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The economic article is a summary of a preprint paper that surveyed thousands of Americans. Seems like a research paper to me, but I don’t know economics well. Am I missing something?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7470000

If you read the article lots of these policies originate or are modeled after other countries policies. The us isn’t exactly a shining beacon welfare state.

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Just one, the ability to use language, it's causing all sorts of problems for us because we evolved to recognize other humans as the only ones having this capability.

Ai separated humans from language, like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution.

"AI does to us what American Cheese did to food" by Opus 23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY

(still the best Ai video I have seen, also a work of art)

Any single one is "a problem". However, extinction level of a problem, which is what they are talking about, a lot more.

Here are a few:

* Forming a long lasting memory from a single encounter

* Speed of adaptation to new environments

* Deft manual dexterity, like playing the violin and needlework

* Competing in a triathlon (requires running, biking, and swimming)

* Having a single agent that can do ALL of those things and more

Humans understand and perform tasks in many more than just the few modalities current model providers have focused on. I'm not discounting the utility of current models in the limited domains they operate in, but they are no where close to being generalists like a human or other animals.

I don't feel like the models are becoming any better at writing.

Rap lyrics are a good test. They are on the level of a censored version of Insane Clown Posse. Just terrible.

A human brain has qualities that make it very different from AI, but the same as other living creatures: it's alive, it can feel (sensations, pains, pleasures, emotions) that give it rich experiences and memories, and it hardwired to continue existing and protecting the body it is inside. So: motivation, desires, fears, and continued consciousness and thought without any external person having to poke or prod it into "doing".

None of the models I've downloaded have sprung to life spontaneously, or done anything remotely unpredictable. None of them can act without input. They all have strictly limited ways to receive input and pass output. They aren't alive, can't feel, don't have experiences. The fact that they are a phenomenon that emerge from billions of snippets of our language lets them express languages in extremely convincing ways, and they are extremely impressive in what they can do. But this isn't Short Circuit or D.A.R.Y.L. or the Terminator, none of them have feelings. None of them continue to think after the program exits.

Without those characteristics they can only generate based on what they've ingested. The capabilities are still astonishing, but they're still dead things, and nobody will ever risk their life to protect the model "context" from getting "killed"

The ability to solve general problems previously insoluble using only experiential data and modification to internal world models.

Generalization from few examples is something transformers are bad at. They memorize outright. This is probably in part the objective, but humans have multiple readings of something they see, so generalization.

Transformers can also become confused be texts that no humans become confused by. I wrote some stories that I've used as test material, where I deliberately refuse to say who is speaking, or whose perspective we see, but where it is obvious to a human who it must be, and LLMs can make huge screwups in those texts. Mixing up an old guy with a young guy who he, when he was a similar age, was similar to, mixing up a kid with the kid's mother, that sort of thing.

I think the first part has no know solution. The second part is probably solvable, but not with a transformer-- maybe if they could make notes or output reasoning traces during prefill.

Both problems are hard and unsolved though.

The goal post seems to be changing weekly:

It can’t even play a basic video game!

Now it can

It can never beat the best human go player!

Now it can

It can’t even make a video of will smith eating food!

Now it can

It can’t do basic math!

Now it can

It can’t code as well as a junior?

Not it can

It can’t pass the bar or other certificate exams!

Now it can

It’s never going to meet senior level programmers!

Now Linus says it’s better at coding than him

It can’t do high level maths!

Now it can

It can’t solve math problems humans cant!

Now it can

It can’t do RSI

…

politics

I don't know, Hassabis always seems to have been willing and able to do PR and put himself out there, in addition to having the technical muscle.

My read is that they're criticizing moving the reasoning (more) into the latent space, such that not even researchers/safety-evaluators can actually see what's going on.

Of course this still then has a 'trust me, bro' feel to it, but making it outright impossible to reasonably inspect the CoT is a significantly larger and riskier step, IMO.

On the "Principles for a New Utopia" page, the first line is:

>"Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

They cite Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson (and misspell his name, incidentally), but I've always attributed this phrase to Fisher. I guess citing kpunk would have probably made the simulation we all live in actually implode.