pharke

Given a choice between pre-industrial life and our current lifestyle, the choice is obvious.

Explain how a language model can “evolve” into AGI.

LLMs will never be AGI

We currently live in a world that has been “unrecognizably transformed” by the industrial revolution and yet here we are.

Could’ve said the same for any major technological advance. Luddism is not a solution. If these models are easily run on a laptop then yes some people are going to hurt themselves or others but we already have laws that deal with people doing bad things. The world is not going to end though. Your Taiwan scenario has a much higher probability of ending the world than this yet you seem unconcerned about that.

They charge per 1k tokens so you must have high volume somehow, are you maxing out the prompt length every time? That’s the only thing I can think of besides sending a ridiculous number of requests that would cost that much in an evening.

You could have saved some money by writing tests. How much text were you sending at a time? I’ve been summarizing multiple 500 word chunks per query in my app as well as generating embeddings and haven’t broken $10 over the course of a couple weeks.

> I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline

> ...the Catholic Church, threatened by the spread of the Protestant Reformation, took ‘be fruitful and multiply’ seriously and the purpose of marriage became explicitly multiplicative

> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several

Blaming the Catholic church specifically for high birth rates is a misstep especially since the author compares to England which has a long and varied history with Protestantism. The argument should be reframed around religiosity in general or he should show data for England that indicates a difference in fertility during the periods of stronger and weaker Catholic influence in England.

It's very much in their interest, if the information their models provide is impossible to verify then it severely limits its uses. You essentially can't use it as a source for anything that requires any type of citation or reliability. That's a huge handicap for selling it to businesses and researchers. The general problem of determining what training data was used to produce an output is an open problem in ML and one that is being very actively worked on since it would greatly further the field.

You believe correctly that ChatGPT is not capable of showing sources, it's currently impossible to do but we were discussing Tomorrow so I included it as a possibility. You could potentially hack it in now using traditional search or nearest neighbours but it wouldn't be 100% accurate, probably not even 50%, it would just show a bag of similar texts so not really worth doing.

I'd still be in the market for a book even if we had a perfect LLM that could answer every question I had with impeccable accuracy. I read books because I want to find out about things I don't know that I don't know. It's pretty hard to find those things if you just do question response. It's like a graph, if you start at one node it may take you a very long time to traverse the graph to another node but if you have some outside source that gives you the address of a new node you can just jump straight to it.

Why would someone only ask an LLM questions when they were in the market to buy a book? Most people I know don't buy books in order to look up the answer to a question, sure some people buy reference books and use them but that's not really what we think of when talking about authors and books. If I'm in the market for a book, I'm looking to read a book, not query something or someone for answers. I think your example should go like this:

Tomorrow: 1) you do research, write posts, publish a book, 2) it is all consumed by a for-profit operated LLM. 3) People ask LLM to get answers to some related question or interest 4) They ask the LLM for a list of recent books that go in depth on the topic or are in the genre etc. 5) Your name comes up in the list 6) Goto step 2 from Yesterday

You can also invert this and say that without a system like ChatGPT it is physically impossible for most people to find or use those 570GB of data. A search engine can only get you so far and over time they are becoming less useful as the net floods with junk content. If you don't even know what terms to search for then ChatGPT wins out since you can start with a very simple question and then interrogate it further on details it produces. The best way to think about it is as a better search engine, a fully interactive one that also has some degree of its own agency when it comes to synthesizing data. It could be better, it would be nice to have the option to show sources for the output so that you can verify the facts or do your own research.

I'm of the opinion that all kids books should be heavy on metaphor and allegory and all of the other important and joyful aspects of language. Restricting children to books that have been "written at their level" or "made easy to read" is doing them a disservice. It's no wonder so many people grow up to be seldom readers if their first exposure to reading is saccharin pablum that presents no challenge, no meaning, no mystery, and no danger. A proper children's book should be one which an adult can also read and enjoy if they give way to that childlike wonder that still lives within them.

I've also played a few indie VR games that are using it. It's not like you have to be some technical wizard to enable it, you just need to make sure you aren't stomping on your FPS with a bunch of other stuff at the same time.