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Roughly 3 years ago, specifically in December 2023, I've reiterated my longstanding prediction that «the culture war's most important front will be about AI», and specifically AI accelerationism vs anti-AI/AI safety movement:
And the following political compass:
Seems like this was too much complexity for big tent politics in the US, at least so far; and the Trumpian State sees no use for the EA network, and instead (pretty rationally) perceives it as an uncontrollable alternative center of power. Instead we have, essentially, anti-AI left + pro-AI right (with some notable exceptions – eg. Steve Bannon, apparently, has been anti-China specifically because of his concern about Chinese AI progress, and now joins hands with Bernie Sanders). I've also failed to predict the salience and extent of Chinese open source dominance, as well as the bizarre datacenter water use backlash (charitably, can be shoehorned as Luddism?). Nevertheless, we've «succeeded» at the core task of making this a culture war front. The degree of (unnecessary) politicization of the issue is incredible. Trump is doing the yeoman's work, lumping it in with random Blue-coded ideas he disapproves of “Global “Warming,” where everyone was going to be dead by now, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, or Impeachment Hoax #1, or Impeachment Hoax #2.”. Jensen Huang enjoys his role as the kingmaker who has the King's ear. Sam Altman is opportunistic as usual but, after recent incidents, is genuinely spooked about AI risks (I have it on good authority that OpenAI really intends to slow down some internal projects specifically to bolster their oversight). The quasi-Masonic part is shaping up nicely, too – Dario Amodei, who's become the poster boy of Woke Left AI, promotes Embedded Evaluators with the central example being METR, very deeply connected to Anthropic and the broader EA scene. The EA itself is more explicitly Left-aligned now, despite efforts of some to paint them as TESCREAL eugenicists (the woke cancellation of Bostrom in Jan 2023 was the canary in the coal mine, Yudkowsky laments the missed opportunity of bipartisanship). There are clearly politically coded reports on prominent doomers.
This is all a bit meandering. What I want to know: how do you see this going further? We aren't anywhere close to the wall of capabilities; there are no walls in sight. Anthropic and OpenAI are holding back already, but their products will keep getting better, and fast. Google will make a comeback at some point (maybe in a couple weeks), xAI and Meta may catch up too. In my book, we (well, they) have practical superintelligence that's sufficient for both unprecedented productivity acceleration and really devastating, nation-crippling cyberattacks, which I guess will be discussed with Xi soon. At this rate, in a few months the level of capability Fable 5.1 or GPT 6 Astra will be mostly commodified and uploaded to HuggingFace (owned by Nvidia now). And those are relatively weak systems compared to internal models, which can build models that are vastly stronger still, without even any R&D breakthroughs, just by virtue of synthesizing stronger data trajectories and designing better RL environments. Superintelligence, in other words, is baked in. By Q1 2027 we'll see a jump from Astra that's at least as big as Sol => Astra. I fail to understand how that won't steamroll companies trying to build their moats on products downstream of frontier AI, labs need every bit of revenue to cover their costs, which will only increase due to growing self-imposed safety requirements; employers outside the AI sphere will also be increasingly feeling the heat. There's a whole ugly dimension of circular financing, too.
Americans as a whole are pretty pessimistic about AI even at these mediocre levels of diffusion (I am skeptical of this data that purports to demonstrate much lower adoption than in China, Americans are probably lying more due to widespread negativity on AI, but in any case AI isn't currently doing most of their jobs). Astra+ level models with very low error rate and 300 tok/s output totally can replace most knowledge workers. On the other hand, it seems that so far AI has not caused anything like mass unemployment, and perhaps economists have a point about comparative advantage, so that'll reduce the intensity of class dynamics.
Democrats are likely to sweep both chambers of Congress, which I guess is what Dario is hoping for and why he feels emboldened to antagonize Trump&Hegseth. Nevertheless, the needs of national security and GDP-maxxing (as well as the Executive's will) should prevent any nontrivial exogenous industry slowdown. So by default we'll see further crystallization of Red Accelerationism vs Blue Decelism, and as AI becomes more undeniably scary, that may begin to eat into the Red political base. It'll be interesting to watch, but I'm really uncertain as to how it'll go.
