New lucidity post: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/

The author is entertaining, and if you’ve not read them before their past stuff is worth a look.

It isn’t clear to me at this point that such research will ever be funded in english-speaking places without a significant set of regime changes… no politician or administrator can resist outsourcing their own thinking to llm vendors in exchange for funding. I expect the US educational system will eventually provide a terrible warning to everyone (except the UK, whose government looks at the US and says “oh my god, that’s horrifying. How can we be more like that?”).

I’m probably just feeling unreasonably pessimistic right now, though.

Some people casting their eyes over this monster of a paper have less than positive thoughts about it. I’m not going to try and summarise the summaries here, but the threads aren’t long (and are vastly shorter than the paper) so reading them wouldn’t take long.

Dr. Cat Hicks on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114690973548997443

Ashley Juavinett on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/analog-ashley.bsky.social/post/3lru5sua3fk25

It is related, inasmuch as it’s all generated from the same prompt and the “answer” will be statistically likely to follow from the “reasoning” text. But it is only likely to follow, which is why you can sometimes see a lot of unrelated or incorrect guff in “reasoning” steps that’s misinterpreted as deliberate lying by ai doomers.

I will confess that I don’t know what shapes the multiple “let me just check” or correction steps you sometimes see. It might just be a response stream that is shaped like self-checking. It is also possible that the response stream is fed through a separate llm session when then pushes its own responses into the context window before the response is finished and sent back to the questioner, but that would boil down to “neural networks pattern matching on each other’s outputs and generating plausible response token streams” rather than any sort of meaningful introspection.

I would expect the actual systems used by the likes of openai to be far more full of hacks and bodges and work-arounds and let’s-pretend prompts that either you or I could imagine.

It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.

It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.

I might be the only person here who thinks that the upcoming quantum bubble has the potential to deliver useful things (but boring useful things, and so harder to build hype on) but stuff like this particularly irritates me:

https://quantumai.google/

Quantum fucking ai? Motherfucker,

• You don’t have ai, you have a chatbot
• You don’t have a quantum computer, you have a tech demo for a single chip
• Even if you had both of those things, you wouldn’t have “quantum ai”
• if you have a very specialist and probably wallet-vaporisingly expensive quantum computer, why the hell would anyone want to glue an idiot chatbot to it, instead of putting it in the hands of competent experts who could actually do useful stuff with it?

Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.

And back on the subject of builder.ai, there’s a suggestion that it might not have been A Guy Instead, and the whole 700 human engineers thing was a misunderstanding.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/

I’m not wholly sure I buy the argument, which is roughly

• people from the company are worried that this sort of new will affect their future careers.
• humans in the loop would have exhibited far too high latency, and getting an llm to do it would have been much faster and easier than having humans try to fake it at speed and scale.
• there were over a thousand “external contractors” who were writing loads of code, but that’s not the same as being Guys Instead.

I guess the question then is: if they did have a good genai tool for software dev… where is it? Why wasn’t Microsoft interested in it?

Turns out some Silicon Valley folk are unhappy that a whole load of waymos got torched, fantasised that the cars could just gun down the protesters, and use genai video to bring their fantasies to some vague approximation of “life”

https://xcancel.com/venturetwins/status/1931929828732907882

The author, Justine Moore is an investment partner at a16z. May her future ventures be incendiary and uninsurable.

(via garbageday.email)

I was reading a post by someone trying to make shell scripts with an llm, and at one point the system suggested making a directory called ~ (which is a shorthand for your home directory in a bunch of unix-alikes). When the user pointed out this was bad, the llm recommended remediation using rm -r ~ which would of course delete all your stuff.

So, yeah, don’t let the approximately-correct machine do things by itself, when a single character substitution can destroy all your stuff.

And JFC, being surprised that something called “YOLO” might be bad? What were people expecting? --all-the-red-flags

LLMs aren’t profitable even if they never had to pay a penny on license fees. The providers are losing money on every query, and can only be sustained by a firehose of VC money. They’re all hoping for a miracle.

(this probably deserves its own post because it seems destined to be a shitshow full of the worst people, but I know nothing about the project or the people currently involved)

Did you know there’s a new fork of xorg, called x11libre? I didn’t! I guess not everyone is happy with wayland, so this seems like a reasonable

It’s explicitly free of any “DEI” or similar discriminatory policies… [snip]

Together we’ll make X great again!

Oh dear. Project members are of course being entirely normal about the whole thing.

Metux, one of the founding contributors, is Enrico Weigelt, who has reasonable opinions like everyone except the nazis were the real nazis in WW2, and also had an anti vax (and possibly eugenicist) rant on the linux kernel mailing list, as you do.

In sure it’ll be fine though. He’s a great coder.

(links were unashamedly pillaged from this mastodon thread: https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/114664107545048173)

Relatedly, the gathering of (useful, actually works in real life, can be used to make products that turn a profit or that people actually want, and sometimes even all of the above at the same time) computer vision and machine learning and LLMs under the umbrella of “AI” is something I find particularly galling.

The eventual collapse of the AI bubble and the subsequent second AI winter is going to take a lot of useful technology with it that had the misfortune to be standing a bit too close to LLMs.

Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND

(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)

The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like

Calls Al coding assistants too risky

Has never tested Al-generated code

Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets

Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?

AI audio transcription is great.

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987

Sean Murray @NoMansSky

Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.

Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.

For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.

https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/

There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.

As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.

There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.

It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.

Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.

AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.

I like that Soylent Green was set in the far off and implausible year of 2022, which coincidentally was the year of ChatGPT’s debut.

I am absolutely certain that letting a hallucination-as-a-service system call the police if it suspects a user is being nefarious is a great plan. This will definitely ensure that all the people threatening their chatbots with death will think twice about their language, and no-one on the internet will ever be naughty ever again. The police will certainly thank anthropic for keeping them up to date with the almost certainly illegal activities of a probably small number of criminal users.

If it were merely a search engine, it risks not being ai enough. We already have search engines, and no one is gonna invest in that old garbage. So instead, it finds something that you might want that’s been predigested for ease of ai consumption (Retrieval), dumps it into the context window alongside your original question (Augmentation) and then bullshits about it (Generation).

Think of it as exactly the same stuff that the LLM folk have already tried to sell you, trying to work around limitations of training and data availability by providing “cut and paste as a service” to generate ever more complex prompts for you, in the hopes that this time you’ll pay more for it than it costs to run.

I like the idea of small communities, but a major issue (possibly the biggest issue) as demonstrated by many mastodon servers over the years is longevity. What happens when your admin gets bored/burns out/dies/goes fash/is replaced with an asshole/is unable or unwilling to moderate effectively?

I don’t particularly like the big mastodon hosts (eg. mastodon.social) but they’re probably still going to be here tomorrow, unlike eg. octodon.social who are winding down because adminning was too much (after 8 years, which was a pretty good run!) and they didn’t have any plans or processes in place to handle this eventuality.

Between that sort of thing and stuff like matrix cryptography being full of holes and large matrix room management being a nightmare and email really being gmail, I’m slowly coming round to the idea that federation is too hard to do well and that if we could just manage a decentralised identity service and decent client software then it wouldn’t matter if servers didn’t talk to each other because we’d still have 90% of what people wanted from federation in the first place. Just a simple matter of engineering, I’m sure.