You literally were LMAO
Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.
Literally a direct quote. In what world is this not talking about LLMs?
Did you read the article, or the actual research paper? They present a mathematical proof that any hypothetical method of training an AI that produces an algorithm that performs better than random chance could also be used to solve a known intractible problem, which is impossible with all known current methods. This means that any algorithm we can produce that works by training an AI would run in exponential time or worse.
The paper authors point out that this also has severe implications for current AI, too–since the current AI-by-learning method that underpins all LLMs is fundamentally NP-hard and can’t run in polynomial time, “the sample-and-time requirements grow non-polynomially (e.g. exponentially or worse) in n.” They present a thought experiment of an AI that handles a 15-minute conversation, assuming 60 words are spoken per minute (keep in mind the average is roughly 160). The resources this AI would require to process this would be 60*15 = 900. The authors then conclude:
“Now the AI needs to learn to respond appropriately to conversations of this size (and not just to short prompts). Since resource requirements for AI-by-Learning grow exponentially or worse, let us take a simple exponential function O(2n ) as our proxy of the order of magnitude of resources needed as a function of n. 2^900 ∼ 10^270 is already unimaginably larger than the number of atoms in the universe (∼10^81 ). Imagine us sampling this super-astronomical space of possible situations using so-called ‘Big Data’. Even if we grant that billions of trillions (10 21 ) of relevant data samples could be generated (or scraped) and stored, then this is still but a miniscule proportion of the order of magnitude of samples needed to solve the learning problem for even moderate size n.”
That’s why LLMs are a dead end.
I’d give strange new worlds a pass as being better than Orville, but yeah, it’s definitely the exception to the rule.
Yeah, there are so many moments I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and yell at various people while shaking their shoulders.
For the love of God, Barack, don’t make fun of Trump at the White House correspondent’s dinner, he’ll run for president to dismantle all you’ve built up in revenge and HE WILL WIN.
Please, Ruth, I beg you to step down now while there’s still an opportunity for you to be replaced with another liberal justice. If you don’t, your legacy will be undone I’m under four years and it will herald the end of American democracy.
Please, Barack, don’t let them steal a supreme court seat like this, you have to force the issue while there’s still time or else you will watch the heritage foundation gloat about the second American revolution against the left while a corrupt court anoints the president as above the law of the land.
For the love of God, Biden, please run in 2016, I know you’re still grieving over the death of your son, but if you don’t you’ll be grieving over the death of your entire country.
For the love of God, Hillary, please step aside and let Sanders be the candidate, I know you agreed with Obama that he would give you SoS in return for you running after him but the Republican propaganda machine has made you toxic.
Barack, you can’t sweep this Russian interference under the rug, it’s too important to ignore, please!
I beg you, Hillary, don’t ignore the rust belt, your numbers are weaker than they should be there and they are too important to lose, the literal future of democracy is at stake.
For fuck’s sake, Comey, don’t reopen this stupid email investigation two weeks before the election, we both know there’s nothing on that fucking laptop. You need to shut down the trumpy faction before they leak its existence because they are trying to interfere with the election, and if Trump wins he will reward you with a pink slip while gleefully dragging the country to a dictatorship.
This timeline could’ve been so easily avoided, if only one variable out of dozens was different. But here we are, with me wondering where I can even flee to in order to escape the coming dictatorship.
The hush money payments were before the election so they were still felonies. It’s possible Trump wouldn’t have bothered hiding them like he did if he lost, but in any case there wouldn’t have been the appetite to prosecute him.
As for the coup, he absolutely would have tried it, definitely through filing lawsuits, and probably up to the same fake electors scheme and the riot, but it’s debatable how far he would’ve gotten. Definitely not as far as he did in reality, though.
Hoo boy, it’s a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn’t be in as much legal peril as he is now (it’s likely there wouldn’t have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn’t have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th–he was foreshadowing that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.
The world where Trump doesn’t attempt a coup isn’t very interesting, at least for this thought experiment–he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn’t try to run again (or loses in the primary because he’s a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of “statesmanship,” and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.
The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It’s highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.
In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he’s thwarted to the point where he doesn’t (or can’t) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all–it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it’s likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton–something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn’t her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015–the dominant force in the party.
Aside from that, the court wouldn’t be as openly corrupt as it is now. It’d be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn’t have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.
Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.
For what it’s worth, I played the NES release of DQ1, and then a translation of the japan-only SNES release of DQ2 recently (I actually beat DQ2 last week) and I found DQ2 to be a much better game than DQ1 overall. DQ1 was… interesting, but it was very much a game that did not respect the player’s time in the least, to the point of expecting the player to fight literally hundreds of battles in order to grind up enough money and experience to afford the gear. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that the battle system was so rudimentary and so grindy that the gameplay felt more like it was focused on resource management–there was a tension in deciding whether you could afford to take another fight, or if you needed to return to town and spend money sleeping at an inn to heal (setting your grind back at least 1-2 fights with how piddly gold and XP drops were), optimizing efficiency in spending your MP to heal vs. the risk of dying to the next monster, etc.
