Does anyone with any power to change the situation in the common core or whatever governmental department even care? If the rubber never hits the road anywhere with the people who have the power to change the situation, absolutely nothing will happen or the situation will continue to deteriorate as the same motivations and methods that led to the current sad state of things will continue as they have.
I should have qualified the meaning of “works perfectly” :) No 70b for me, but I am able to experiment with many quantized models (and I am using a Llama successfully, latency isn’t terrible)
Does anyone know what "pathways" is and why they wanted so much central control to set that up? It seems that there was some sort of power angle to all this.
If the training data for these LLMs is from humanity in general, and it is trying to imitate humanity, wouldn't its IQ tend to be the average of all of humanity? Perhaps the only people who talk about STEM topics are people of higher IQ generally, including a lot of poor students asking homework questions. Thus, the way to get to higher IQ output is to critique the lower IQ answers, which may be more numerous by rejecting their flaws in favor of the higher IQ answers. That, or just training more heavily on textbooks, and so forth. How to reject errors, and maybe train on synthetic data generated without reasoning with errors.
A LLM can therefore have an higher IQ because it can combine all fields.
Also parameters and architecture might or might not be a limiting factor to us humans or a LLM. But LLM and parameter size, optimizations etc. are just at the beginning.
If we now have a good reasoning llm, we can build more test data automatically. Basically using the original content + creating new ones which can then lead to new knowledge = research.
There is way too much free entertainment these days. That's the most underrated difference in the world between now and 40 years ago. The change is even more dramatic for people who live in developing countries where TVs were rare 40 years ago.
I also think this is why traditional opera and the symphony are failing. People have too much entertainment.
Opera and classical music are simply no longer the popular form of musical theater or music.
Stage musicals (Hamilton) and film musicals (anything from Disney) are still very popular.
Popular music concerts (Taylor Swift) are obviously incredibly popular, and they're usually not symphony concerts.
While popular tastes have largely diverged from classical art music, a good deal of "popular" (and often excellent, in my opinion) symphonic music is still being produced and listened to as film music and game music.
Were they ever "popular?" Hasn't Opera and Classical long been the domain of the highly educated and elite? The more intellectual among the middle/lower class only receiving via recordings, radio, charity concerts, and community ensembles?
They struggle right now yes, but the major organizations in the great cities (London, New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Berlin, etc.) all seem to still stay afloat.
Opera used to be rather popular, back before there were recordings. Opera stars like Jenny Lind and Enrico Caruso used to be a big deal, and played to packed houses. Every city had an opera house, even quite small ones.
Ballet and classical music were similar, as was classical theater like Shakespeare. They would be presented by touring companies, as well as community groups.
I think that recorded media played a key part in displacing them. The older forms, in their most expensive incarnations, remained as entertainment for the wealthy, as a way to distinguish themselves from the masses who watched recorded entertainment.
But a lot of grand old movie theaters started life as opera houses and classical theaters. They used to be popular entertainment.
I think another reason for their failure is the same reason the bottom has fallen out of the antiques market, because of changes in the culture, people don't have the respect for the past like they used to. Toppling of old statues, renaming of all sorts of things to have no connection to the past or history, the rewriting of history in popular shows, etc, are all sort of extreme reactions against the past and tradition and it's reflected in a fall in demand for older culture.
It must be horrible if a story of a fight explained all the world you know all your life giving you conversation airsuperiority.. and then that story starts to fade out while you are in it..
>I also think this is why traditional opera and the symphony are failing. People have too much entertainment.
I haven't looked into this too much, but I hypothesize this might not be the case due to attendance numbers. Top-line symphony and philharmonics still sell out regularly. I know locally, the LA Philharmonic's shows at both the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl have robust attendance.
I want to explore a different avenue -- donors and patrons. I wonder if the new generations of millionaires/billionaires don't donate the way they once did to the classical arts.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/951... -- the LA Phil does rather well for itself, but with $64mm in artists' salaries/fees in 2023 and only $42mm in contributions, one cannot help but wonder if this could be helped out by a couple of more billionaires setting up endowments?
Free entertainment is great. it prevents additional resource extraction from the environment and allows acceptance of relative masspoverty (compared to our parents ). panem and circensis indeed.
So I thought about the brain uploading stuff for my next novel, "The Godlike Era" and my conclusion is : Dude, brain uploading to ONE replicant after you die is totally pathetic. Make 100,000 brain replicants. Run them in parallel on a nuclear powered GPU cluster. Have them learn all specialties of modern civilization in faster than real time. Have them teleoperate 100,000 robots. Build out whole civilization's worth of infrastructure on other planets with you as the ceo of that 100,000 person planetary development corporation WHILE YOU'RE STILL ALIVE.
The part that I don't like about that one is Bob is dead. What if you do this while you're still alive? Von Neumann probes would be super energy inefficient too. Just power people with electricity via advanced wetware and static nitrogen atmosphere and a bit of climate control and people could live in deep space or uninhabitable planets easily.
