This is the bitter lesson that the labs may have to learn for themselves. Like, even with AGI, without corresponding enhancements in robotics, the machines basically _can't_ take over. Intelligence is not all you need (you also need hands).
You see this in Dario's appearances, where he jumps from AI is doing well using verifiable rewards (true), to therefore we can automate basically all science (maybe, but not without a lot more work in how it interacts with the physical world).
The problem with AI writing is that it can't add produce the texture of lived experience.
This would mean the specificity of details, thoughts and sensations as filtered through a specific individual.
There is a theory that what we perceive as beautiful in a face is that every feature, distance between the eyes, width of nose, distance between cheekbones etc is average. Note that a random face is very unlikely to have every feature be average.
With AI writing, the problem is the reverse. LLMs have captured lived experience, but it's the smooshed over experiences of millions of people.
It's not able to create a unique viewpoint which is believable. What comes out are average thoughts, sensations and details, but good writing lives in the specific.
AI's problem isn't that it can't generate unusual things. It's that it struggles to generate believable conjunctions of ordinary things.
But even this is too reductive. AIs don't have a body or a 'soul.' They don't know what it feels like to be a person, so they can't write like one.
I remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had code listings in them.
Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies.
I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?
I dunno man, there are two "tech" industry worlds and the one you and I -- hacker types -- think of as "tech" is not what the rest of the world means. They mean the other one, which has almost nothing to do with the actual technology and instead everything to do with the absolutely apeshit amount of money, power, influence and intrigue that the technology enabled.
This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond imagination.
There's a whole generation of people whose association with the engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their interest in the other side of things.
What gets me is back in the day when I said I was into tech I got shat on for being a nerd. Now I get shit on for destroying the world. And because I don't care about whose company is dating who (I'd rather be coding), people call me out of touch with "tech".
I feel myself going insane when I think about it too much.
Interesting. So, the actual concern now for the average person is ... which narcissist is steering the apocalypse? Yeah, that's slightly more engaging than RAM prices.
Back in the day when it came out, I gotta admit, Docker sort of got my my nerves as yet another thing coming to 'disrupt' how things are done.
(Half assed NOSQL 'databases' with poorly thought out storage models, everything having to be a microservice, turning every function call into a fallible RPC call etc...)
But I've come to appreciate it more, and i use it regularly now. I appreciate its relative simplicity.
But as in life, hell is other people's containers. My own I can at least try to keep them simple and minimal.
But I have seen many use the kitchen sink approach, giving me the feeling that even the developer don't seem to know how they arrived at their deployment anymore.
But this all seems quaint today. With LLMs, now we can look forward to a flood of code the developers haven't even looked at, but which is widely believed to work...
Having been on way too many middle-of-the-night Zoom calls watching my company's DevOps and development teams aimlessly troubleshoot issues with containers and similar cloud first technologies, I am convinced that nobody really understands what's happening.
> "hey, why do mathematicians keep changing rules on the fly, they just told me square of minus one doesn't exist
Mathematicians aren’t chasing numerical solutions, they’re chasing structure. ℂ isn’t just about solving cubics, it’s about eliminating holes in algebra so the theory behaves uniformly and is easier to build upon.
And as for "changing rules" they haven't changed, they have broadened the field (literally) over which the old rules applied in a clever way to remove a restriction.
reply