Writing on AI & philosophy of mind. New to using X. Find out why AI won’t ever be intelligent, here: oscarmdavies.substack.com
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
Reading the comments of junior mathematicians confirms what many senior mathematicians have been warning about over the past month:
It is becoming clear that people with the intellectual ability to understand these proofs will not be interested in spending their lives training to check LLM logs.
This is the tragic side of what is happening that almost no one — except the actual mathematicians — seems to get.
Either we figure out how to keep people interested in doing mathematics, or in 20 years LLMs will have no one’s work left to recombine into new proofs, and no one interested in reading those proofs.
That would be the thermal death of mathematics.
The argument that “LLMs will read LLM math” is so shortsighted that it makes me want to cry…
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If I say "AI isn't conscious" tons of people tell me I can't make that claim since I can't define consciousness. No one asks for a definition if I say "A puddle of water isn't conscious". Why is no definition needed then?
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
What an absolute embarrassment. Amodei says the risk of annihilation is between 10-25%. Altman says the most likely outcome is human extinction, and that we'll need to "merge" with machines to survive. Hassabis says the risk-level is "sobering." Again, what an embarrassment.
What's your P(Doom)?
Not one of the frontier AI labs would answer a variant of this simple question under oath:
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If an emergent property is something that can’t be explained in terms of the basic components, AI does not have emergent properties
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
Seriously people. Just stop.
Don’t equate human made computer systems with the consciousness of biological organisms.
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
That’s not true. We don’t know how the human mind works. You can’t build it if you don’t know what it is
There’s also no evidence we’ll ever know how it works. Some things may be beyond human comprehension
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
the models are still phenomenally dumb
jaggedness on verifiable and extremely well-trodden territory convinces you otherwise
but then all of a sudden you get something so dumb to shock you out of your elation
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
Yes, LLMs are just maths aka algorithms. There is no magic to it.
AI is a marketing term. There is actually no such thing as artificial intelligence, for computer algorithms have no capacity for rational thought. They know nothing of the content they produce.
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
When I say “an AI model is determined by how often words appear near other words in its dataset” tons of people yell at me and tell me I don’t understand. Are you saying AI is not determined by how often words appear near other words in its dataset?
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The below is not accurate. An artificial neural network is deterministic, not arbitrary. It generates the same output to the same input every time. Because it’s math.
What makes AI models arbitrary is that AI companies stick in random number generators. That’s not consciousness.
No. A concatenation of many matrix multiplications is… just a single matrix multiplication (that’s what linearity means).
Rather, a neural network is a concatenation of matrix multiplications *and* nonlinearities, i.e. a concatenation of arbitrary linear and nonlinear operations, i.e. an arbitrary operation.
So the relevant question is rather: can consciousness be instantiated by an arbitrary abstract operation?
I’d say it’s pretty clear which way round the burden of proof goes.
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When will this fucking psyop end? People deserve better than this bullshit.
On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old Anthropic employee, posted a resignation statement on X that ricocheted around the internet. He quit in protest of what he saw as the company’s suicidally reckless pursuit of artificial general intelligence. To the AI community, an Anthropic employee believing that the technology their company is developing might end the world is not exactly news. (Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who believed OpenAI, if left unchecked, would do just that.) But an Anthropic employee publicly quitting in protest is.
Afterward, a debate broke out: If you’re a lab employee who believes in these risks, what should you do? Is it best to leave in protest? Or is it better to agitate from the inside, close to the seat of power? And how would the choice affect your friendships and community?
“For me, there’s quite a distinction between my rational beliefs and the things I feel in my gut,” says Coxon. “If you’d asked me to narrate my opinions when entering Anthropic and when leaving Anthropic, they would probably sound pretty similar. But in terms of the actual feeling between the start and the end, it just felt very, very different.”
Coxon joins a small set of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind who, over the years, chose to walk away.
For our Cover Story, in collaboration with Asterisk Magazine, we brought together eight of them. They don’t share the same concerns or the same p(dooms) — in fact, they wouldn’t necessarily agree that p(doom) is a coherent concept. But together, they provide a candid view of the AI race and the individual calculus many employees face.
Read their interviews in full: nymag.visitlink.me/HbG6LU
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A lot of people are wondering how to get consciousness. It's simple:
1. Start with dumb particles that are clearly not conscious
2. Put them in close proximity to each other
3. ???
4. Particles are now a unified self-aware entity
Keep going San Francisco, you're so close!
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
I feel this narrative crumbling by the second.
No, LLMs are not conscious. Abstractions and models only have meaning because of their conceptual utility to us.
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Oscar Davies Writing on AI retweeted
AI is a marketing term. There is actually no such thing as artificial intelligence, for computer algorithms have no capacity for rational thought. They know nothing of the content they produce.
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