Nothing? It remains the same story. What do you think it would change?
> Von Neumann probes would be super energy inefficient too.
Stars radiate a lot of energy. Simple fact of the Kardashev scale.
> Just power people with electricity via advanced wetware and static nitrogen atmosphere and a bit of climate control and people could live in deep space or uninhabitable planets easily.
>Nothing? It remains the same story. What do you think it would change?
The AI would have loyalty to its creator, and it would get into the deep philosophical aspects of what is a living organism vs what is a machine and why that matters.
>Von Neumann probes would be super energy inefficient too.
Yeah, but if someone became intelligent 10,000 years before us, which is a pretty trivial amount of time technologically, their Von Neumann probes would have eaten our planet already, so probably not going to be militarily feasible if there's other intelligent life in the galaxy that's keeping an eye on us.
>This is mumbo-jumbo
It doesn't defy the laws of physics to power people with electricity. Sure, we're going to need a lot of engineering to figure out how to plug people into the wall to recharge, but with AI we might get there in 100 or 200 years. The benefits would be enormous. People need 2000 calories a day which is a trivial amount of electricity compared to say an AI cluster. It would make a lot of sense to send humans around for most things if they used such a small amount of energy.
> The AI would have loyalty to its creator, and it would get into the deep philosophical aspects of what is a living organism vs what is a machine and why that matters.
I guess you will have to write it for me to see. :)
> People need 2000 calories a day which is a trivial amount of electricity compared to say an AI cluster.
We have no idea how much energy an AGI will need. You are literally looking at steam engines de-watering a mine and trying to guess what a Shinkansen ticket will cost. It would be very surprising to me if it turns out that keeping human bodies around is the most efficient from of intelligence.
> Yeah, but if someone became intelligent 10,000 years before us, which is a pretty trivial amount of time technologically, their Von Neumann probes would have eaten our planet already, so probably not going to be militarily feasible if there's other intelligent life in the galaxy that's keeping an eye on us.
You will have to spell this one out for me a bit more.
We can't have Von Neumann probes because if we could someone who came before us would have already eaten Earth before we came? There are quite a few assumptions here. And the thesis is not entirely clear either.
Also we just assume that there are little grey ones watching us, and they have never contacted us, or told us anything but seemingly their military red line is us creating Von Neumann probes? Do you feel that this is built on a pile of shaky assumptions?
You know the cheesy ending in a dumb TV show where they play a song and the plot gets resolved? They should have had one where the evil guy is going to use his laptop to do something sinister and then they play "Rhythm Nation."
Dostoevsky really saw the gathering storm clouds, especially in his book, "The Possessed." He did a great job of criticizing the idle status seeking upper classes who were charmed and oblivious to the gathering power of radical ideologies like that of Pyotr Stepanovich and his gang of radicals in that book.
James Lindsay has spent a lot of time talking about the Gnostic and Hermetic currents running through these disastrous revolts against liberal ideas that occurred throughout the 20th century.[1] It seems that the ancient Gnostic and Hermetic cult ideologies and their derivatives, imported into the modern world by Marx, Hegel and Rousseau are exploiters of many unfixed security vulnerabilities in the human psyche, especially in large groups, that are used to regularly create all sorts of mayhem, and pointless civilizational self-destruction by promising easy societal transformation in any way imaginable and a forthcoming great vague unspecified utopia where the details of how it actually would work are considered unimportant.
I'm wondering how you square this with fascists being largely responsible for the body count and the most egregious human rights abuses (particularly, for the purposes of this conversation, those attributed to Imperial Japan).
Communists believe that classical liberalism does not exist. That all systems are an arbitrary unprincipled prejudiced exercise of power with law and merit being clever illusions hiding raw power and prejudice, so if the communists are not exercising it arbitrarily and with no concern for any principal except raw power on behalf of the proletariat, then someone else must be exercising it on behalf of whoever they think should exercise tyrannical power for the greater good like the Japanese, or the Germans racists.
The fascists have the same gnostic and hermetic beliefs as the communists. For example, the Nazi belief in the control of the world by the inferior and evil races, representing the demiurge and all that garbage.
Liberalism, on the other hand, is based on the idea that there are no special people. No enlightened people with the true knowledge of the world, or special truths that would become true if only everyone started believing them.
Among the communists, I think both types could be found, it is just that the more idealistic, moderate and anti-authoritarian people always lose out in those revolutions. An organized, amoral and unscrupulous minority has a big advantage over them. Classical liberalism suffers from the same issues, and systems designed by classical liberals also often get subverted by minority interests.
>Classical liberalism suffers from the same issues, and systems designed by classical liberals also often get subverted by minority interests.
