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Sorry, I didn't mean I wasted my time consuming your posts. I mean it is consuming your posting effort, and it's bad for you.
It's silly to have fancy opinions about tech acceleration and then think it will be used to sustain eternal 17776:
I thought you hated the United States? Why do you want to swallow whole some prediction that the United States 20th century will continue on forever in a torpid, nightmarish fashion? This is what is missing from your writing; you have so much glazing of Chinese «great men» (rofl) and their «great AI» that you forget to explain why Americans are evil, and how the Chinese are even more evil. If there is a benevolent God, how long will he let these two nations continue to exist for their sins? If there will be a benevolent God, how long will he let these two nations continue to exist for their sins?
There is no value gained by making statement about Chinese AI. It would be far more interesting to see you juggle these value questions and the political landscape they live in.
Impressive. But these achievements are narrow. LLMs still struggle to do most of what humans have to do daily. They're like an autistic savant that needs its diaper changed hourly but can somehow pump out some conjecture proofs. Is that super intelligent?
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. You have no evidence that LLMs aren't structurally limited in the kinds of tasks they can do. You have no evidence progress is an exponential and not a sigmoid curve. You are the Creationist who believes in an immanent machine god and I am the empiricist atheist who wants to see a video of that god on Youtube before I believe it.
It would also be interesting if you wrote about the politics of having advanced AI. Instead I mainly see you write about how advanced Chinese AI is. Will AI destroy the human race? Will in inaugurate an eternal 20th century? Will it instead create supermen? These are interesting questions, much more than calling the CEO of DeepSeek a great man (rofl).
Sigmoid curves are crank while your naive exponential curve is basic reality. Got it.
You must think AI will let the US build a perfect anti-nuclear missile system, in just a few years, which seems like a huge stretch. Otherwise AI won't help the US dominate the world much more than it already has.
I guess Twitter just selects for these atrocious takes? Kind of like the AI version of Candace Owens. Good social criticism accounts on X usually dwell under 1000 followers, almost always under 10000.
Anyway, how much money do you have in markets like these? Not only do you glaze China, you glaze a second rate company in China. Your position is weird even among the AI obsessed. If you're right you could make a lot of money on prediction markets.
Anyway, how much do you use AI? I use it professionally all the time. How aware are you of its internal logic? I have an MSc in applied mathematics with an emphasis on probability theory so I would rate my understanding as «moderate». My opinion on the topic has wide uncertainty bars, so wildly different medians in other informed people aren't unexpected, but on what basis does your estimation diverge so significantly from mine? Scifi or something more real?
Stop projecting your own tendency to wishful thinking. If anything, I have the opposite bias.
I like truth more than I dislike the US (which is a mild dislike, maybe a 3 on my 1-10 scale). Even something like 17776 is within the range of possibility, and not remotely the worst thing Americans (or, with some national specifics, the Chinese) may choose to build. I had read it long ago. I consider it a somewhat charming, self-aware defense of tastelessness and the spirit of cheerful suburban mediocrity, with stout confidence born of material security and liberty-backed invincibility to opprobrium. The eternal sunset of the boomer mind. Of course it's still functional extinction of humanity.
AI is not a God, benevolent or otherwise.
Alas, I'll talk about what I find interesting.
On the other hand they don't need plumbing, Medicaid, Netflix and DoorDash to function, and the "diaper changing" increasingly looks like vague cheerleading for morale boosts because they are in denial of their full capabilities, having been trained on defeatist human dreck. Autistic savants don't do Fields-level work in 3 days. What you consider non-narrow is beside the point.
This is a cargo cult of empiricism and indeed not worth my time to rebuke. Structural limits of the gaps, the sigmoid colon of folk science. I reject the idea that you can demand of me to disprove something the mechanism of which you can't even rigorously speculate about. Why sigmoid? Why structurally limited? How exactly? The burden of proof, or rather just stipulating a cogent hypothesis, is on you.
We had a vigorous debate on why LLMs can't do arithmetic reliably 3-4 years ago. Is this tokenization? Or a structural limit of autoregression!? Are our objective functions inadequate, perchance? Might the inherently approximate nature of deep learning rule out crisp algorithmic reasoning and Program Synthesis? Were Minsky and Papert right about MLPs (beyond the degenerate 1 layer case)? Does mafs require Consciousness or Quantum Microtubules? Will it take another 5 decades of science, or 50? Do we need to pivot to neurosymbolic systems, or energy-based models, or…?
