In my opinion, being anti-AI or anti-LLM is much like being anti-chocolate. There are many good reasons to be anti-chocolate. It is very difficult to verify that a chocolate supply line does not include slave labor or child labor. I only know of one brand that even comes close. And the deforestation caused by farming can and does lead to climate change. Not to mention the addictive qualities and health effects of eating sugary candy.

It seems mostly bad and when you look at the numbers, I think we should all be against it. And yet, making these arguments tends to do very little to make people stop eating chocolate.

Yet, I could imagine a world where it’s farmed sustainably, by people who are paid appropriately, and with proper guidance on nutrition and exercise, it could be consumed safely.

I have no problem with people saying they are anti-AI. But I’d just like to pause here to confirm whether maybe anti-AI is just our shorthand for anti-the-way-AI-is-right-now. Anti-the-companies-that-run-AI. I do not want noisy server farms taking up all the water of rural communities. I don’t want all of our electricity to go towards LLMs that are already “intelligent” enough to tell us that the best most immediate way to prevent further climate change is to turn them off.

I’m not making this comment to promote one side or another. I’m just suggesting that we act strategically and try to be mindful about how polarization can appear from the outside. Being anti-AI likely persuades about as many people as being anti-chocolate. That is, very few. But if we could work towards more ethical AI, even if we don’t plan to use it, just so our argument is more palatable to the masses, it could lower the use of AI overall.

So, I think it is worthwhile to get into the technical details of things like LLMs even if most of us here are fighting against such technologies. Just trying to add some nuance to a world that often feels way too polarized for me.

Do any of you like to go to the ISS in your free time? Just me? I’m never going to find someone who shares my hobbies.

But if they evolved to be right triangles with their sides marked by three dots, four dots, and five dots, then the message will be spot on.

He has a theme song if you didn’t know.

*a.

Reminds me of when I got my second ever flip phone, and while it was great with texts (which played cool data transmission sounds over nearby speakers) and it was the first one I had with a camera, the first-gen web browser they had on it simply took ages getting even an image to load over the cellular connection.

I was thinking, this is cool. I can actually web browse on my phone. Sort of. I figured the connection will get better over time and was generally optimistic about what a cell phone would someday be, but never did I think we’d be able to stream not just video but high-definition video over cell service like it’s nothing. While I have a lot more experience and knowledge now, I’ve learned to hesitate before claiming anything is impossible.

That’s the classic flaw with flood plane exemptions. The floods don’t tend to care. Next time, if they want to be exempt from flooding, they need to get out the old fashioned map and Sharpie.

That’s a great idea! Treating the children like perfectly spherical objects will let us calculate the flow of children through the bowling alley more like particles through a garden hose. Since we can accommodate many more children this way, let’s expand the invitations to the entire school contacts list, with the new subject line, “Your child-sized balls are cordially invited!” The invitations are sent and your wife’s travel plans have been amended to a one-day round trip starting and ending at the same airport to save on airfare costs. Is there anything else you need help with?

Fog corn leg corn!

A tragedy on another scale.

I think it very well might conclude things we haven’t.

But at the same time, I think what you’re saying is so very important. It’s going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity’s most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, “If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago.”

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that’s smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

I love the story of this “renovation” so much. The idea that someone thought they could do it, got in over their head, and just iteratively kept making it worse is so funny to me. “I think the eyes were here? And… and they were looking up a bit, right? And I’m pretty sure he was smiling… and had a mustache… that doesn’t make him look like an open-mouthed baboon does it? No, you’re right, what we’ve got is really close enough. I don’t think it’s that different, is it? I mean, I can tell because I’m a painter, but no one else is going to notice.” Bless their hearts.