eaglelamp

Call it what you want, but if the companies who received the orders are able to treat them as assets/income then the overall macro effect will be the same as with debt: leverage. If funding begins to dry up it may not be Anthropic or Google facing a liquidity crunch, but someone will be.

The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?

Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.

What do you mean by "fundamental truth"? If LLMs produce a collection of proved facts this doesn't sound like what I would call fundamental. It may be the case that there is no such thing as "fundamental truth", that the world is just a blizzard of facts, but in that case we would need to give up on using it as a guiding star.

Arguments for LLM consciousness are a Trojan horse for strengthening the rights of corporations. How could a model trained, controlled, and operated by a private corporation be anything except for an extension of that same corporation?

This has ramifications for assessing their consciousness as well. Conscious experience does not pause as you wait for input from a puppet master.

The first section of this post responding to "Meta, Google, and Microsoft are dying" is completely misrepresenting Zitron's arguments in the linked video. Zitron is making essentially an enshitification argument concerning Google and Meta. He's not talking about whether they will be able to squeeze out more revenue in the short run, but how they are willing to abuse their users to ensure that they do. Citing increased revenue for these companies is not arguing against Zitron's point.

Luu also fixates on Zitron mentioning Prabhakar Raghavan, but then proceeds to agree with Zitron's core point that Google has intentionally degraded it's search product to maximize revenue. Maybe Raghavan is not solely responsible, but it seems fair to hold him accountable for trends that accelerated under his leadership.

My cognition is outmatched by predicting the impact of throwing a brick over my neighbor's fence. I have no idea if it will land harmlessly in a patch of grass or fracture her skull. Once I've thrown the brick, even if I see my neighbor enter her yard, my reactions are too slow to save her.

I'm not the wisest man, but I'm wise enough not to throw the brick and see what happens.

Similarly OAI should have the wisdom to see that deploying a hazardous swarm of agents with access to the public internet could result in harms, and that those harms would manifest quicker than humans can react, but they unleashed the swarm anyway.

I'm not.

As it stands LLMs are not intelligent, they have no agency, they only produce output in response to input. Ultimately this input comes from a human who is an intelligent agent and should be held responsible for the consequences.

Humanity has created and tamed many dangerous tools. Creating a fantasy world where LLMs are super intelligent and beyond the control of any mere mortal isn't going to help us build the norms that minimize their harms.

Of course there is more to be learned by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it. I'm sure we could learn a ton about infectious diseases by designing new ones and unleashing them on the world, but there are very good reasons why we don't.

Most of the benefits could have been gained from a network isolated from the internet. OAI could have deployed servers to exploit and methods for inter-agent communication on such a network easily. They could have even worked with partners to deploy cloned versions of their infrastructure in this sand-boxed environment.

The only problems with an isolated network approach are: it takes some amount of effort, and it doesn't create another "AI apocalypse" news cycle.

From Wikipedia:

>After graduation, she worked on Wall Street, first at JPMorgan Chase and then Lehman Brothers. She later joined the United States Foreign Service.

Looks pretty wall street to me.

Also you regarding Claude usage limits:

> Before the doomers come in, you get $200 in API credits every month for claude -p usage. Usage counts against those API credits.

So which is it $300/day is trivial to consume or $200/month is a completely reasonable limit, it can't be both.

Inference might be unreasonable for a royalty agreement, but, in assessing damages, it is certainly relevant.

"I made enough copies for everyone" isn't a valid defense for copyright infringement.

You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely.

Likewise with AI the appearance of reasoning without the substance could lead to boring exchanges of plausible slop rather than meaningful discourse.

China is not the only nation that depends on Gulf oil, all of SEA does as well. If the strait remains closed it will destabilize the region and diminish the prestige of the US, and with the US military focused on the strait China will benefit.

Current US interventions should be read as a sign of weakness - an inability to shape events without resorting to naked aggression. Global hegemony can not be maintained through force alone.

No one ever asks how much it costs Facebook or Uber to serve requests because it is irrelevant, they set prices to maximize their profit like any good monopolist. Similarly the future cartel of big providers will charge their captive users whatever they can get away with, not the cost of inference.

The current discourse around "AI", swarms of agents producing mountains of inscrutable spaghetti, is a tell that this is the future the big players are looking for. They want to create a captive market of token tokers who have no hope of untangling the mess they made when tokens were cheap without buying even more at full price.