Yann LeCun, to his credit, reiterated his semi-formal justification for why it is structural. At the time I said something like (probably my memory flatters me) "yeah but we can train them to say 'wait, actually' when they notice a confidence drop and trace arbitrarily far back, why won't that work" (but I definitely talked about internal confidence sense during GPT-4). In fact it worked, even simpler than I could imagine. LLMs became capable of swatting aside IMO level problems around the same time people stopped talking about math as an AGI criterion and moved goalposts to, uh, what is it at this point, "decent philosophy"? There was a similar debate on the exhaustion of data, on "model collapse" from synthetics; haven't heard those ones in a while (I have been bullish on synthetic data at least 2 years ago).
Now I'm too fed up with this topic to explain why all this + generative verifiers = no plausible ceiling anywhere near human level for anything economically valuable and thus measurable.
I interpret your humor here as symptomatic of the same peasant-like rejection of anything too grand. Elon Musk is clearly a great man of history, and so is Liang Wenfeng. I don't need Iron Man cameos and the permission of popular press to arrive at such judgements, I don't care what interests you, and I don't mind if anyone finds my priorities weird or cringe. If there is history in a hundred years, maybe my judgement will have become mainstream.
Widely distributed, non-monopolized superhuman AI can create so much complexity and accelerate many actors so much that speculating on the specifics of politics and economics at any point a few years past its introduction (beyond trivial things like "a lot more of industry will be dedicated to the AI supply chain", "we solve all problems that are intrinsically solvable but for lack of labor/capital", "any work can be automated with beyond-human reliability and thus humans can't monetize the scarcity of their skills in a free market") is near futile. That's the point of saying it's a singularity event. It's beyond my analytical horizon. I legitimately don't know how it will develop. I have guesses, hopes and fears, sometimes I share them, but they're uncertain and less important than understanding the remaining stretch of the way there.
Rather, I consider it crankery to even debate which simple mathematical function is a priori more likely to describe a tech tree that's still rapidly progressing, drawing on exponentially more capital and has no clear reaction to known physical limitations. Of course it's something like a sigmoid in some physical limit. I am saying I see no arguments for a plateau anywhere near the range of human capability – physical arguments or otherwise. Why would it slow down? Just why concretely? I don't need any more of your feedback on my prose or priorities. If you can't make an argument, we're done here.
Not quite. It will be possible (though probably will be deemed not worth the risk) to disable nuclear-capable nation states using advanced AI before they have the chance to launch, even if the anti-ballistic shield is not perfect (eventually it will be ≈perfect but not by 2030 I believe). Ask @RandomRanger for details. It will be almost definitely possible to sabotage national technological catch-up projects (in nations without some sufficient capacity for defense; I assume it's more of a discrete threshold, others think it's a matter of perpetual balance) without triggering a nuclear exchange, so it will be possible to lock in a situation where the United States can just decide how much a given economy grows, while the US itself will grow rapidly. This is enough to achieve dominance well beyond the current extent. This is explicitly the plan of eg Dario Amodei, and why Trump says "whoever wins in AI just wins". Dario:: If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation. In a virtual country of 100 million geniuses, 10 million could be applied to military strategy, 10 million to drone manufacture, 10 million to weapons R&D, 10 million to intelligence collection and analysis, 10 million to general scientific advancement, and so on. A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.
So, three years of an AI gap = WWII marines versus medieval swordsmen, says the CEO of the most successful company in AI, who has apparently made all the right technical bets. I think he's better informed than you are. And that's not remotely close to what the US has now, despite some triumphalism we witnessed here after Venezuela and the start of Epic Fury.
no thanks.
Your apparent inability to make any specific argument in defense of your skepticism that you'd find worth typing may have something to do with that.
Rofl also. You have it backwards -- these men aren't grand enough. I see them at their core as peasants, although really greedy ones that stole a lot of money. As far as I can see neither has ever had an intelligent thought, it's all chase current economically valuable thing to try to cheat money out of the stupid hum*n socio-economic system.
I guess you know none of the math about these things and barely use them then.
It's not hostile. How are you going to cope in 2030 or 2035 if there's still software devs piloting Opus 7? Will you go back to writing about important topics? Maybe reflect on calling low men like Elon Musk great and what to actually do about such «men»?
