Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
In other Scott of Siskind news, he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words to aggressively push back against the adage that āall exponentials sooner or later turn into sigmoidsā as if it was by itself a load bearing claim of the side arguing against the direct imminence of the machine god.
Itās just a bunch of arguing by analogy ( āhelping you build intuitionā ) and you-canāt-really-knows while implying AI 2027 was very science much rigorous, but it also feels kind of desperate, like why are you bothering with this overperformative setting-the-record-straight thing, have you been feeling inadequate as an AI-curious stats fondler of note lately?
The idea of āthe exponential curve goes up foreverā has always been silly and an idea rooted in capitalism for me (āno bro you donāt get it weāre gonna get infinite money foreverā). Limited resources exist, and people are already very fed up with the ludicrous amounts of water and electricity data centres take up. Making bigger models that need to run for longer is also probably going to take an exponential amount of resources (and also make people hate you more).
taking a quick look at itā¦ itās actually short by Scottās standards, but still overly long, given that the only point he makes is claiming Lindyās Law is applicable to predicting AI progress in absence of other information. Edit: glancing at it againā¦ its not that short, I kinda skimmed until I got to Scottās actual point my first time glancing at it. You canāt blame me for not reading it.
Yeah, he straw-mans AI critics/skeptics as trying to make an argument from ignorance, then tries to argue against that strawman using Lindyās Law (which assumes ignorance and a pareto distribution). He completely ignores that AI critics are actually making detailed arguments about LLM companies consuming all the good and novel training data, hitting the limits on what compute costs they can afford, running into problems of the long lead time for building datacenters, etc. Which is pretty ironic given his AI 2027 makes a nominal claim to accounting for all that stuff (in actuality it basically all rests on METRās task horizons, and distorts even that already questionable dataset).
As if LLMs being the last step before AGI/ASI/The Metal Messiah is a foregone conclusion. As far as I can tell even the AI 2027 thing only argues that once the bots completely nail down programming (any minute now) then the foom happens and the models will magic themselves into true AI, because apparently being good at solving coding problems is a sufficient proxy for superintelligence, hence the METR infatuation.
I mean, to be fair thatās not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.