Could be an SSC type situation: you write an interminable pretend research post in a superficially serious manner on an obviously flawed premise and let the algorithm help it find its audience of mostly people who won’t read it but will be left with the impression that the premise is at least defensible.

This will be made considerably easier once siskind puts it in his regular link roundup with a cheeky comment about how he doesn’t really truly endorse this sort of thing.

His commenters really didn’t like the ‘white’ part.

An LLM will write in the style of my immortal just fine if you ask it to.

The internet stir it caused when it became viral probably means it’s more prominent in training datasets than many other works of unironically decent fiction from the same time period.

May non-judgemental chatbots are a feature only at a higher paid tiers.

it’s rather hilarious that the service is the one throwing the brakes on. I wonder if it’s done because of public pushback, or because some internal limiter applied in the cases where the synthesis drops below some certainty threshold. still funny tho

Haven’t used cursor, but I don’t see why an LLM wouldn’t just randomly do that.

That’s the second model announcement in a row by the major LLM vendor where the supposed advantage over the current state of the art is presented as… better vibes. He actually doesn’t even call the output good, just successfully metafictional.

Meanwhile over at anthropic Dario just declared that we’re about 12 months before all written computer code is AI generated, and 90% percent of all code by the summer.

This is not a serious industry.

Huggingface cofounder pushes against LLM hype, really softly. Not especially worth reading except to wonder if high profile skepticism pieces indicate a vibe shift that can’t come soon enough. On the plus side it’s kind of short.

The gist is that you can’t go from a text synthesizer to superintelligence, framed as how a straight-A student that’s really good at learning the curriculum at the teacher’s direction can’t really be extrapolated to an Einstein type think-outside-the-box genius.

The world ‘hallucination’ never appears once in the text.

New ultimate grift dropped, Ilya Sutskever gets $2B in VC funding, promises his company won’t release anything until ASI is achieved internally.

Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow’s enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.

Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I’ve had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.

Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I’ve been managing to read them all the way through.

What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?

That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely can’t be helping DoNotPay’s bottom line.

i think yud at some point claimed this (preventing the robot devil from developing alignment countermeasures) as a reason his EA bankrolled think tanks don’t really publish any papers, but my brain is too spongy to currently verify, as it was probably just some tweet.

I don’t think him having previously done undefined PR work companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.

Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he’s playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.

It’s adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.

Is this… the perfect grift?

Surely the free market would never allow this.

So many of the prominent eugenics enjoyers name-dropped in the article have being regulars in ACX in common, as well as having been personally sanewashed by siskind on numerous occasions, that it’s becoming increasingly absurd how he keeps flying under the radar when modern racism and eugenics are being discussed in major outlets.

Like, I don’t see how Cremieux/Lasker/TP0 ever breaks into the mainstream enough to be notable by The Guardian without Siskind making rationalist spaces super friendly to people like him as well as deferring to him and endorsing his writing.

Should be noted that it’s mutual, Hanania has gone to great lengths to suck up to siskind, going back to at least the designer mouth bacteria thing.

And GPT-4.5 is terrible for coding, relatively speaking, with an October 2023 knowledge cutoff that may leave out knowledge about updates to development frameworks.

This is in no way specific to GPT4.5 but remains a weirdly undermentioned albatross about the neck of the entire LLM code-guessing field, probably because the less you know about what you told it to generate the likelier you are to think it’s doing a good job, and the enthusiastically satisfied customer reviews in social media that I’ve interacted with certainly seemed to skew toward less-you-know types.

Even when the up-to-date version release happened before the cut-off point you are probably out of luck, since the newer version is likely way underrepresented in the training data compared to the previous versions that people may have been using for years by that point.

Nothing in my experience with LLMs or my reading of the literature has ever led me to believe that prompting one to numerically rate something and treating the result as meaningful would be a productive use of someone’s time.

Still occasionally think about that bit in the o1 white paper where the openai researchers innocuously pose the question of what if our benchmarks for detecting hallucinations are shit actually, wouldn’t that be something.

Implicitly assuming that the technology to terraform Mars is just around the corner is the we’ll become profitable once we hit AGI of space exploration.

In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan: