doubleunplussed

I saw that too, but that's actually even worse on cache - the entire conversation is then a cache miss and needs to be loaded in in order to do the compaction. Then the resulting compacted conversation is also a cache miss.

You ideally want to compact before the conversation is evicted from cache. If you knew you were going to use the conversation again later after cache expiry, you might do this deliberately before leaving a session.

Anthropic could do this automatically before cache expiry, though it would be hard to get right - they'd be wasting a lot of compute compacting conversations that were never going to be resumed anyway.

> "Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole [...]"

Not even that, since so many CoCs are vague enough that someone unprincipled wielding them could be using them for petty interpersonal disputes. Unless I already have reason to trust the accuser, when I see "CoC violation" it tells me there's drama but it doesn't tell me who the asshole is.

That is true but requires some extra assumptions to explain why people don't keep losing weight - because the strongest influence on most people's appetite in the short run is how much of a deficit or surplus they're currently in. Thus as TDEE drops, so does hunger.

In "setpoint theory" there's an additional hunger drive based on whether you are below or above a given level of adiposity - your "setpoint". This is often given as an explanation for why people can't keep weight off, and is the sort of thing you'd need to posit to explain why people on GLP-1 inhibitors can't as easily get to lower levels of adiposity.

One thing I hear people say in places DST was abolished is that the late sunrises in winter are similarly depressing, and that this is something not really appreciated by those who want to abolish DST by having it be summer time year round

I don't think you really understood my comment

I didn't say it did, I said they're aware of it.

Also thought it was worth pointing out that the LW "weird label" predates the label in the comment I replied to.

I just mean that the existence of the human brain is proof that human-level intelligence is possible.

Yes it took billions of years all said and done, but it shows that there are no fundamental limits that prevent this level of intelligence. It even proves it can in principle be done with a few tens of watts a certain approximate amount of computational power.

Some used to think the first AIs would be brain uploads, for this reason. They thought we'd have the computing power and scanning techniques to scan and simulate all the neurons of a human brain before inventing any other architecture capable of coming close to the same level of intelligence. That now looks to be less likely.

Current state of the art AI still operate with less computational power than the human brain, and they are far less efficient at learning that humans are (there is a sense in which a human intelligence takes a merely years to develop - i.e. childhood - rather than billions, this is also a relevant comparison to make). Humans can learn from far fewer examples than current AI can.

So we've got some catching up to do - but humans prove it's possible.

> "recursive self improvement" does not imply "self improvement without bounds"

Obviously not, but thinking that the bounds are going to lie in between where AI intelligence is now and human intelligence I think is unwarranted - as mentioned, humans are unlikely to be the peak of what's possible since evolution did not optimise us for intelligence alone.

If you think the recursive self-improvement people are arguing for improvement without bounds, I think you're simply mistaken, and it seems like you have not made a good faith effort to understand their view.

AI only needs to be somewhat smarter than humans to be very powerful, the only arguments worth having IMHO are over whether recursive self-improvement will lead to AI being a head above humans or not. Diminishing returns will happen at some point (in the extreme due to fundamental physics, if nothing sooner), but whether it happens in time to prevent AI from becoming meaningfully more powerful than humans is the relevant question.

> we do not have a definition of intelligence

This strikes me as an unserious argument to make. Some animals are clearly more intelligent than others, whether you use a shaky definition or not. Pick whatever metric of performance on intellectual tasks you like, there is such a thing as human-level performance, and humans and AIs can be compared. You can't even make your subsequent arguments about AI performance being made worse by various factors unless you acknowledge such performance is measuring something meaningful. You can't even argue against recursive self-improvement if you reject that there is anything measurable that can be improved. I think you should retract this point as it prevents you making your own arguments.

> There is not even any evidence that LLMs will continue increasing as techniques improve, except in the tautological sense that if LLMs don't appear to resemble humans more closely we will call the technique a failure.

I'm pretty confused by this claim - whatever our difficulties defining intelligence, "resembling humans" is not it. Do you not believe there are tasks on which performance can be objectively graded beyond similarity to humans? I think it's quite easy to define tasks that we can judge the success of without being able to do it ourselves. If AI solves all the Millennium Prize Problems, that would be amazing! I don't need to have resolved all issues with a definition of intelligence to be impressed.

Anyway, is there really no evidence? AI having improved so far is not any evidence that it might continue, even a little bit? Are we really helpless to predict whether there will be any better chatbots released in the remainder of this year than we already have?