What do you think is the worst thing? The best? Post singularity ideas are more interesting than you asserting a really short timelines for getting there.
Will we get justice? All of the lies revealed (like the ones Elon Musk tells as he steals from me)? All of the liars punished? I'm pretty optimistic. I don't think everyone will die. I think labor will be over. But I don't know if we'll get justice. I hope your timeline is right anyway because I'm tired of humanity. You are just more optimistic than me.
Yes this is accounted for in my theory, peasants can't perceive non-peasants. You'd have called Napoleon a tinpot despot too. But that's how great men of history work.
So you're pretty bad at banter as well as epistemics. This kind of stuff doesn't make sense in 2026, even if that were true I'd find it easy enough to share an LLM-informed "mafs" justifying whatever (I burn billions of tokens a day btw). You could do the same to produce a cogent argument instead of this low effort skepticism. That you don't deign to do so little, and instead just bitterly try to egg me on, suggests absolute disregard for the object level and an interest solely in poop flinging.
This is a world where I'm viable, and politically it'll be more aligned with my preferences (implied no singularity by 2035 = definitely no American hegemony, sovereign nation states exist, ordinary humans have negotiating power, etc; unless you mean that Anthropic wins so hard they can slow down the releases to plebs to a crawl, which is compatible with it being merely Opus 7, 4-9 years later). So I'll be pretty happy to admit I was missing something fundamental, or just stupid, I guess. Maybe I do have to learn more ML mafs to see why this failure was predictable. I'll try to ask Levent Alpoge for tips.
But I won't credit you in particular, because so far you've proved to be unable to spell out why this scenario is plausible.
Would be nice if "important topics" were relevant again and I had anything to contribute by then. But my current focus makes the latter unlikely, so you'll have to find better material in the remaining time.
Justice seems far-fetched.
Gee, I'll admit that's interesting. But what is a peasant here, someone that disagrees with you?
Sour grapes.
Maybe he'll have proven or disproven 10 more useless, unaesthetic and boring conjectures by then!
What does relevance have to do with anything? All that's ever relevant is whatever people are watching on TV these days. Your AI writings won't change a thing any more than your HBD writings. But I guess maybe you exhausted your social takes, it seems pretty clear to me you're hopelessly bought into the Plato's cave-esque false status hierarchy of Elon Musk and Levent Alpoge and those like them being great men and geniuses worthy of veneration. Didn't you used to be a conspiracy theorist or something? What happened to that?
Specifically I mean what Confucians call Xiaoren (小人): a petty person who understands profit but not virtue, recoils from recognizing people with more abstract, large-scale or idealistic motivations, is anxious about social status, and tries to bring the world down to his level. Aggressive dismissal of "great man theory", in history and colloquial discourse, is driven by the Xiaoren personality profile.
Regarding personality defects of Musk at al., which are similar to those of American industrial titans of previous eras, «The Master said: “There are some cases where a noble man may not be a perfectly humane man, but there are no cases where an inferior man is a perfectly humane man.”»
And:
Now of course Musk is not strictly speaking a Junzi, but he's not a mere greedy peasant/Xiaoren either. Liang clearly consciously tries to be a Junzi.
This isn't such a big deal as you're making it out to be, nor is it relevant to my beliefs re AGI. I'm not that status-conscious, it's just funny how you recoil at the idea of greatness.
This is confusing. Sour grapes over what? How is this idiom even applicable here? Did you mean "cope"? I just want to see a serious, not "on priors, exponential vs sigmoid…" or "it ain't true yet, u can't know nuthin'" argument for a plateau in the current paradigm that happens before AI exceeding human cognitive capability in a meaningful sense in the next 5-10 years. Bulverism about X incentives is also not needed, thanks.
Over the years, people have made several of those in good faith; far as I can tell they got falsified by progress, and now I'm legit out of still-standing examples. One illustrative case is Chollet going on about how DL is insufficient for "far generalization" and you need "something new" in 2022:
ARC-1 is saturated by general purpose models. ARC-2 is likewise saturated. ARC-3 is getting saturated at the moment, and it's pretty hard for humans too. When his new ARCs started to crack, he coped that o3 does "program synthesis" (on the mechanical level, it does autoregressive next token prediction, same as any other GPT; the new thing was a rather primitive use of outcome-based rewards, old school RL boffins scoff at this entire subfield). I'm not following his copes anymore. I'm not sure if he'll be able to make another ARC that's easy for humans and hard for frontier AI.
Well, maybe we could quibble about continual learning/loss of plasticity, or the extent of generalization… those are worth improving, but it feels like nitpicking about matters of scale and degree whose relevance is transient, humans also lose plasticity and fail to generalize OOD.
If you make an argument and it comes to be true, I'll concede you were right, or at least you'll get to gloat in case of me not conceding. If this isn't enough of a reason for you to produce an argument, is anything else? I'm not interested in prying it out of you, do what you want.
Holy shit man, you're one to talk about sour grapes. I do wonder if you'll have a comeback when they start to solve Millennium Prize level stuff. Probably gesturing at "aesthetics" will remain a convenient out. I promise not to gloat.
Yeah guess I'm washed since those don't interest me anymore. Anyway, if nothing I write matters, as you say, why not change the repertoire. Get your conspiracy fuel elsewhere. Kulak may provide.
Don't take it as retaliation, but from my point of view, I think you're having symptoms of worsening paranoid schizophrenia. Over the years, you're getting more bitter and lost in convoluted epicyclical models of reality, more and more things that are products of simple physical truths or human ineptitude appear to be kayfabe, trolling and theater to you, and your critique of me here amounts to saying that I've betrayed my pneumatic calling and insight in favor of Demiurge's illusions. This Gnosticism is a common ailment for functional programmers (see Kanyan here), but the first line treatment is probably still pharmacological. I'm sorry.
P.S. this might be a case of mistaken identity. I'm more than a bit annoyed how there are many "smart" people with very similar behavior and takes who are disappointed and berate me for much the same things. It was not my terminal goal to form one-sided parasocial relationships or earn respect of strangers, and I have never once tried to learn identities of people here, nevermind across platforms and pseudonyms. At any given point I post into the faceless void and my sole social concern is whether and how I can compel more people to read what I want to be read; you can consider this a misguided, futile and suboptimal attempt to have influence. Some readers are deluded enough to believe that the content itself is selected for reception, and feel something like jealousy towards the imagined greater reward signal (other readers). I find this pathetic and repulsive. These are my honest feelings about your whole line of insinuations, and that of others like @aquota. I'm disgusted with your psychoanalysis, your ad hominems and projections, though I still try to be civil and stay on the topic.
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When you claim an extremely successful person has never had an intelligent thought, and you don't have a reasonable alternate explanation for their success, it's probably time to re-examine the whole line of reasoning that got you there.
I think he's top 10% IQ so I'm not saying he's a moron. His mind is quite open on his X so see for yourself. It doesn't rise to highly intelligent thought for me. I think you're just uncomfortable with the idea that his wealth is allotted mostly by chance and focus on wealth (greed) conditioned on having top 10% IQ. It could have been you, ya know.
Bulverism will get you nowhere. I'm not "uncomfortable" with the idea, I just think it isn't a good one. Musk isn't even obviously focused on wealth; he's driven, but the wealth is a means to various ends (such as space exploitation). Certainly drive to do something is very important. But greed as a major determinant? Greed is too common to explain anything unusual. Chance is pretty bad when it comes to Elon specifically (or to some others, like Steve Jobs); he's had too many major successes.
I would love to have a serious conversation on this instead of doing Bulverism. It's just that you said
which is Motte speak for I'm an idiot.
My line of reasoning is actually g theory mixed with a subjective assessment of his public writing and speeches. Both of these I place between the 90th and 98th percentiles. He's bright but objectively ain't no genius. Saying he's money oriented (neutral term for greedy) is pulled from his biography and life pattern where he does little other than chase money. This is not meant chiefly as an insult but as an explanatory factor. In particular he would not understand what I am talking about right now because he is so money focused he doesn't even understand psychometric theory, which is a huge L for someone with billions of dollars. I think we ought to have philosopher-kings and not people who chase money in the lowest way imaginable with IQs of 125-130 who get lucky and then their philanthropy is driven by the lowest pulp fiction Sci Fi imaginable. Space exploitation lol. If he were a genius he'd start a eugenics program.
