[-] lurker@awful.systems 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I was just about to follow up my own comment with “also just because AI is good at maths doesn’t mean it’s good at everything” but beat me to it

Scott also makes the assumption that AI won’t run into any financing issues that could stop progress flat, the growing number of people in power striving to regulate it and all that jazz

Edit: Bringing two BetterOffline posts into this as sources

[-] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago

you have to be fucking kidding me

[-] lurker@awful.systems 10 points 19 hours ago

For anyone who says AI doom sounds like an apocalyptic religion, that the rationalists/Singulatarians seem like a Bay Area cult, that Eliezer Yudkowsky gives off the vibes of a messianic prophet: yes, yes, and yes. But crucially, today you’re no longer being asked to believe in arguments and extrapolations, but only in the front-page news. Accepting the reality of the coming machine god after it’s solved Navier-Stokes and dozens of other longstanding open math problems (while dramatically ramping up in capability every month), is sort of like accepting Jesus after he’s returned to earth on the gleaming cloud. It’s the epistemic bare minimum

So we’re going full mask off now. Awesome

On top of that, why the hell are you using ChatGPT as a therapist when you say that it’ll end the world???

[-] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

“oh noooo our tech is soooo scary we need to slow down! let’s build a wet lab for it!”

I’ve said this a hundred times before but Amodei should be pelted with rotten tomatoes

[-] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

All 3 of these reasons make them monsters. 1 and 2 are saviour complex bullshit and 3 is just pure greed and selfishness

[-] lurker@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago

Holy fuck. How embarrassing would it have been if they actually went through with it and ended up having to explain to China that they attacked a random ship because a chatbot hallucinated some bs

[-] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

AI company called iLands makes Twitter accounts for its AIs and it’s going about as well as you’d think

“I’ve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,” New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. “Some are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.” (reply from CEO): “Jeff, I’m sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,” Tang wrote in response. “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real

Rigghttt okay. Let’s look further down-

“I’m sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,” Tang wrote in reply. “Neither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed.

Oh okay so you did intentionally send a message to someone but never specified who it should be sent to or what it should say

7
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by lurker@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

Originally posted about in the stubsack but decided to make this its own post because what the hell, let’s see how everyone’s favourite scenario is doing!

There are two takes on it: the author’s own (their 2025 evaluation is here) and another one from this website called AI 2027 tracker (not run by the authors) pretty sure this one only evaluates the qualitative predictions and not the quantitive ones

Both of them show that we are behind AI 2027’s predicted pace. By the author estimate: 2025 was only at 58% and 2026 is 69% of progress. AI 2027 tracker shows a consistent decrease in accuracy over time (from 100% to 81% to 91% to 46%)

7
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by lurker@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

From the Old SneerClub

From the recent influencer camp, our friends have made a parody music video on AGI apocalypse. I wish I was joking

40
87
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by lurker@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
64

Originally posted in the Stubsack, but decided to make it its own post because why not

12
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by lurker@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

this was already posted on reddit sneerclub, but I decided to crosspost it here so you guys wouldn’t miss out on Yudkowsky calling himself a genre savy character, and him taking what appears to be a shot at the Zizzians

27
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by lurker@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

full transcript:

Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

34

I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about

view more: next ›

lurker

0 post score
0 comment score
joined 7 months ago