Yes but in classical liberal states, when the minority interests subvert established norms, it very rarely leads down a path of mass bloodshed and wanton destruction. In heavily authoritarian communist revolutions, one mistake of letting the "more extreme" (because even the less extreme figures in these kinds of regimes tend to also be fanatics) reach power gives you a regime like Mao's or Stalin's. Even in less extreme examples, few people would call a government like Castro's preferable, or claim that if Trotsky had come to power, then repression and mass shooting would have ended in the USSR.
Beyond just ideology, the type of state institutions and their fundamental tendencies of respect for the rule of law (or a lack of this respect) are important factors in deciding how far the unscrupulous can go even if they do come to power.
This is why in a country like the U.S. with very stable liberal traditions and strong state institutions built with these traditions in mind (if imperfectly), having someone like a Nixon or Trump get into power gives results that are nowhere near as bad as they are when a Hitler, Castro, Mao or Lenin comes to power in a country with much weaker bulwarks of liberal history.
Gnosticism has the pattern that there is a demiurge that created this world as a prison. This is the capitalist economy. Gnosticism says that those initiated into secret knowledge will become of aware of the real nature of the world and seek to wake everyone else up. This is the idea of the revolution fixing all problems and bringing about the great communist utopia by transferring all capital ownership to the state. Marx doesn't say a whole lot about how the Utopia would actually operate, those were details Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were figuring out in Vienna.
Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds. Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things. This applies to Marx's beliefs in the labor theory of value among other totally non-empirically backed beliefs being treated as ideological indisputable truth.
The credit for the labour theory of value goes to Adam Smith, specifically the Wealth of Nations. Whether it was true or not is a separate question, but it was based on empirical data available at the time. Marx is usually credited with it because he altered it, and saw a flaw in Adam Smith's version. The idea that "what something costs is what people are willing to pay for it" was something Adam Smith was familiar with and addressed in the Wealth of Nations.
> Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things.
The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history. The Cathars were wiped out, and Giordano Bruno, an early proponent of the Copernican model of the solar system was burnt at the stake by the inquisition. It seems to be the other way around.
> Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds.
I don't think this is correct, but I can't prove a negative.
You're talking about genocide and religious discrimination.
Wikipedia: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century,[110] referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".[111]
I thought the demiurge was simply ignorant not malicious. It found itself in a chaotic world and tried to make sense of it. In doing so it mistook itself for a god. That said I'm not an expert in gnosticism.
Whether the truth is found in Sophia or quintessence, I think transcendent claims are the real problem. This applies to both the orthodox traditions in the west as well as the esoteric traditions.
Gnosticism is not a term that can be used to define a uniform metaphysical system. There are a variety of metaphysical schools that are bundled together in the modern usage. For example, in what German scholars of early 20th century came to call "Iranian Gnosticism" (in reference to Manichaeism [1]) it is in fact the Father of Light that "sacrifices his sons" as 'food for daemons' so that the battle between Light and Darkness is taken to 'their turf'.
> Capitalism
Interestingly enough, another Iranian gnostic school derivative of Zoroastrianism - that of Mazdak [2] - shared everything, including "women".
In general, one should be careful to be quite specific as to what metaphysical school of thought they are referencing when using the currently ambiguous term "Gnosticism".
~
Mani's metaphysical vision is rather wild. I was just reading up on it the other day - apparently he even resorted to diagrams to make things clear.
One of the criticisms of Gnostisicm, even going back to the ancient Greeks is it never makes positive assertions about what the new world will be like. It's only negative saying things like "all this is illusion," "all this is bad." It never puts up its own program for criticism. So if you say anything about Gnosticism, the Gnostic can just respond, our faith isn't that, it's better than that. However, they never tell you what it actually is so it can be objectively criticized.
The human brain uses 20 watts, so yeah we figured out a way to run better than human brain computation by using many orders of magnitude more power. At some point we'll need to reject exponential power usage for more computation. This is one of those interesting civilizational level problems. There's still a lack of recognition that we aren't going to be able to compute all we want to, like we did in the pre-LLM days.
For 20 watts of work on stuff like this for about 4 hours a day counting vacations and weekends and attention span. So 20 hours of rest, relaxation, distraction, household errands and stuff, so that maybe bumps it up to 120 watts per work hour. Then 22.5 years of training or so per worker, 45 year work period, 22.5 year retirement. So double it there to 240 watts. We can't run brains without bodies, so multiply that by 6 giving 1440 watts + the air conditioning, commuting to school and work, etc., maybe 2000 watts?
We're getting close to parity if things keep getting more efficient as fast as they have been. But that's without accounting for the AI training, which can on the plus side be shared among multiple agents, but on the down side can't really do continuous learning very well without catastrophic forgetting.
Bruner's "Stand on Zanzibar"from the 60s and "The Shockwave Rider" from the 70s predicted a lot of social trends. Most millennials and younger won't be able to stand them though because of the different cultural norms of those eras embedded into the books
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