I do not think we are that helpless - if you entirely reject past trends as an indicator of future trends, and treat them as literally zero evidence at all, then this is simply faulty reasoning. Past trends are not a guarantee of future trends, but neither are they zero evidence. They are a nonzero medium amount of evidence, the strength of which depends on how long the trends have been going on and how well we understand the fundamentals driving them.

> thinking clearly is about the reasoning, not the conclusion.

And I think we have good arguments! You seem to have strong priors that the default is that machines can't reach human intelligence/performance or beyond, and you really need convincing otherwise. I think the fact that we have an existence proof in humans of human intelligence and an algorithm to get there proves it's possible. And I consider it quite unlikely that humans are the peak of intelligence/performance-on-whatever-metrics that is possible given it's now what we were optimised for specifically.

All your arguments about why progress might slow or stop short of superhuman-levels are legitimate and can't be ruled out, and yet these things have not been limiting factors so far despite that they would have been equally valid to make these arguments any time in the past few years.

> no legitimate argument has been presented that implies the conclusion

I mean it's probabilistic, right? I'm expecting something like an 85% chance of AGI before 2040. I don't think it's guaranteed, but when you look at progress so far, and that nature gives us proof (in the form of the human brain) that it's not impossible in any fundamental way, I think that's reasonable. Reasonability arguments and extrapolations are all we have, we can't imply anything definitively.

You think what probability?

Interested in a bet?

I think most in the rationality community (and otherwise in the know) would not say that IQ differences are almost entirely biological - I think they'd say they're about half genetic and half environmental, but that the environmental component is hard to pin to "parenting" or anything else specific. "Non-shared environment" is the usual term.

They'd agree it's largely stable over life, after whatever childhood environmental experiences shape that "non-shared environment" bit.

This is the current state of knowledge in the field as far as I know - IQ is about half genetic, and fairly immutable after adulthood. I think you'll find the current state of the field supports this.

I think you'll indeed find, if you were to seek out the relevant literature, that those claims are more or less true, or at least, are the currently best-supported interpretation available. So I don't think they're assumptions so much as simply current state of the science on the matter, and therefore widely accepted among those who for whatever reason have looked into it (or, more likely, inherited the information from someone they trust who has read up on it).

Interestingly, I think we're increasingly learning that although most aspects of human intelligence seem to correlate with each other (thus the "singular factor" interpretation), the grab-bag of skills this corresponds to are maybe a bit arbitrary when compared to AI. What evolution decided to optimise the hell out of in human intelligence is specific to us, and not at all the same set of skills as you get out of cranking up the number of parameters in an LLM.

Thus LLMs continuing to make atrocious mistakes of certain kinds, despite outshining humans at other tasks.

Nonetheless I do think it's correct to say that the rationalists think intelligence is a real measurable thing, and that although in humans it might be a set of skills that correlate and maybe in AIs it's a different set of skills that correlate (such that outperforming humans in IQ tests is impressive but not definitive), that therefore AI progress can be measured and it is meaningful to say "AI is smarter than humans" at some point. And that AI with better-than-human intelligence could solve a lot of problems, if of course it doesn't kill us all.

Blocking people on Twitter doesn't necessarily imply intolerance of people who disagree with you. People often block for different reasons than disagreement.

Many specific studies on the matter don't replicate, I think the book preceded the replication crisis so this is to be expected, but I don't think that negates the core idea that our brain does some things on autopilot whereas other things take conscious thought which is slower. This is a useful framework to think about cognition, though any specific claims need evidence obviously.

TBH I've learned that even the best pop sci books making (IMHO) correct points tend to have poor citations - to studies that don't replicate or don't quite say what they're being cited to say - so when I see this, it's just not very much evidence one way or the other. The bar is super low.

> The most powerful AI we have now is strictly hardware-dependent

Of course that's the case and it always will be - the cutting edge is the cutting edge.

But the best AI you can run on your own computer is way better than the state of the art just a few years ago - progress is being made at all levels of hardware requirements, and hardware is progressing as well. We now have dedicated hardware in some of our own devices for doing AI inference - the hardware-specificity of AI doesn't mean we won't continue to improve and commoditise said hardware.

> The part that seems indefensible is the unexamined assumptions about LLMs' ability (or AI's ability more broadly) to jump to optimal human ability [...]

I don't think this is at all unexamined. But I think it's risky to not consider the strong possibility when we have an existence proof in ourselves of that level of intelligence, and an algorithm to get there, and no particular reason to believe we're optimal since that algorithm - evolution - did not optimise us for intelligence alone.