The Butlerian Jihad grows closer and closer by the day. Maybe its already arrived.

His non-apology apology:

I’m not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

Guys, he has a baby. Don’t be too mean to him.

One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism

full AI communism

At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

Listen I’m all for hating on the Chinese government, but it’s more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.

Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word

Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn’t use enough words.

Even /r/singularity, which has a high percentage of boosters and often buys OpenAI/Anthropic talking points uncritically (or with only a few un-upvoted naysayers) eviscerated his comments as the shallow attempt to beg for regulations on China to protect OpenAI that they are. Also, China’s consistent open sourcing and lower relative cost per performance (well insofar as you believe the benchmarks and such indicate performance) has the /r/singularity audience questioning the “China bad” narrative US media tries to sell.

I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

The rest of his “accelerationist”/“decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha

“A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

even his AI-generated profile pic is punchable

Pairs nicely with the latest long-form Pivot!

These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:

In a universe where all things are transforming all the time it seems pretty fair to ask the question: “What IS IT about humanity that we want to preserve and expand?” If the answer is “23 chromosomes, 2 eyes, 5-6 feet tall, etc” that seems pretty shallow.

Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we’ve incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can’t really separate them out at this point. Sure, there’s some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there’s already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there’s no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say “cats”, but I know plenty of y’all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you’re not wrong.)

Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.

So he’s basically arguing that the Borg did nothing wrong (note: the Borg do not actually exist, note #2: the Borg are space fascists).

Worthy Successor: A posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea in rationalist circles: that is bad / wrong / irrational to be biased in favor of humans and or humans to succeed in particular. Often the idea is taken as obviously true, but I cannot understand it at all.

Like I don’t care if you can make a computer “better” than me or less sad than me or less likely to eat an innocent shrimp than me. I am not that computer-- if it’s a choice between me and them I’m fighting on team me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make one’s space in the universe or to “selfishly” want self-actualization or to want humans to thrive.

daniel self-flagella, more like

for frame of reference, this is the kind of stuff he tweets

Oh hell yeah, I fucked with the bot enough to get it stuck in a loop and now it’s been rapidly outputting the same character for ten minutes with no safeguard in sight

Enjoy your next bill, fucker

Detrans.ai is on X, the everything app

Modern fascism in one sentence.

ah sweet horrors that are perfectly in my comprehension. what the fuck

whaaaaat the fuuck

D:

Patreon essayed upon going slop, and the creators roundly rejected it

You know, I think there’s an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.

Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor

I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.

there’s been a wave of spam posts on writefreely couple of days back not sure if there’s a relation

Attempting to credit Luigi’s actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.

Still, if that’s where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it’s relevant.

[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:

That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you’re far more ignorant than you let on.

thank you! I feel terrible I haven’t been posting as much here as life’s been finding a way to consistently disrupt my writing and admining time, but mastodon’s format is pretty good for turning disrupted, high-anxiety writing into threads

for those not following it’s https://mas.to/@zzt/

looks like a confluence of dumb shit that may or may not result in anything that means anything or does anything

there was a big blockchain push from 2019 on, basically in response to Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency plan. This directly brought us the e-CNY central bank digital currency. They tried to do this with a blockchain, but quickly realised you weren’t going to scale a blockchain to fucking China. So far e-CNY is just another phone money like Alipay or Tenpay. I suppose it’s a public good to have cash be under public control and not just private control, but it doesn’t really have a compelling use case in its own right.

These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.

Are these agents in the room with us now?

How can all this possibly be enforceable.

article is llm-generated