DQ2 meanwhile was a much more robust and much less grindy game–the simple addition of multiple party members and multiple enemies in a single battle meant that your gold and XP gains were multiplied over the first game. While it still demanded grinding, it was much more reasonable about it, and it felt much more like a “modern” JRPG like you’re used to seeing.
Really? Fusion stops holding your hand around the time you get to sector 4, but it’s strictly linear until you’re literally about to go fight the final boss–the game explicitly blocks you from backtracking to areas that aren’t immediately plot-relevant.
OK, so I actually know a fair bit about this series since I went through (a good chunk of) it semi-recently myself!
The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan, where your party is yourself, maybe a few other humans, and most importantly, demons that you recruit, level up, and combine together to make new, more powerful ones. Like someone else said, SMT is sort of like Pokemon, but instead of fighting with cute electric rats and furry bait, you fight alongside various mythological figures (…and furry bait). The SNES games are first-person, grid-based dungeon crawlers, but later games largely drop the grid-based aspect.
Anyway, I started out with Shin Megami Tensei 1 on the SNES. It was pretty darn enjoyable, though I used a walkthrough–if you play the SNES games, I strongly recommend doing this, because both games are basically one giant labyrinth with an overworld. A walkthrough is pretty much mandatory to navigate which demons are worth recruiting and merging together, and to find the various secrets and treasures scattered throughout the world. A nice thing about the first game is that the level scaling is well-paced; as long as you don’t run away from battles and are smart about your recruitment and demon fusions, you should generally be able to keep up with the power level of your enemies.
As for SMT 2… well, it spikes the difficulty up much higher than the first game. to the point where I actually wound up giving up about 10-15 hours in, even with a walkthrough and using save states. I had reached a point where the enemies were outleveling my demons and killing them over and over, I couldn’t easily afford to revive them, and I was having trouble recruiting new demons to merge with my existing party into more powerful ones–there were multiple instances where even when I used save states to explore the demon’s entire recruitment dialogue tree, it either took my valuable items/money and ran away, or attacked me. Forced to choose between sitting and grinding for at least 5-10 hours, or moving on, I moved on.
SMT 3 on the PS2 is the first real “modern” shin megami tensei game, and it introduces the press turn mechanic that forms the core of the mainline SMT series from that point on. Press turns work by giving each side a number of actions they can take based on how many members are in the party–in other words, if you have 4 members active in the party, you have 4 actions. If you hit an enemy’s elemental weakness, you’re given bonus actions you can take (up to a max of 2x your base actions), and if you miss an enemy, or attack them with an element they nullify, reflect, or absorb, you lose turns. Crucially, this also applies to your opponents as well, making combat tense, tactical, and deep: your demon is the only one that uses ice magic, which the enemy is weak to, but your demon is weak to lightning and the enemy can use that element. Do you switch out this demon to cover your own weakness, or keep it in to better exploit the enemy’s weakness? Remember, if the demon dies, you not only have to spend a turn summoning a replacement, but your baseline actions go from 4 to 3, so you’re penalized twice.
Admittedly, I didn’t play SMT 3 myself, because it has That One Fucking Spell called Beast Eye, which is something only opposing demons can use, and spends a single action to grant the AI two turns (or Dragon Eye, which grants four turns). This gives SMT 3 a reputation for being incredibly difficult, even by the standards of SMT, and frankly I had no appetite for that after having just given up on SMT 2 over difficulty. That said, everybody I speak to who has played SMT 3 says that it’s one of the best RPGs on the PS2, however, so it’s still highly recommended, and later games mercifully got rid of Beast/Dragon Eye.
SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.
There’s also Persona. Where SMT is a post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler, Persona (at least from 3 onwards) focuses much more heavily on time management. You play as a Japanese high school student in Persona, so a lot of your activities are based around juggling a schedule: attending classes, going to after-school activities, working part-time jobs, spending time with your various party members to build relationships, and saving the world in between. Persona is also different in that instead of having mythological figures fight alongside you as distinct party members, they’re instead Personas that act more like Stands from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure–they just give humans the ability to cast magic. Notably, the main character is typically the only one who can change their persona-- your companions all have their own persona, but they’re stuck with the one they have, which conveniently gives them their own static elemental strengths/weaknesses and roles. The other big difference is that (up until Persona 5) the main dungeons were more roguelike, procedurally-generated designs, than the static designs of mainline SMT.
