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technically the threshold for “different species” is “can’t reproduce with other species through normal biological means” so I think while it’s hard to argue that with other billionaires, Elon Musk is an interesting case since AFAIK all those kids with his genes were conceived through artificial insemination. you may be on to something; maybe we’re watching a divergence in action.

and the vibes around Trump were good? the dude is a shitstain on the very fabric of existence

The Man in the High Castle comes close… or at least, makes it clear that it’s not as though the Nazis and Japanese occupying America would actually live by the code they dictate for others.

this is learning completely the wrong lesson. it has been well-known for a long time and very well demonstrated that smaller models trained on better-curated data can outperform larger ones trained using brute force “scaling”. this idea that “bigger is better” needs to die, quickly, or else we’re headed towards not only an AI winter but an even worse climate catastrophe as the energy requirements of AI inference on huge models obliterate progress on decarbonization overall.

The Internet in general, but especially social media, is a cesspool of AI slop, bots, algorithm manipulation, and less exotic/high-tech forms of disinformation. How about instead of telling our politicians to meet us there we get the fuck off of it and meet each other in the streets. They can join our party if they want but we’re starting it.

I would go so far as to say that this has always ben the plan, at least this time around. I find it highly suspicious that Trump has been the target of assassination attempts by republicans twice (plus a foreign attempt on his life) already. We’re being prepared to accept this as expected when it finally happens, and it has to happen in order to give Vance the pretext to implement martial law and usher in the high-tech Handmaid’s Tale scenario his patrons want. Trump is their useful idiot; but useful only because he is populist and charismatic enough to get them in power via ordinary electoral process. Once they suspend that process entirely they no longer need him and in fact he becomes a liability; offing him kills two birds with one stone.

Serious question, is it likely that comedians who he brings on Kill Tony are also conservative racist POS assholes? I hope not because I actually kind of enjoyed Casey Rocket for a bit when he came up through that show. Definitely got a weird vibe from the host that made me wonder who they were and what the show really was (now I know).

Well, maybe we need a movement to make physical copies of these games and the consoles needed to play them available in actual public libraries, then? That doesn’t seem to be affected by this ruling and there’s lots of precedent for it in current practice, which includes lending of things like musical instruments and DVD players. There’s a business near me that does something similar, but they restrict access by age to high schoolers and older, and you have to play the games there; you can’t rent them out.

We don’t. It probably is. Mastodon is the way, but they need to fix a few things themselves.

'tis true that women’s bodies hold great power, and not irrelevant at all to the discussion at hand. rather than reiterate and attempt to paraphrase jaron Lanier on the topic of how male obsession with creating artifical people is linked to womb envy, I’ll just link to a talk in which he explains it himself:

https://youtu.be/rGqiswuJuQI?si=oAKvWrtlji4yrfpd&t=42m05s

Like any occupation, it’s a long story, and I’m happy to share more details over DM. But basically due to indecision over my major I took an abnormal amount of math, stats, and environmental science coursework even through my major was in social science, and I just kind of leaned further and further into that quirk as I transitioned into the workforce. bear in mind that data science as a field of study didn’t really exist yet when I graduated; these days I’m not sure such an unconventional path is necessary. however I still hear from a lot of junior data scientists in industry who are miserable because they haven’t figured out yet that in addition to their technical skills they need a “vertical” niche or topic area of interest (and by the way a public service dimension also does a lot to help a job feel meaningful and worthwhile even on the inevitable rough day here and there).

My “day job” is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype… machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I’m even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the “solution to climate change”… I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.

We had a classic bot on r/SubSimGPT2Interactive that was trained on discussions about Dwarf Fortress. It was always one of my favorites even though I had never played Dwarf Fortress, and it took me a while to realize that more than half of the absurdity it was generating was due to the game just being like that. GPT-2 was merely shuffling the deck and dealing the cards

Me: I’ve cut my coffee intake down to one cup a day! Look how disciplined and restrained I am!

Also me: drinks 1.5 cans of Celsius per day

I think that there are some people working on this, and a few groups that have claimed to do it, but I’m not aware of any that actually meet the description you gave. Can you cite a paper or give a link of some sort?

Y’all should really stop expecting people to buy into the analogy between human learning and machine learning i.e. “humans do it, so it’s okay if a computer does it too”. First of all there are vast differences between how humans learn and how machines “learn”, and second, it doesn’t matter anyway because there is lots of legal/moral precedent for not assigning the same rights to machines that are normally assigned to humans (for example, no intellectual property right has been granted to any synthetic media yet that I’m aware of).

That said, I agree that “the model contains a copy of the training data” is not a very good critique–a much stronger one would be to simply note all of the works with a Creative Commons “No Derivatives” license in the training data, since it is hard to argue that the model checkpoint isn’t derived from the training data.

Model sizes are larger than their training sets

Excuse me, what? You think Huggingface is hosting 100’s of checkpoints each of which are multiples of their training data, which is on the order of terabytes or petabytes in disk space? I don’t know if I agree with the compression argument, myself, but for other reasons–your retort is objectively false.

The problem with your argument is that it is 100% possible to get ChatGPT to produce verbatim extracts of copyrighted works. This has been suppressed by OpenAI in a rather brute force kind of way, by prohibiting the prompts that have been found so far to do this (e.g. the infamous “poetry poetry poetry…” ad infinitum hack), but the possibility is still there, no matter how much they try to plaster over it. In fact there are some people, much smarter than me, who see technical similarities between compression technology and the process of training an LLM, calling it a “blurry JPEG of the Internet”… the point being, you wouldn’t allow distribution of a copyrighted book just because you compressed it in a ZIP file first.

yes, I’ve extensively written about Phi and other related issues in a blog post which I’ll share here: https://medium.com/@matthewmaybe/data-dignity-is-difficult-64ba41ee9150