An excerpt has surfaced from the AI2027 podcast with siskind and the ex AI researcher, where the dear doctor makes the case for how an AGI could build an army of terminators in a year if it wanted.

It goes something like: OpenAI is worth as much as all US car companies (except tesla) combined, so it could buy up every car factory and convert it to a murderbot factory, because that’s kind of like what the US gov did in WW2 to build bombers, reaching peak capacity in three years, and AGI would obviously be more efficient than a US wartime gov so let’s say one year, generally a completely unassailable syllogism from very serious people.

Even /r/ssc commenters are calling him out about the whole AI doomer thing getting more noticeably culty than usual edit: The thread even features a rare heavily downvoted siskind post, -10 at the time of this edit.

The latter part of the clip is the interviewer pointing out that there might be technological bottlenecks that could require upending our entire economic model before stuff like curing cancer could be achieved, positing that if we somehow had AGI-like tech in the 1960s it would probably have to use its limited means to invent the entire tech tree that leads to late 2020s GPUs out of thin air, international supply chains and all, before starting on the road to becoming really useful.

Siskind then goes “nuh-uh!” and ultimately proceeds to give Elon’s metaphorical asshole a tongue bath of unprecedented depth and rigor, all but claiming that what’s keeping modern technology down is the inability to extract more man hours from Grimes’ ex, and that’s how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don’t need sleep. And didn’t you know, having non-experts micromanage everything in a project is cool and awesome actually.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 day ago

    I couldn’t find further holes in it

    Here’s a couple:

    1. iirc it claims we’ll have reliable “agents” in mid 2025. Fellas it’s almost June in the year of the “agents” and frankly I don’t see shit. We are not starting strong here.
    2. they predict a 10k person anti-AI protest in DC. For context, the recent “Hands Off” protest in DC saw 100k person turnout. Israel / Palestine protest saw 300K in DC in 2023. A ten-thousand-person protest isn’t really anything out of the ordinary? It’s almost like the authors have never been to a protest, don’t understand collective action because they live in a bubble or something? But they assure us, this document is thoroughly researched maybe their point was self-deprecating, “woe is us, only 10K people show up :(”
    3. When they get into their super agi fanfic, they describe Agent-n as “never stops training” continuously learning from the environment. Like the only way I read this is that somehow, we discover paradigm shifting algorithmic discoveries by coincidence in the next couple years that make DL obsolete so we can abandon train-inference approaches and instead have this embodied entity that is constantly taking feedback from the environment to “train” but the system itself is still described under the massive data center heavy DL framework. It’s like they know that bio intelligence has this continuous feedback mechanism, so obviously ai researchers will just patch that in, how hard can it be?
    4. Ong, i swear they just put in there at some point “hallucinations are solved” the thing they have been claiming will be solved in the next month since 2023.
    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      23 hours ago

      Microsoft’s Visual Studio says it’s going to incorporate coding ‘agents’ as soon as maybe the next minor version. I can’t really see them buying up car factories or beating pokemon, but agent- as an AI marketing term is definitely a part of the current hype cycle.

    • scruiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 day ago

      Fellas it’s almost June in the year of the “agents” and frankly I don’t see shit.

      LLM agents can beat Pokemon… if you give them enough customized tools and prompting that with the same number of lines of instruction you could just directly code a bot that beats Pokemon without an LLM in the first place. And you don’t mind the LLM agent playing much much worse than literal children.

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 hours ago

        Kind of knew that after Claude plays pokemon went semi viral, it was going to immediately get goodhart’d. i also saw the usual doomers be like BY END OF YEAR AGENTS WILL BEAT POKEMON, which I thought was a severe underestimate at the time- they were undoubtably basing their projection based off the Anthropic people who posted a little chart showing how far each version of Claude made it, waiting for pokemon playing skill to emerge from larger and larger models, instead of thinking, hmm they are iteratively refining the customized tools as it gets stuck. Then after Gemini ‘beat’ the game I read a disappointed response from an RL guy that said after trying to replicate the results, they concluded Googe’s set up was basically 90% harness for the model, 10% model despite the Google team basically implying it was raw pixels-to-action.

        • scruiser@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 hours ago

          Yep. If you’re looking for a snappy summary of this situation, this reddit comment had a nice summary. An open source LLM Pokemon harness/scaffold has 4.8k lines of python, and is missing features essential to Gemini’s harness. Whereas an open source LUA script to play Pokemon is 7.2k lines, was written in 2014, and it consistently speed runs the game in under two hours.

    • mountainriver@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 day ago
      1. You get better at being smart by INT-grinding. A machine could be INT-grinding the whole time. It’s like in Oblivion if you wanted to grind Speed you could go into a city, stand in a doorway and place something heavy on the jump key on the keyboard. Then while you take care of the dishes or something, your character grinds. But for INT!

      If it gets smart enough it will start finding hacks, like those INT- increasing potions in Morrowind that increased your Alchemy so you could make even better INT-potions.

      It might even get smart enough to escape the Elder Scrolls; and start playing another game!