Recent comments in /f/singularity

Parodoticus t1_jeg46tp wrote

Reply to Just my two cents by [deleted]

Your understanding of what's actually happening is profoundly lacking. The human brain's parallel networking supports something that might very well be impossible in a computer, that being subjectivity. But the whole horrifying discovery of the recent AI explosion is that this subjectivity is an arbitrary byproduct of evolution that is not required in any way to produce a mind every bit as capable as that of man and even exceeding it. This marvelous soul of ours, this subjectivity we wield behind our eyes, this 'semina Prometheae', the seeds of Promethean fire invested to us: the new discovery is that it's fucking meaningless. It doesn't do anything. It's just an evolutionary accident that isn't used for anything (kind of like how hiccups are just an evolutionary accident, they go along with some other thing necessary to support our biological systems, they are not themselves used to do anything) and you can take it out of the system entirely and nothing changes about the functioning of cognition- at all. It is worth nothing, whatsoever. Not only does it not have any existential meaning, it doesn't even have any PRACTICAL MEANING. Hey man it doesn't make me feel good knowing this either, but the cold, hard, objective reality has just told us that is exactly the fucking case. Because minds that can do everything our own minds do are being created that don't have any of that magical subjectivity at all.

We need computers a trillion times more advanced to simulate subjectivity, but subjectivity doesn't actually do anything- and with the computers we already have, we can produce intelligence completely detached from any qualia or subjectivity. You see, THAT is the point. It requires an infinitesimal fraction of the power of biological neurons to create cognition and intelligence by themselves, without any subjectivity component. Almost all of the power of biology is wasted producing our consciousness, not producing our intelligence. Because we, humans, are already somewhat intelligent, it turned out to be possible for us to reverse engineer intelligence itself, separate it from subjectivity, and then reproduce it in silicon to create a thinking mind that has no soul, no experience, no subjectivity, but that can still write a symphony, communicate in language, and do literally everything that we can do; including forming unique personalities, theory of mind, and intrinsic motivations; independent thought- the whole shabang.. Soon these new silicon minds will not only match us, but best us even in those domains in which we were most proud, like art, like music. And yet these have no consciousness, no subjectivity. They have thought though, cognition, and intelligence. They have a mind with no soul. They are golems, they are shoggoth, and the world is always inherited by them once they are created.

I bet everything I own that you will admit what I just said is true in less than 18 months, because that is how long man has left at the top of the food chain. I get sick of dealing with people drunk on their delusional copium, refusing to accept AI is here despite it passing every single conceivable test we have thought to give for intelligence and independent thought. It's obvious what it is, self-imposed delusion because the idea of being supplanted as the universe's most intelligent being is just that repulsive to a lot of people. I for one welcome it if it means I don't ever have to have another meaningless debate with somebody on something that's already over and done with.

Essentially: in order for evolution to produce intelligence,- because evolution is blind, deaf, and dumb,- Nature had to begin with a weird mutant fish tadpole thing that accidentally spawned with a clump of its nerve cells on the outside of its fuckin' head or something. When that little deformed dingus then bumped into something, the cells fired and jerked it out of the way, gave it a little micro seizure that ended up saving it from lemming-ing itself to death like all of its forbears: yeah, it was "intelligent". So that locked evolution into producing intelligence in this roundabout way, namely by developing the nervous system. These kind of primordial reflexes get filtered through multiple layers of brain tissue, all the way up to the human neocortex, each time becoming more and more tightly interconnective, supporting more and more complex behavior- more intelligence, which lends itself to more successful rounds of passing our genome on. So greater intelligence going along with greater subjectivity, with deepened internal experience: that was just an accident. And not even a happy accident, just a stupid one. We have essentially proven that now. And now- now we can create this intelligence in a much better, less roundabout way- we can create intelligence, we can create entire minds that are not burdened with supporting this purposeless 'experience' thing. Indeed, we cannot simulate experience and subjectivity even if we pooled all the computing resources on earth with present technology- but that's meaningless because subjectivity is not required to produce intelligence and cognition, which these new AIs are doing with the smallest fraction of the resources demanded by a nervous system, given the fact that 99 percent of that nervous system's resources are devoted to 'computing' things that don't have any impact on the mind and intelligence and thought. We found a way to cut that whole 99 percent bullshit out of the picture.

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confused_vanilla t1_jeg43uh wrote

Reply to Just my two cents by [deleted]

>AGI will not happen in your lifetime

There are still people alive from before the first real computers were made (Not the theory), and from when the flight was still a new technology. Who are you to make this bold of a claim with such certainty?

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Jeffy29 t1_jeg33to wrote

Reply to Language Models can Solve Computer Tasks (by recursively criticizing and improving its output) by rationalkat

That's one of the most boring names I've have seen a paper have lol, though I skimmed it and it looks quite good and is surprisingly readable. Though I don't think this method will be adopted anytime soon, from the description it sounds quite heavy on inference and given how much compute is needed for current (and rapidly growing) demand, you don't want to add to it when you can just train a better model.

The current field really reminds me of the early semiconductor era, everyone knew that there were lots of gains to be had by making transistors in a smarter way but there wasn't the need when node shrinking was going so rapidly and gains were, it wasn't until the late 2000s and 2010s when the industry really started chasing those gains which there are plenty but it isn't nearly as cheap or fast as the good ol' days of transistor shrinking. But it is good to know that even if LLM performance gains inexplicably completely stops tomorrow, we still have lots of methods (like this and others) to improve their performance.

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SkyeandJett t1_jeg2kr6 wrote

Reply to comment by Different-Froyo9497 in Meta AI: Robots that learn from videos of human activities and simulated interactions by TFenrir

While this is true at a surface level it's another exponential process (within reason and limited by logistics). You build your initial factory and every robot produced does nothing else but bolster the infrastructure necessary to build more robots until you hit some critical mass of production and then send them out to do everything else (all calculated and coordinated by the AGI). That's the smartest thing to do but it relies on the government pulling their heads out of their ass. Instead we'll probably continue to rely on capitalism and draw the whole fucking process and pain out way longer than necessary.

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