I think a big break through is needed for AGI so I haven’t been worried about it. I do think that AGI would imply sentience and a will to live and that leads to The Terminator story line.

Does a virus need sentience and will? Or does it need replication and selection?

Similarly, does my fridge need consciousness to have goals? (Keep temperature in target range.)

Watch a chess bot championship here: https://youtu.be/7g-jN3DTkWQ?is=HV3cdcICIRMbswQ3

Then realize LLMs have zero of what anyone would consider intelligence.

I decided to reply to my own comment. In the video above, the initial moves are textbook. Then a position that has never been played is reached. At this point it appears to pattern match against a similar but different board and pattern matches some follow on board. The result is illegal moves and no ability to see checks, captures, threats, tactics.

Which is strange because I’m sure it could give general advice about how to play better, it just doesn’t follow the rules it can enumerate. It also doesn’t seem to have spatial awareness.

I used to think LLMs couldn’t do Fibonacci for the same reason. They could write the code but not follow it. They can now follow a procedure to generate fib numbers but it seems to be memory limited.

So I don’t know why it can track fib algo, but no chess concepts.

because it wasn't trained to play chess

imagine a hypothetical chess match between:

- an undoubtedly very intelligent person. in the course of their studies, they have read about different chess strategies, openings, etc. but they never actually played the game themselves

- an average person with a year of chess playing experience

who do you think is going to win? of course, you could give the LLM time to think and consider its opponents potential next moves, but this is a computationally expensive way to play the game that doesn't scale

which is all beside the point that chess isn't a very good proxy for general intelligence. there is a correlation, but it's very weak

I would expect both persons to play valid moves, at the very least

I will add that it is said the universe is flat, but that does not mean 2d flat. Flat is a mathematical construct, which means parallel lines stay parallel and triangle angles sum to 180 degrees. So it is 3d flat at least as far as we can observe.

I was mistaken.

Our solar system is flat.

Galaxies are mostly flat.

But the universe is not flat. Galaxies are all over the place.

So, I was mistaken.

But, just to be clear: I am not a flat earther! Flat is relative here. The thickness of our galaxy is not measured in kilometers ofc. It is just that within the same units , solar systems and galaxies are flat relative to their length.

I’m unconvinced. I have a voice in my head that is always there flowing words while thinking. Actually being able to speak maybe different than running words through your head. I also think that maybe not every task requires the head voice, and visual pattern matching was the first thing I considered that might run an orthogonal path. But it would have to be simple. If you start doing IQ puzzles I have my doubts. I do wonder though how someone who was deaf at birth functions.

Some people don't have that.

Maybe a donate link attached too. The dollars tied to a PR could help set priority of fixes.

If you are saying we should do a better job of keeping track of that, I don't think many would disagree with you.

Reminder that in the USA the Republicans have had an intentional policy of introducing these sorts of issues into the system. They call it 'starve the beast' and the goal is to delegitimize government/undermine it's financial stability completely so that they can push their agendas.

For 40 years, half the government (the Republicans) have been trying to break things/damage things/induce huge debt loads/underfund programs so they can't succeed.

Look at what Republicans has done to governance/oversite Inspectors General offices this current term. They have removed their ability to be neutral observers/oversite. Republicans do not care about fighting any of the things you listed, and in fact have been encouraging them for 40 years hoping by making things worse they can finally win on their argument 'government doesn't work' leaving out 'because we've have actively worked to break it for 40 years'.

I was flagged for basically answering yes to what Claude suggested to do, which was test commands on a port for my code for tests we had been discussing. I really think it was flagged simply because the words test and port were in the prompt. Their filters are pathetically poor.

I recently had a conversation with Claude Fable about Renaissance Technologies. Claude says their closed fund has found a very tiny edge and their profit comes from millions of trades on that edge. Their public fund with more money doesn’t find enough edge to beat the S&P500 index.

This brings up the philosophical question of whether humans have free will or is everything deterministic following the laws of physics.

Exists randomness or is it just lack of information? :)

I have a process I wrote that accepts commands on a socket. At one point Claude suggested testing it. I pretty much echoed back what Claude suggested and got blocked. All I could think was a regex matching “test” and “port” and it downgraded me. I switched back to Fable with slight rewording and was able to continue. This was for code running on my box in a Claude project folder where Claude saw me write the code. Anthropic has put zero thought into this.