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Comment Re:Existential threat (Score 1) 76

Are these AI companies saying that Russia and China (and every human beings on Earth) are totally justified to bomb these AI companies and their datacenters to a crater to stop them from destroying all humans?

China is a major developer of AI, so that's obviously a very stupid take. They would have to bomb themselves first.

Comment Re:Hey guys, I have a great idea! (Score 1) 107

What exactly *are* you thinking here? That Microsoft expected and wanted Twitter trolls to turn Tay into a Nazi? That Google wanted a black George Washington? That people just expected LLMs to realize they're being tested on alignment and give different answers when they think they're being quizzed and by who? Do you actually believe what you're writing here?

I was involved in early RLHF (was writing a plugin for AUTOMATIC to let users rate responses to create an aggregate dataset to use for open-source post training). Worked for months on it. Never once occurred to me that it might make models obsequeous. I knew other people who were involved on RLHF. Not a single one ever suggested that it might. It was not obvious in foresight. When you start with "Models behave like X", you expect, in the future, them to behave like "Models behave like X, but just smarter", unless you deliberately try to change the behavior.

Comment Re:Hey guys, I have a great idea! (Score 1) 107

You realize that open source and the research community exists as well, correct?

I'll repeat: nobody was expecting this.

There is no grand overarching plan led by a shadowy cabal who has everything plotted out decades in advance with a high level of knowledge as to how everything will play out. Everyone is stumbling through the dark here. Visibility is only vaguely one step ahead.

When Word2Vec was written, the goal was text compression. The crazy properties of latent spaces were an entirely unexpected property.

When Transformers came out, it was intended to be translation software. That's it. But there were little hints at the end of the paper where they tried it on other tasks that suggested, hey, maybe this could be used for a lot more than just translation.

When GPT-2 came out, it was mostly an academic exercise, not really "useful" in most regards. But people, playing with it, started realizing that it could "almost" - not very reliably, low quality, etc - do a lot of different tasks. And it actually kinda could do some useful tasks, like summarization.

When ChatGPT came out, there were some thoughts about using it for simple tasks, but the fact that it could actually write, say, trivial bash scripts or subroutines with reasonable reliability led to a reaction of, whoa, maybe if we improve this, we can really open up a role for programming.

When the first agentic harnesses came out, thoughts of "vibe coding" were pretty far away (the term was only even coined in February 2025!). You'd ask for changes, and then review the diff; they'd do a good job with small projects but struggle more and more as codebase size grew and really needed to be babysit (honestly, it was kind of a hair-pulling experience, even though it did save a lot of time with certain things). But it was visible with each new release that the amount of babysitting you had to do got less and less, and suddenly we could see a path to where anyone can just type in something and a program comes out.

All we can do is forsee one step ahead, through the haze. We've never done anything like this before. There are no great oracles out there who can see the future here. Sorry. Everyone is half blind.

Comment Re:I'm still wondering (Score 3, Informative) 145

People ranted about the Epstein files during the Biden administration, now politically opposite people are ranting about the Epstein files during the trump administration.

False. People on both sides ranted about the Epstein files during the Biden administration, now maggots have gotten suspiciously quiet, even the ones who haven't obviously suffered massive brain damage and have to be wheeled around making taxidermy turtle faces.

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