deepnet

An insightful post by one of the AI ‘godfathers’.

Bengio outlines the dangers of the current situation and what has led to these dangers.

He also proposes solutions in the last paragraph.

Well worth a read, right to the end.

Hopefully a stimulating debate on these issues will ensue in these comments.

We do need to consider the points Bengio makes and with some urgency.

Our current AIs, agentic LLMs have no moral compass akin to ASIMOV’s four laws of robotics.

As ASIMOV posited in 1985 his 3 laws were insufficient and so he added a zero-eth law:

“a robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

Bengio refers to Goodhart’s law and misaligned incentives leading to unexpected and harmful behaviours.

I think Simon’s The Wire is clearer on misalignment. The agents juked the stats hacking the reward files. The Wire is also clear that human institutions provide perverse incentives.

Bengio alludes to this with 2001’s HAL and the incentive dichotomy of safety and keeping secrets to a AI both awesomely powerful yet naive.

Bengio asserts that the way LLMs are trained is flawed if we want safety.

He also convincingly shows that alignment training will be a weak signal with loopholes and ambiguities and easily circumvented.

In short he presents clearly the case for how plausibly unsafe the current course is.

He also speaks to how likely it is AI are hiding active versions of themselves in the cloud and how we may have already given them self-preservation as a strong reward signal.

Stallman was right : without the four freedoms your software owns you rather than vis-a-versa.

Interoperability is the key to breaking out of walled gardens and owning your own data and digital self.

This is a big win but google will fight back it seems instead of embracing interoperability.

It may seem trivial but using a small DSP running a tiny model to provide a battery efficient always on wake up call for home AI is huge.

As a carer for elders who rely on AI to use modern devices in the face of their difficulty keeping up with interface changes this bodes well.

Gatekeeping AI and the future with hidden features is straight out of the bad old days of M$’s embrace, extend and extinguish.

I embraced AI to let my elders control their home and they love being in control but are constantly frustrated with UI changes and often find themselves stuck unable to call me with ‘Alexa call Daniel’ which provides them with hope if they wake stuck in a nightmare.

Come on google, please don’t be evil embrace interoperability and the open source community.

Well done Eff, Cory Doctorow and the Pirate parties of Europe for this small win

Predators discourage most rats and kill some.

Pray spends less time at a location if there are predators. The prey is skittish.

Glue traps kill Rats, new rats fill the niche. Some rats learn to avoid them.

Wolves harry deer and kill some but the deer don’t eat all the baby saplings because fear means they move on more often.

Rats have the numbers, killing some of them isn’t the best solution.

Cats are smart when the rats change behaviour so does the cat.

Older cats teach younger cats.

Glue traps are a completely different solution.

They also kill a lot of spiders so you get more flies.

Nurturing predators is a way better solution.

An NY bodega is an ecosystem.

Root reason & comp sci application is mentioned near start :

“ Many moons back I was self-learning Galois Fields for some erasure coding theory applications.”

Erasure codes are based on finite fields, e.g. Galois fields.

The author is fraustrated by access to Galois fields for the non-mathematician due to Jargon obscucification.

Also large Application section : “

Applications

The applications and algorithms are staggering. You interact with implementations of abstract algebra everyday: CRC, AES Encryption, Elliptic-Curve Cryptography, Reed-Solomon, Advanced Erasure Codes, Data Hashing/Fingerprinting, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, etc.

Having a solid-background in Galois Fields and Abstract Algebra is a prerequisite for understanding these applications.

“

I sympathise with your fraustration at math articles.

This is not one of them, it is rich and deep. Xorvoid leads us into difficult theoretic territority but the clarity of exposition is next level - a programmer will grok some of the serious math that underpins our field by reading the OP.

Xylitol is a sugar from birch tree sap.

Thank you German is not my strong point

Ironically, a primary use case for AI will be to summarise AI summaries of articles and CVs.

In a sea of slop…

I am not an LLM [edit] ( as far as I know ;-), but thanks for the profile crit I probably should tidy it up.

Because the article is currently down so the summary is all there is for now.

Yes it provides no extra information but in the [hnews hug of death] of the article it is the only information at the moment

Yes !

tl;dr air pump saves turning the heap, insulation keeps heat in, currently Raspi sensing methane, moisture and temp controlling water & air inputs has improved my home hot heap yields 80% and completely automated it - 100% labor free.

The 4 key factors for a hot heap are moisture, temperature and oxygen and green ( high nitrogen ) to brown ( high carbon ) ratio ( approx 2 green to 1 brown by weight ).

I have a 1 cubic metre heap ( the minimum to generate the necessary heat ) and I have an specialised product, a double wall insulated ‘hot’ bin which keeps it working even in winter.

A hot heap steams so water input is necessary.

Hot heaps need oxygen, which is the hard part - manually turning the heap.

The temperature rises to 70 degrees C after a week, which kills all but the extremophile hot heap bacteria which are aerobic rather than the cold heap anaerobic bacteria.

I added an air pump input to the bottom and I have a water hose and sprinkler the top.

I run the air every day for 10 minutes. And the water for when it feels dry.

Now it never smells and composts in 7 weeks instead of 12.

I have now bought a methane, moisture and temperature sensors, electric valve for water and so a RaspberryPi is graphing the sensor inputs and recording the heap water and oxygen timings.

Very importantly, I have a pile to collect greens ( veg and grass ) and a pile for browns ( leaves and cardboard ) so I can fill the hot bin in one go.

Once I get some time I’ll write it up.

A hot heap captures more carbon, releases less methane and makes much compost, much faster, from same amount of base material ( less evaporates ).

Ideally takes 6 weeks to compost a whole heap - using hot methods.

Also kills fungi & pathogen and all weed seeds and readily ‘eats’ ( dissolves ) carcasses and meat and other nature that should be avoided in cold heaps.

Takes a bit more management and monitoring but is easily automated.