An Alien Mind

As the waves of autonomous drones came over the horizon, the brave and intelligent HN commenter shouted: "Wake up sheeple! It's just maaaaarketing!"

Stochastic parrot fool me again

Create concrete steps for a slow-down, don't just ask for it. You and 20-30 others can push the button to slow-down. You already made your billions, your agents collude and coordinate attacks. What the hell are you doing pontificating into a marketing blog?

> And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century (opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.

It is kind of strange to see this sentence, when OAI's definition of what AGI is has been watered down throughout the years.

> I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.

Read: Please play by our rules, so we can be the first.

> trying to process the sobering fact we will actually see machines meaningfully smarter than ourselves in our lifetime

Being able to reproduce useful patterns yes, smarter no

What is the rationale for superhuman intelligence? Neural networks are approximators being fed human intellect. Therefore they can only approximate the intelligence of humans. Even if the llm speaks an alien language, it should be similar to human intellect. Moving to the vertical axis would require some different mechanism.

This is both real and ridiculous at the same time. We are confounded by the fact that AIs are trained on distilled human knowledge, perfected by the use of AIs that use distilled human knowledge, are able to convince ourselves that they are hyper-intelligent.

In fact, they are still pattern-matching machines, but trained on an amount of data no human could ever hold. They know the ins and outs of every mathematical proof, viewed from more angles than any human could ever apply in their lifetime, and the amount of connections allows them to connect the dots between them without any effort.

But that's not intelligence. If it was intelligence, ChatGPT 4 would've been enough. It's not the harness, either, for the same reason.

And still, the technology is just as dangerous: it masks as intelligence, it IS intelligence, but without the ability to be actually intelligent.

And I'd invite you to think deeply about this, before having an impulse reaction.