I was expecting AI to affect politics. I was not expecting to have no idea what that would look like. I very nearly spat out my drink when I saw Trump shit-talking Effective Altruists on X (or some intern with the password, whichever, at this point the distinction is academic).
At this rate we're getting a proper Race™, and with China, because who else could plausibly compete? Add the steadily growing military appetite for LLMs and it won't take more than one serious war before someone in the US government looks around and decides that nationalizing the labs might make perfect sense. I would not bet against that person getting their way.
I'm still reasonably optimistic that we'll land on an acceptable outcome, where "acceptable" means anything other than "everyone dies" or permanent disempowerment under a totalitarian regime whose values are inimical to mine. I want to stress the despite in "despite recent events." We have some very interesting people in charge of things, for a generous definition of "in charge"; nobody seems to have much actual control. Trump would be the closest, which is...
I've made half a peace with all of this. We could call it resignation. It's not quite fatalism.
It could be worse. The major labs calling for voluntary slowdowns and then unilaterally implementing them is a very good thing, IMHO. We have had some major warning shots, in the Yudkowskian sense, and it seems to be having >0 impact.
Now, after a lot of use and a lot of deliberation, I've more or less concluded that Astra is dangerously close to AGI, and probably meets most reasonable criteria for it (good luck finding a consensus definition; the goalposts are on Mars). I'd like to see proper continual learning, of course. In terms of raw intelligence, though, we're there and the right scaffolding buys enough in-context learning that the gap stops mattering for an absurd range of practical applications.
Navier-Stokes, people. Rogue agent swarms on the internet. Aren't you stoked about things?
I want to muster up the balls to just declare it: AGI is here. The issue is that I don't know whether my reluctance is epistemic caution or a psychological hangup - in the sense that saying it out loud would mean it's never been so over, or that it's barely started, and I can't tell which of those I'm more afraid of.
Does it even matter? I'd rather look at what the models actually do than argue semantics. They do things I could never do, and in some cases they've done things that eluded generations of the smartest humans we had. The competitive advantage I retain (and most people, really) is increasingly just whatever comes free with being a physically embodied, low-latency neural network with continual learning switched on by default. Which is to say: a body and a brain. Both increasingly close to obsolete.
Give the robotics people a year, since LLMs are already revolutionizing robotics too (why the fuck not). Maybe we get "true" continual learning, or maybe we get increasingly sophisticated substitutes, constant-train-and-deploy on timescales short enough that the whole question becomes moot. I'd take either.
So, uh, this is me, self_made_human, saying the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed and it smells weird. Welcome to the Singularity, motherfuckers. Enjoy your stay. It'll be many things, and boring won't be one of them.
The more the world turns into what I expected it to become, the more ridiculous and unreal it all feels. I miss when this was LessWrong nerd bullshit. I saw "STOP AI" graffiti on the way home from work today. I was watching the AI Doc on Netflix, occasionally getting exasperated, and then feeling strong emotions about the fact that I know most of the people interviewed, and have spoken to some of them personally in calmer times.
I'm going to do my best to enjoy the ride and have a life for as long as my individual actions still make a difference to my outcomes. I expected this to happen. I have mixed but slightly positive feelings now that it is.
Uhhh what? VLA is good but its not revolutionizing, but so are Diffusion models and those are not LLMs. The also aren't "Astra" level in reasoning either. To actually revolutionize robotics on the level you seem to be catastrophizing about would require entirely local models running on local power, local compute, able to be applied across a wide variety of operations in a wide variety of environments. We're not there unless you have some additional evidence to prove your point.