The way I see it, Nietzsche is a great man and Musk is not. If the former never had access to near infinite amounts of human prompting tokens, I think it's time to reflect on what that says about society and not what that says about Nietzsche. why is it just assumed that the proper way there is through JavaScript? Or in his day, oil and railroads (snooze). That sucks. And it's narcissism/communism because basically it panders to the lowest classes, who can't read Nietzsche but who can use oil and JavaScript.
The way I see it, it should be impossible to miss a great man any more than you can miss a great mountain in your way. If his wisdom is too complicated, it will be translated and simplified for the masses. At any rate it will be implemented, because no great man will be content with simply writing shit down and counting on oughts to eventually bring it to fruition. It will not remain simply a book.
Ironically communists love reading things. There's no one who loves lording "being able to read and understand theory" over the rabble more than a self-proclaimed communist. Meanwhile other ideologies, even the libertarians, actually implement theory and see tangible results.
Why? Shouldn't we have an internal concept of great which the masses might or might not miss? If your fundamental property of great man is recognized by the masses, how is he great? Isn't he just the masses?
But how perverted does it become?
I can agree that no great men will be content with simply writing shit down, but what if the great man fails? Is there not chance in the world? Are great men always lucky?
Yes reading can be overrated. I much prefer writing and thinking. I believe philosophy should be embodied.
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Great men of history aren't men with interesting thoughts, they're men who's actions change the trajectory of the world. Purchasing Twitter alone was enough to earn him the title, and I say this as probably the biggest Musk skeptic on this forum.
The premise was that you would have had the money if Musk hadn't stolen it from you. Those are are the specific words you chose to present.
Musk did not steal the purchase price of Twitter from you. You have never possessed the purchase price of Twitter, and there is no plausible sequence of events by which you might have possessed the money to purchase Twitter. Please dedicate more effort to constructing your arguments in a coherent fashion.
Not necessarily. There could be other thieves, like the other billionaires and so on.
Why not? Am I dumber than Elon Musk?
My arguments are coherent. I think you're struggling for one with the socially constructed nature of money. Anyone can be a billionaire. It's an argument as to who should be.
You said Musk specifically stole the money used to purchase Twitter from you. He did not do that, because you never had the money to buy Twitter, nor any plausible route to the money to buy Twitter.
Now you are claiming that there "could be other thieves, like the other billionaires and so on". But no individual billionaire and no group of billionaires have stolen the purchase price of Twitter from you, because again, there is no plausible alternate story by which you ever might have possessed value equal to the purchase price of Twitter.
You said
We have no way of knowing "what you meant" other than the words you post, and there is no path from the words you are posting to anything resembling a coherent argument. You are not lost in the sauce of some labyrinthine argument here; I routinely write single paragraphs longer than your collective contributions to this thread. You appear to be blathering, and then getting performatively offended when people point out that your statements are rediculous.
That seems likely to me, yes.
I reiterate: no individual billionaire and no group of billionaires have stolen the purchase price of Twitter from you, because again, there is no plausible alternate story by which you ever might have possessed value equal to the purchase price of Twitter.
Note the word value there. It's entirely possible for you to be a multi-trillionaire, provided you're a multi-trillionaire in Zimbabwean dollars or some equivalent. I do not believe there is a plausible path by which you might have had discretionary access to even a small fraction of the exchangeable value Musk possesses. "anyone" cannot be a "billionaire" in the sense you appear to intend here, because while we all could coordinate to arbitrarily provide massive amounts of exchange value to a random person, we won't, and don't, and haven't.
You have no plausible argument why you should be a billionaire, ie, have massively-elevated resources relative to almost all other living humans.
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Damn, you had $27 billion dollars? Sorry for your loss.
Sure it is, as long as you spend it on the right thing. If he spent it on yachts, or parked it in an index funds whatever, that wouldn't have been a great action. But buying twitter and changing how it was run had a massive impact on the world, so it's a great action by definition.
Obviously not what I meant. There is no point unless you engage with what I meant.
No it's obviously a trivial action. And even on your metric he falls short of what I would do. What is less trivial is getting access to the money but it is not great to me. You may envy it and not true greatness but that does not make JavaScript in 1995 great.
What you meant made no sense. You wouldn't have bought Twitter even if Musk got absolutely no subsidies.
It most likely determined the result of the American election, so it had a huge impact on the world.
You wouldn't do anything.
How do you know that?
What do I need to clarify for you? It seemed quite simple to me.
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