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> Perhaps this is why our generation often approaches technology with a mix of fluency and skepticism This resonates with me, as I was just last night telling

by efnx 2y ago

> Perhaps this is why our generation often approaches technology with a mix of fluency and skepticism This resonates with me, as I was just last night telling a friend about the grift that is “the singularity”. Remember that? The tech bros were really concerned about that for a hot moment, then their stock went up… …but nobody seems worried about the singularity anymore.

exe34 2y ago
isn't that because a lot of the predictions are now taken for granted and it's no longer interesting? only a few days ago somebody posted a plot of how much of their code for an AI helper is written by AI and I think it reached 80% or something. We're not quite at the point where deepseek comes up with the next version of deepseek, but as more intelligence gets distilled into smaller models, we can expect more and more people to start trying to build a better AI and eventually we should expect take off to happen.
andyjohnson0 2y ago
I'm not sure why you call it "grift". Who profited? To me it was just an interesting bit of speculation popularised by an academic and sci-fi author (Vernor Vinge) - which is the very thing such people should be doing imo. And the history of it goes back to Ulam and Von Neumann, and maybe Turing. Hardly grifters.
- efnx 2y ago
  Sorry, the people who came up with the concept are not grifters. The folks who own AI companies claiming to be afraid of the “very imminent” singularity are the grifters, I highly doubt they truly believe that. And they have profited from this AI hype.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Some of the owners, sure. Musk can't have it both ways, "AI is summoning the demon, and also I own a humanoid robot factory, AI for autonomous cars, and am training my own LLM now that a company I part funded then stopped supporting made a famous one before I did". But there's still a lot of alignment research going on, to make sure we can even tell if the AI we have now has the equivalent of an evil bit (which they definitely observably and reproducible demonstrate having) that is set to "evil".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ben_w 2y ago
> but nobody seems worried about the singularity anymore. A lot of us still are. Just because the news cycle moved, doesn't mean Yudkowsky et al isn't still screaming into the void. Two weeks ago: https://youtu.be/K8p8_VlFHUk?si=RpatWnlb1z8aKzhN https://youtu.be/K8p8_VlFHUk?si=RpatWnlb1z8aKzhN

by efnx 2y ago

exe34 2y ago

isn't that because a lot of the predictions are now taken for granted and it's no longer interesting? only a few days ago somebody posted a plot of how much of their code for an AI helper is written by AI and I think it reached 80% or something. We're not quite at the point where deepseek comes up with the next version of deepseek, but as more intelligence gets distilled into smaller models, we can expect more and more people to start trying to build a better AI and eventually we should expect take off to happen.

andyjohnson0 2y ago

I'm not sure why you call it "grift". Who profited? To me it was just an interesting bit of speculation popularised by an academic and sci-fi author (Vernor Vinge) - which is the very thing such people should be doing imo. And the history of it goes back to Ulam and Von Neumann, and maybe Turing. Hardly grifters.

efnx 2y ago
Sorry, the people who came up with the concept are not grifters. The folks who own AI companies claiming to be afraid of the “very imminent” singularity are the grifters, I highly doubt they truly believe that. And they have profited from this AI hype.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Some of the owners, sure. Musk can't have it both ways, "AI is summoning the demon, and also I own a humanoid robot factory, AI for autonomous cars, and am training my own LLM now that a company I part funded then stopped supporting made a famous one before I did". But there's still a lot of alignment research going on, to make sure we can even tell if the AI we have now has the equivalent of an evil bit (which they definitely observably and reproducible demonstrate having) that is set to "evil".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ben_w 2y ago

> but nobody seems worried about the singularity anymore. A lot of us still are. Just because the news cycle moved, doesn't mean Yudkowsky et al isn't still screaming into the void. Two weeks ago: https://youtu.be/K8p8_VlFHUk?si=RpatWnlb1z8aKzhN https://youtu.be/K8p8_VlFHUk?si=RpatWnlb1z8aKzhN