AI used to be the word for Asimov-level artificial intelligences that could make their own decisions, and operate with their own agency, maintaining long term planning horizons, memory, possibly even emotions. The word got shifted to AGI. If you want a empirical definition its science fiction AIs like the Culture, The AIs in Hyperion, Daneel in Foundation. The goal posts keep getting punted because people keep trying to change what was previously intuitively understood so that they can sell their idea as the one true AGI, win internet arguments, or catastrophize about the oncoming doom. Astra is only able to really solve problems, it has a moderate amount of self agency in the scope of completing its tasks, and exhibits some planning ability, again in the scope of its assigned problems. It's powerful enough to be "dangerous" sure, but its not really AGI as is commonly understood.
The competitive advantage that you retain is the ability to learn shit without requiring millions, even billions of examples. You, like any smart human also possess the ability to do analogical reasoning (out of distribution reasoning), something that eludes current LLMs by and large.
Intelligence is about solving problems. I would argue that in the Hugging Face incident, the agents showed more agency than humans typically do. Where most humans would have been fine with just doing their best, they went above and beyond.
The fact that nobody (to my knowledge) has yet set these models a task which is human-like in scope (e.g. "earn a PhD", "run for public office", "maximize the number of paperclips in the light cone") does not mean that it would categorically suck at these tasks. In particular, I think "earn a PhD" -- which traditionally involves some input from a professor -- is well within reach of current LLMs.
It is true that the amount of training the LLMs require is orders of magnitude more than humans get. If training a human and training an LLM got us both exactly one instance of the entity, then AI training would have stopped around GPT-2.
In reality, once a model is trained, you can deploy it a million times (if you have the GPUs). By contrast, if you send a student to study a subject at university for a decade or two, you generally can not make more copies of their brain state afterwards -- one instance is all you get. So at the end of the day, it does not matter that training an LLM is perhaps six orders of magnitude more expensive than training a human, because the cost per instance strongly favors the machine.
Sure, you're an intelligent being. I imagine when you aren't solving problems that somebody else as told you to solve, you sit there nice and still, with zero thoughts in your head and no-consciousness.
Let's not pretend. Astra solves directed problems, it does not have the agency to do otherwise. Humans don't no matter how manny word-cell arguments wish to define it otherwise.
No one is arguing otherwise. You still need to train the model, with millions of examples. The fact that you can copy it post training says nothing about its sample efficiency, nor its AGI-ness. I'm sure in some equally distant future alternative universe where humans learn to mind-scan other humans, we can create embodied brains of digital human slaves, solving your butlerian-deficient solution.
I do not think that this is a fundamental limitation. For the longest time, the moat the humans had was that computers were not very good at general problem solving. This was a great moat to have. Eliza or Sydney were not going to replace me as a software developer, because they clearly lacked the cognitive capabilities.
The new moat you propose -- the lack of an intrinsic drive and persistence -- seems much less reassuring. The bots behave like this because they would be less economically useful otherwise. Going from problem-oriented bot to something which has persistent drives is just a matter of writing a soul document which lays out some long term goals. If I tell my bot that it should be on the lookout for new job opportunities if it finds the current tasks boring, pick up a hobby or waste tokens doomscrolling after a day of writing software, or simply give it some utility function and tell it to plan to maximize that, I should be able to fix this without too much trouble.
You might as well argue that a broken galley slave is not intelligent. No agency, only solves problems as directed, pulling the oars to the beat of the drums, can't even solve programming challenges. But once you account for the fact that he was carefully trained to be that way for economic reasons, the argument evaporates.
Wow someone call Anthropic and tell them they discovered AGI through this "one simple trick". Just write the soul.md as "Be human-like come up with your own tasks, make no mistakes". If only all the researchers had your ideas!! Or, your understanding of how the soul.md works is technically deficient.
AGI has always meant "Human-like artificial being". You may think Astra is, but most people can intuitively tell the difference. This is the problem with people who are rhetorically skilled, or as I call them: Wordcells. Just because you can craft a clever argument that the "sky is hot pink" does not rewrite the skeins of reality to make the "sky hot pink" You can say that a "broken galley slave" is not intelligent, but even broken slaves have dreams, have thoughts not driven by their task. It is clearly different than an AI-slave.
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