If you decide to play Persona, I’d start with Persona 3–either Reload (the recent remaster) or Persona 3 Portable (which has some extra content like that wasn’t included with the remaster for some godforsaken reason). DO NOT start with Persona 5 like I did–to be blunt, it’s way more polished than 3 or 4, and it’ll be hard to go back and enjoy the previous games afterwards. You can also technically start with Persona 1 and 2, but they’re waaay different than the later entries–they lack the time management/dating sim aspect entirely, and honestly there isn’t a whole lot of reason to play them unless you wanna beat the shit out of Hitler for some reason.
My thinking in regards to the humor is that it’s very strongly late 90s/early 00s edge humor. A lot of the game’s humor is based in cute, cartoony characters swearing, drinking, fucking (off-screen), and being maimed and blown up into gruesome chunks of low-poly meat. It’s also very British–Rare is based in the UK, and it really shows through in this game, from the characters’ accents, to the whole game’s plot being kicked off by Conker getting lost while drunkely stumbling home from a pub that wouldn’t be out of place in an English village.
If you’re a fan of, or nostalgic for, the style of edgy shock humor animation from that period–things like classic South Park, Happy Tree Friends, (jfc how do I say this without getting automodded) R-worded Animal Babies, or Scoundrels (a British skit comedy show starring puppet animals), this game will be right up your alley. Even if you’re not, I’d still say to give it a try–underneath the swearing, poop jokes, dated movie references, and low-fidelity gore, it’s still a platformer by Rare while they were at the top of their game.
The problem is that there’s no incentive for employees to stay beyond a few years. Why spend months or years training someone if they leave after the second year?
But then you have to question why employees aren’t loyal any longer, and that’s because pensions and benefits have eroded, and your pay doesn’t keep up as you stay longer at a company. Why stay at a company for 20, 30, or 40 years when you can come out way ahead financially by hopping jobs every 2-4 years?
The guy apparently rescaled the models to make them similar in size, which, idk if I’d call that altering
I still think it’s kind of a BS claim though
It makes sense to judge how closely LLMs mimic human learning when people are using it as a defense to AI companies scraping copyrighted content, and making the claim that banning AI scraping is as nonsensical as banning human learning.
But when it’s pointed out that LLMs don’t learn very similarly to humans, and require scraping far more material than a human does, suddenly AIs shouldn’t be judged by human standards? I don’t know if it’s intentional on your part, but that’s a pretty classic example of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You can’t have it both ways.
The entire point of the season 1 finale is that if Pike’s fate gets retconned it’ll turn out very, very poorly. If Pike doesn’t end up the way he did in TOS, it means he doesn’t vacate the captain’s chair on the Enterprise, and when the events of Balance of Terror happens, Pike’s inclination towards compromise and peaceful negotiations leads the Romulan empire to conclude that the Federation is weak and declare war, causing the death of millions. Future!Pike even says at the end “every timeline where you don’t end up in that accident ends up with something horrible happening, and someone else taking your place.”
Who even knows? For whatever reason the board decided to keep quiet, didn’t elaborate on its reasoning, let Altman and his allies control the narrative, and rolled over when the employees inevitably revolted. All we have is speculation and unnamed “sources close to the matter,” which you may or may not find credible.
Even if the actual reasoning was absolutely justified–and knowing how much of a techbro Altman is (especially with his insanely creepy project to combine cryptocurrency with retina scans), I absolutely believe the speculation that the board felt Altman wasn’t trustworthy–they didn’t bother to actually tell anyone that reasoning, and clearly felt they could just weather the firestorm up until they realized it was too late and they’d already shot themselves in the foot.
…So your metric of “too much AI safety” is that it won’t let you fuck the fish…?
The speculation I heard in the Ars Technica article is that the board was unhappy with how quickly he was pushing to commercialize OpenAI, and they were wary about all the AI side hustles he was starting, including an AI chip company to compete with nvidia.
Iirc There’s a remaster floating around that revamps the super dated CGI. It’s no SNW but if you can stand TNG & DS9 you’ll be OK.
Isn’t the entire concept behind Lower Decks is that the Cerritos isn’t a big, important ship? The California class only has 13 decks, which is the third smallest ship in the entire series–the only ships smaller than the Cerritos were the Defiant (which was an “escort ship” not intended for long missions) and the NX-01 Enterprise. It’s also slower than everything else in the 24th century–while most other ships can handle warp 9 without problems, the Cerritos flies itself apart if it goes above warp 8 for too long. It’s not all that strong either, practically every time it gets in a fight it gets its ass kicked.
Yeah, suuuuure you weren’t.
Note that the proof also generalizes to any form of creating an AI by training it on a dataset, not just LLMs. But sure, we’ll absolutely develop an entirely new approach to cognitive science in a few years, we’re definitely not boiling the planet and funneling enough money to end world poverty several times over into a scientific dead end!