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So, so many pro-AI/AI boosters just... Ignore this rather inconvenient fact in my experience. They will hype up how epic agentic coding is, or agentic <whatever here> is, all day long, but they will never tell you that LLMs are really benefiting scammers and criminals the most, who can now generate literally infinite content, for infinite amounts of time, because they don't need to verify or prove anything legitimate. And people who are apart of both of these groups are very, very good at sending, to the LLM, prompts that look completely innocent to any kind of guardrail or filter that these companies can devise. The only other use that is probably more profitable is porn. Really.

This is also assuming that AGI is even possible. So far there is no evidence that this is actually doable over anything but billions of years (and even then we have no idea how nature really managed it).

Edit: Meant to say AGI (superintelligence didn't make sense). Superintelligence is undefinable at the moment so even considering if it's possible or not is more of a philosophical thing/si-fi thought experiment than anything else.


> So far there is no evidence that this is actually doable over anything but billions of years (and even then we have no idea how nature really managed it).

"The brain is so mysterious and unique, that we should abandon all attempts to even try to apply results like the general approximation theorem to it and discard all signs that some approximation is happening."

Why we don't see signs of intelligence in the universe? The simplest self-replicator requires accidental synthesis of the sequence of 200 (or so) RNA nucleobases.

BTW, your argument could have been applied word-for-word to powered flight in 1899. In short, argumentum ad ignorantiam.


No. To realize the possibility of powered flight one only needs to look at birds. AGI, on the other hand, is another word for God.

Just define "general" as "as general as allowed by math, physics, and practical limitations." Or use a conventional reading of AGI as a human-level intelligence (which we, naturally, have a working example of).

Yeah but if you do that, you have to then turn around and look at how all the goalposts keep moving around. That is what I was (originally) trying to get at, and why I phrased it like I did. If we truly had actual (artificial) general intelligence (or were close to it) we would already have a solid definition/benchmark (and it... Probably wouldn't be what you said, but something a lot more detailed/thorough). Right now both AGI and ASI is just... Whatever. "It earns a hundred billion dollars in revenue," "It can do anything a general human can do" (ignoring the shear amount of ambiguity alone in that), "It can do most tasks a human can do" (again, ambiguous: which human, which tasks, on and on and on).

oh absolutely, no argument there, the case for AGI is pretty weak. I was just saying that I am even more sceptical that any of this is a "first or nothing" scenario - that is one of my biggest pet peeves about the entire tech sector.

Right, but I never said it was a first-or-nothing scenario to begin with. Given that both AGI and ASI are so ambiguous as to be nothingburgers, talking about them is just a performative thought experiment IMO. An interesting one, certainly, but neither are even remotely close to being realized. Until we have some kind of clear definition that can be scientifically proven and reproduced, that will remain the case.

the original comment I was replying to said "Under this scenario if you are a few months behind at the pivotal time you might as well not exist at all."

ASI is the acronym you’re looking for. It stands for Artificial Superintelligence.

Arguably it’s already here. ChatGPT knows more than any human who has ever lived. It can carry out millions of conversations at once. And it has better working memory (“context”) than humans. And it can speak and write code much faster than humans.

Humans still have some advantages: Specialists are smarter than chatgpt in most domains. We’re better at using imagination. We understand the physical world better. But it seems like we’re watching the gap close in real time. A few years ago chatgpt could barely program. Now you can give it complex prompts and it can write large, complex programs which mostly work. If you extrapolate forward, is there any good reason to think humans will retain a lead?


> It can carry out millions of conversations at once.

You're anthropomorphizing it, this isn't what it's doing. It's being fed a series of text and predicting what comes next the box has no context about the other "conversations" it's having and doesn't remember them.


ChatGPT can only respond to a prompt, and in the context of that prompt. It has no continuous awareness of anything. That isn't superintelligence. We are easily fooled because we have stupid monkey brains.

No, I am not looking for ASI. We have yet to achieve AGI. Unless you can definitively prove that we already have? Because, I mean, if we've already achieved AGI then that obviously means that you can define what intelligence actually is, no?

We have more like Artificial Superstupidity.

Ultimately our current model is extremely unlikely to perform better than the sum of current human knowledge. Godlike super-intelligence is a pipe dream with the current LLM based approaches.


Honestly, if GH keeps getting worse I may need to migrate away to Forgejo or something. The problem is GHA... Does anyone know of a service that is better and doesn't charge me an arm and a leg for runners (particularly MacOS ones)? I've been wanting to shift away from GHA for ages (because I hate it) but I don't know of any alternatives that are quite like it (or the costs involved).

Founder of WarpBuild here. We provide GHA runners that are much faster and about half the cost. This includes MacOS. Check us out.

https://warpbuild.com


If self-hosting the runners too then it's doable. Not 100% sure for Forgejo but with Gitea and act_runner it's possible and pretty economical if you have an extra mac mini.

The sad thing is that I expect this to rise as time passes. Most vibe-coders, from what I've seen, are exactly like this guy: they have no idea of trademark or copyright law and think that they can just... Do things like this without consequences. They will self-justify until they're blue in the face and not learn anything from it. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know how significant said exceptions really are going to be to this.

Because people believe that they know everything about humans and how they work (or they hedge it). This is the exact same reason I don't trust supposed "experts" claiming AI will replace all these jobs: those same experts have no idea what these jobs actually entail and just look at the job title (and maybe the description) but have not once actually worked those jobs. And there is a huge chasm between "You read the job description" and "you actually know what it is like to be in this position and you fully understand everything that goes into it".

Yes, but that doesn't mean AI increased their revenue. Is there definitive proof that AI/LLMs caused this increase?

I completely agree with you. I pointed out replying to the same person that in the same report their ad impressions were up 20% and the price per ad was up 12%, which account for a huge amount chunk of that revenue increase.

All I was saying here was that tax breaks wouldn't impact revenue since revenue is reported before taxes, operating costs and anything else.


This is extremely naive. If you are in Germany and I am in the US and you get a default judgement against me (which would cost you money to get), good luck getting it enforced internationally. Hint: it's way, way harder than you think.

I also got randomly invoiced $5.00 for absolutely no reason on the 28th. I don't have auto-reload enabled, nor did I explicitly buy extra usage.

Isn't this illegal/fraudulent in many places? Pretty sure just randomly charging a customers payment method without their consent is definitely illegal.

Can you back this up with actual data, or is this "I believe it to be true" vibes?

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