Mathaetaes

@georgetakei Those things are expensive. I guess Portland is really putting their money where their mouth is. ... In this context, that seems wrong.

@briankrebs I don't touch wordpress at all, but is there a way to programmatically know if a wordpress plugin's ownership changes?

@emilymbender You're far more an expert on this than me, so I will defer to your experience. But in all these examples, "powerful" describes utility. A more powerful engine can do more things than a weaker one. A more advanced spreadsheet software can help users calculate/track more things than a less advanced one. By that definition, wouldn't "powerful" for LLMs just mean less wrong, or wrong less often? At the end of the day, a model is just predicting text. A model can't use a tool, but it can predict the text required to use a tool. A model can't write code, but it can predict the text that a compiler will turn into a program. We keep building integrations that allow tools to be driven by text, which allows text prediction models to 'use' them... but really it's still just predicting text. The only real metrics that apply to an LLM are size, speed, and accuracy. For frontier models, size and speed is always compensated by throwing more hardware at it, so users never see it. Thus, the only reasonable measure of power, for the journalistic contexts you're talking about, is the accuracy of the text it's predicting. Thus, a "more powerful AI model" is just one that is less wrong than the previous generations. No? That said, I do agree with your points that journalists are doing the PR firms' jobs for them when they use "more powerful" as a stand-in for "less wrong."

@dalias @glyph Simping is a stretch, and you clearly missed the point of my post.

@dalias @glyph It's not necessarily brain rot. Humans are pretty good at optimization. We're also not great at picking the right thing to optimize on. For the last 200 years or so, most of western society has optimized on wealth; specifically, individual wealth. That creates perverse incentives to do all kinds of things that are good for an individual but terrible for society at large. Some examples just in my lifetime: Cigarettes. Oil (and petrochemicals in general). Cryptocurrencies. Until the various world societies as a whole decide to reorganize and start optimizing on things that benefit the whole over the individual, we will always be subject to empty promises of quick easy wealth. That's *incredibly* easy to manipulate because it pits individuals against each other. Honestly, just like mechanical automation, AI (once it matures) has the potential to make society so much better. We no longer need a fleet of people to pick a field of crops; for many crops, a single person can harvest it in an afternoon. The same work getting done with fewer people *should* free up people to do other things: make art, help people who need it, etc. We can, and do, produce the same amount of resources for basic necessities with far fewer people than we did 80 years ago. Unfortunately, with our current capitalist priorities, in the current system it's only going to widen the wealth gap and hurt a lot of people. We choose not to provide a minimum level of support for basic needs, so people starve while others throw out food. it's pretty f*cked up, when you think about it, but it's never going to change without a massive cultural shift. Frankly, I'm not sure we're capable of such a thing.

@glyph I’m not an AI doomer and I pretty much agree with your whole thread, but something to consider: when I think of AI taking over humanity, I see The Matrix more than Terminator. A hypothetical super intelligent AI wouldn’t necessarily need complete self-replication ability… it just needs the ability to influence humans enough to have them do the parts it can’t. If you think about it, we’ve been building tech designed specifically to manipulate human behavior since the advent of social media… and it’s effective. If humanity were any good at protecting itself or organizing for the greater good, the perverse reward systems of capitalism would’ve been brought into check long before US oligarchs like Musk and Zuck could have been able to amass their power. In a hypothetical world where machines rule, the more likely scenario is a majority of humans self-oppressing because they’ve been manipulated into it by adjustments to the algorithms that feed them the information they use to establish reality. We become part of the system. The only real difference between that world and today is that today it’s a handful of billionaires controlling the algorithms. Replace Zuck and a few others with sufficiently capable AI and is it really that unbelievable that society would just keep cranking out more machines despite a slow degradation of quality of life? Anyway - great thread and a fun topic to kick around. Thanks for posting it.

@eff Finally! I never understood why you guys stayed at the nazi bar so long after it was apparent to everyone that it was a nazi bar... but better late than never.

@mattblaze@federate.social The fact that they're raising money says everything you know. It's a grift. The fact that it's targeting left-wing voters is the only difference (In 2020 they targeted right-leaning ones, but it was the elected officials and their associates doing the grifting. This time it seems to be randos.) That said, I appreciate you posting this. Maybe it'll save some folks from donating money to a dead-end cause, and they can use that money to support their political candidate of choice in 2026 instead.