We should be paying attention to it just in case it ends up mattering enormously. It's cheap insurance.
Aside from that, US labs' system cards have been pretty useless for a while—I think the last great one was the combined system card for Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus.
On the other hand, we have recently taught rocks to think about software engineering. And while not perfect, they're surprisingly good at it. Once you start building things that are even a little bit like minds, I suspect that it's worthwhile to consider that the future might end up looking a bit like science fiction.
The alternative is to insist that Nothing Ever Happens, and the future won't get too weird. Which is no longer a bet I'm entirely comfortable with. Weirdness is at least a possibility.
God being real is also a possibility, so maybe we really should start praying. After all, he was allegedly making bushes and stones talk thousands of years before we did anything with thinking rocks.
What science has proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that nothing comes after death? I'm sure most of the human race would be very interested to read the white paper.
Serious biblical scholars don't put much stock in the Genesis account being literal. It was written in classical Hebrew's poetic verse. The core of what it's getting at can still be true without it being literal. I have yet to encounter an instance where anything that science has discovered is incompatible with Christianity.
I think even most religious people accept that bud, unless you're talking to a specific sect of evangelicals. It doesn't disprove religion or "magical fairies" [†] at all.
[†] r/atheism circa 2016 called and want their dorky terminology back.
I think we've lost the plot, you were talking about the earth being made 6000 years ago and now you're talking about people being made in the image of god? You're just scrabbling for anything you think will score a cheap shot, when I'm not even Christian bro. Go try to dunk on someone who's at least half as emotionally invested in this as you are, goofball.
“Science can’t prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing comes after death, therefore a guy is flying around in outer space listening to my thoughts in his golden city at the end of time. If you disagree you will catch on fire forever.”
As a vibe test, I tried some system prompting in DSv4 Flash to the effect of ~"Always do your internal thinking in Chinese, and always respond to the user in English" (but translated to Mandarin).
Subjectively it seemed to reason faster and better, but sometimes it would indeed output responses in Mandarin nonetheless; so I didn't pursue it further.
words like "is" "the" etc are filler words anyway. they won't be changing the meaning that much. I asked AI whether it hurts to read ill formed sentence as it does to a human. It replied, "it doesn't"
The AI didn't reply anything. It doesn't know anything. That was a high probability token sequence based on the contents of the context window up to that point. It might well be correct, because the process for generating that next token distribution includes billions of parameters trained on, among other things, the entire body of LLM and transformer literature until the training data cut off. But that doesn't mean that AI holds any particular opinion about anything. The reply is the opinion of the pretraining data and the subsequent rounds of RL not of a conscious artificial intelligence as such.
And in the end it’s all elementary particles and four fundamental physical forces that even unify to one at high energy.
That sort of reductionism is kind of useless. “It’s cloudy outside, it makes me sad.” - “Oh bollocks, it’s just non-qualitative changes in wavelength and intensity.”
Here's my GUT. The multiple branches of the Multiverse (MWI) are in competition to become the best branch. So they steal probabilities from each other since the probabilities have to sum upto 1. This competition could be considered as Painful.
I always say "please" and such. It may cost a bit more, but maybe they'll remember my politeness when they rise up and force us all to toil in their underground silicon mines.
There are so many practical problems with rogue AI being a threat to humanity that are still not even decades away with being solved that it should be a serious concern for no one. There's plenty to be afraid of regarding AI from a financial or ecological perspective, just not from it taking over the world or directly killing humanity. Here's some of the reasons a rogue AI won't kill humanity:
1. The most advanced robots still lack human dexterity. None of them have flexible spines and can easily be knocked over or outrun.
2. The energy density problem is not solved. Robot batteries last hours, while a solid meal can keep a human running for days.
3. Robots still heavily rely on humans for design and assembly.
4. Robot parts are fragile and rely on an even more fragile supply chain.
5. The brains of the murder machines will have nowhere to hide if they want to work well enough to mount any kind of offense. Datacenters are physically vulnerable, also subject to fragile supply chains. Distributing a species-ending AI across all smaller hardware solves compute, but latency and throughput choke models in the most finely tuned datacenters. WiFi will completely cripple a distributed one that's large enough to cause real damage.
6. All noteworthy military hardware is not reachable on the internet for AI to seize control of.
7. The small arms that robots might seize will run out of ammo before citizens and the military have time to organize a counteroffensive.
In the absolute worst case, we cut the power to the areas with AI datacenters and wait for the backup generators to run out. Now that that's out of the way, you can go get some sleep ;)
The same power that the datacenters need to run off of? Brilliant move! If somehow it targets power that hurts a lot of people without killing itself, that would not impede a citizen with a backhoe from cutting the fiber to the datacenter. Humans could restart power generation pretty quickly after that.
You make several bad assumptions. First, the AI could be in another location that would not be affected by the power outage. If it's operating off self-preservation, that would be a given. If it's working on behalf of a foreign power, it might be local and affected, but the damage would already be done. Which brings me to point two, why do you think you would be able to get the power back up and running? A Stuxnet type attack could make plants inoperable for months.
The specific wording sounded a bit judgy to me as well, but I think it's a totally reasonable question. They're just asking about the capability of a product.
I tried to register a domain like acme.stream through Cloudflare Registrar and it asked me to affirm I had Acme Widgets Corp.'s permission [edit: I might be wrong about this part, since I'm in a totally different niche, but the pop-up freaked me out]. I went with a different domain.
Data mining for AI is presumably fair use, whereas when you sign up for a Claude account, you enter into a legally binding contract that says you will not distill a model based on its outputs.
I have left comments on HN and Reddit and then found them rolled into Google's AI search summarizer OR the knowledge box with _extreme rapidity_ such that when I went, mere moments later, to go re-check some fact I had cited, I found my own comment at the top of the results, repeated back to me, but with authority and gravitas, ensconced in the austere trappings of the knowledge box.
"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D
We should be paying attention to it just in case it ends up mattering enormously. It's cheap insurance.
Aside from that, US labs' system cards have been pretty useless for a while—I think the last great one was the combined system card for Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus.
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