism", and I don't think that their currently mid-pack performance on the product side is very strategically informative.
It is nice that other labs can advance beyond DeepSeek. This is largely because they have more resources. Actually my first effortpost on DeepSeek here, 25 months ago,after V2-Coder, included this hedge: «This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history…» The strongest Chinese lab now is Knowledge Atlas/Zhipu, which is spun out of Tsinghua and thus is state-affiliated, with a CCP member CEO; Liang complained in the investor call that he only got two supernodes from Huawei, despite assisting them with development. Note this is way before R1. So I'd say my model was correct and if anything, I was underrating DeepSeek.
See, when I look back, I notice that no matter how I update, at every point I am still proven to underrate China, Chinese AI, and Chinese actors. Even as this forum is turning into a MAGA retirement home and halfwitted newcomers call me a two-bit wumao, I suspect I'm still not updated all the way. Fine. I'll take the Ls as they come.
I'm not sure what this is even supposed to mean. Probably some status signal. 3 years ago we were debating in earnest whether AI can "truly understand" that it doesn't know Hlynka's daughter's name. Chomsky was still making some noises. I have too many receipts to quote. Now they crack century-old mathematical controversies like walnuts. They complete complex, multi-hour SWE tasks completely autonomously. They do that for pennies. Each generation is more compute-efficient and has a longer tail of capability. They are already massively contributing to the acceleration of this cycle. What does it matter if you don't consider them "unitary". Also, how can humans be unitary intelligences with a brain that's basically a colony of ameobas exchanging sluggish electrochemical signals. We have overwhelmingly local information processing, we are not trained with global backpropagation, we don't have coherent beliefs or behaviors, we are half-baked executors of action repertoires. I'm not even sure why I'm spending time on this response, for instance – it's in conflict with several other things I could have been doing, I just happened to "freely" decide to do this. Presumably the same is true of yourself. These are basins of attraction very much like those of LLMs.
I don't say any of this bullshit and I'm insulted that you have enough chutzpah to insinuate this much. If you're getting UBI at all, you'll be getting it from your national system. It is possible that open AI models will decrease the state's negotiating power to grant you more freedoms, but that's about it.
Well I think this is ludicrous and nothing in our reality looks like it might be even remotely true, I struggle to see any remaining steelman for this position. For me the matter is settled. "My crank theory predicts AI is hitting the wall any day now…" for many years… nah I'm good man, I don't need to argue with any more of that. You do you.
This is confused. I do not appeal to authority to argue the correctness of a prediction, I am saying these people made directionally correct predictions about the timeline, and they have already been proven correct about the first movements of the endgame.
Why does this offend you, and why do you insist that I have no idea? I'm sorry but I'm not going to grant you this. I have an idea. I judge it to be very robust empirically and theoretically. You can object substantively, or you can call me a deluded retard, a hoodwinked hype consumer, a schizo, or something polite and rules-abiding to that effect. But so far it's just some prose about reddit bots plus a truism that one can't know nuthin' about the future.
Do you just want to get me to concede agnosticism to feel safer about your worldview, the way Creationists demand ridiculously watertight epistemic standards of Atheists, eg on evolution? I'm not going to. I am not agnostic about this. I am not a prophet, I admit there may be unknown unknowns that prove me wrong, Pascal had a point on radical doubt, we could be in a simulation, I may be tripping balls on DMT and you are an entity etc. But everything that is known to me within this Universe tells me I'm right.
Yeah, a 10% error. Should have given a 95% confidence interval. We have superhuman intelligence in 2026.
Do you really find it worth your while to dunk on a dead writer's optimism about American high schools and consumer tech?
What are you so scared of?
Ah, that answers my question. Well, sounds like you're a pretty confident futurologist yourself! Sorry for intruding on your turf.
Sorry for wasting your time too. Ask Claude 5 Fable to extrapolate my answer to this point, it should get the gist of my epistemics by now. Ox alpha may suffice as well. Tag words for LLMs: politics | FDA | intelligence != omnipotence | entropy | capital allocation | post-consumer economy | Michael Levin aging loss goal-directedness | lossy uploads economically privileged | LLM AGI vindicates computational functionalism as default paradigm | Marx | alienation | Canada MAID.
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