Does anybody care about that stuff anymore? It's clearly not preventing his ratings from continuing to fall at a steady pace.

Girl. Bear 909 looking chonk right out of the water.

I'm learning in the replies how much people believe in retrocausality, that because CUDA is used for AI it was therefore developed for it.

I'm being racially profiled by a LLM 😂

I am not wrong though and the article you cite here as evidence that AGI-pilled people have very strong "scientific and logical priors" to back their claims is actually evidence of my contention that people make ridiculous arguments to argue that AGI is right around the corner that in no way warrant the strong degree of confidence they have in that belief. It's really a perfect example of the kind of sloppy arguments I'm talking about. For instance, even if we accept the claim that there are "surprisingly simple *universal* learning algorithms" (a claim that is extremely vague but also very strong on the interpretation the author probably needs here), it doesn't follow from that and the fact that "its complexity is an emergent evolutionary phenomenon arising from the interaction of the information environment" with those algorithms (whatever that means exactly) that human brains are "practical implementations of intelligence" nor that "engineering the brain is tractable". In fact, engineering the human brain is extremely difficult and we are nowhere near having done that (nor will we for decades unless we reach AGI before that and it can helps us do so more quickly), so if AGI happens relatively soon (which is very plausible in my opinion even if I personally think people are too confident in very short timelines), it's all but certain that it won't be reached by reverse engineering the humain brain in any meaningful sense and that moreover AGI will implement human-like intelligence in very different ways from the human brain. As he notes, the's just making a post deep learning revolution version of Kurzweil's argument, but as I argued recently (philippelemoine.com/p/should…) that kind of argument is completely worthless if the conclusion they purport to establish is that AGI will happen within a narrow time window. Like it's honestly mind-blowing to me that we're even having a debate about such an obviously fallacious argument. In general, this text seems representative of the kind of thinking I'm criticizing, because it's full of claims that are extremely vague or very strong and are in no way supported by the evidence or argument presented to defend them. Again, this doesn't mean that AGI won't happen (I have no doubt that it will because there is nothing special in the relevant sense about the human brain) or even that very short timelines won't prove correct (I'm more skeptical but I wouldn't be shocked if that happened), but the fact that people have nothing better than this kind of sloppy arguments to support their belief in a very short timeline is to me compelling evidence that they have not thought this through and are intellectually lazy. If they turn out to be right, it will be by accident, because it won't change the fact that their argument were garbage.

New from @reuters: OpenAI agents posted images belonging to ChatGPT users online, introducing a new area of privacy risk for the company. Story w/ @JeffHorwitz and @razhael. reuters.com/world/openai-wor…

Every few years, non-philosophers discover Peter Singer's oeuvre.

This was great.

I'm reading a Python book to brush up on it before I tackle Sebastian Raschka's Build a Large Language Model and it occurred to me that it may be the last programming book I ever read. The end of an era that for me started with Kernighan and Ritchie's book on C as a teenager.

The scandal about Orélien made people in French journalistic and literary circles realize how much progress AI had made, it's clear based on their initial comments that they thought it could only produce low-quality, robotic content, so now they're checking everything and they're starting to find that a lot of stuff that was published recently was actually produced by AI. Here a left-wing newspaper found that a right-wing journalist had used AI extensively to write his articles and that even passages that purported to be quotes from anonymous sources were flagged as probably generated by AI. A book recently published by a famous TV host about October 7 was also shown to have been largely written by AI. At least in this case nobody pretended the book was good though. I think that's just the beginning and @pangram is about to give rise to a flood of scandals about AI-generated content in French literary and journalistic circles. Now that people realize how good AI has become, everyone is going to scan what their political or ideological opponents recently published and I'm sure they will find a ton of AI-generated content, so a lot of people are about to get egg on their face.

Exclusive: Trump has rejected Iran's proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the midterms, officials said on.wsj.com/4yZ77wy

I think AGI-pilled people constantly make fallacious arguments, where the conclusion is only plausible if you make a lot of implicit and highly non-obvious assumptions they clearly don't realize are required (because otherwise they would point out they are needed and offer a defense of them), but at the same time I think it's a good thing, because they may not commit as much money and effort to AI if they weren't convinced that amazing things like explosive economic growth or curing most diseases within a few years, so I think that's a case where bad reasoning is conducive to progress. There were probably many similar cases in history where people had unrealistic beliefs or beliefs that happened to be true but were based on flawed arguments, but it led them to do things that were conducive to scientific, technological or economic progress. My only concern is that capex is truly insane at this point and, if revenue doesn't increase fast enough, the damage to the economy could be significant if/when the bubble bursts. However, even in that case, it will have led to faster progress on AI that would have happened otherwise.

New genocide just dropped.

The most prestigious French literary prize, which had preselected Orélien's novel for the contest this year, announced that it was excluded from the list because he plagiarized works he's published in the past and his novel was "in all likelihood largely the product of an AI". It has now come to light that virtually everything Orélien has ever published was either plagiarized or written by AI, so this decision isn't surprising. This comes after the French literary world almost unanimously hailed the novel as a work of genius. In a show that was recorded before the story broke, Orélien was even compared to Victor Hugo, it was completely surreal. Most of the praise for the novel alludes to the fact that it casts immigration in a positive light, so I think it's clear that the desire to promote a pro-immigration narrative played a role, but it's also clear that it would never have happened if Orélien hadn't been black. Sometimes I think anti-racist liberals are racist toward black people in a way that is far more offensive than the way in which openly anti-black racists are. The latter are at least honest about what they believe, whereas the former clearly think that black people should be treated as permanent children whose every turd should be praised (kind of how parents clap and tell their 5-year-old they're proud of him whenever he produces a doodle), which is arguably more disrespectful.

Malheureusement, si les États-Unis veulent vraiment imposer leur droit à nos entreprises, ce n'est pas cette loi qui les empêchera de forcer celles-ci à obtempérer. En effet, le gouvernement américain peut nous seulement couper l'accès au marché américain à une entreprise qui refuse d'obtempérer, mais même lui couper l'accès au système financier international parce qu'il contrôle le système de paiement en dollars et qu'il peut en couper à l'accès à toute banque qui accepte de traiter avec une entité sanctionnée par les États-Unis. Nous avons vu au moment de la querelle entre Américains et Européens quand Trump est sorti unilatéralement de l'accord sur le nucléaire iranien que, même quand l'UE a pris des mesures pour essayer de protéger les entreprises européennes des sanctions secondaires américaines, elles ont quand même préféré quitter l'Iran pour cette raison. Le seul moyen de nous prémunir contre ça serait que l'UE puisse de manière crédible menacer les Américains de répondre à ce type de chantage envers nos entreprises en se livrant à une véritable guerre économique contre les États-Unis, qui imposerait un coût significatif à l'économie américaine et donc un coût politique important au gouvernement, mais ça supposerait une volonté politique et une capacité de coordination au niveau européen qui n'existent pas.

Cambridge is no longer planning to investigate Jason Arday’s academic record or the university’s decision to hire or cover for him. Instead, the investigation will focus on “his welfare, his care, his well-being” and “whether the school offered him sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarized.”

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Me+@econJaredB are out w/ a new piece examining how much revenue is needed to justify hyperscaler AI capex. We estimate that incremental AI revenue is currently b/n $86-$188.1B for the hyperscalers, but they need $13.1-$18.7 *trillion* over the next decade for that to pencil out.