Rossphorus

@Rossphorus@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Bubbles are not an existential threat to society. We’ve had like four bubbles in the past 20 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is how bubbles always go, see the Gartner hype cycle. People always overextend, try to apply new tools/tech into places that it doesn’t belong, and only then do people realise the limitations of technology. This is common in business, C-suites explicitly exploit the hype cycle to secure naive investor funding, but investors always become wise eventually - it’s a game to see how much money can be extracted from them before they become increasingly aware of the limitations of the technology. There will be niches where the tech actually settles, but it’s always much smaller than what’s promised. I’m a programmer, I’ve been listening to people say that LLMs are going to take my job for the past five years, and yet every time I’ve actually tried to apply an LLM directly to my work it’s failed in a pretty drastic manner. I find existing systems useful as a tool, but that’s about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t forget this is all under the umbrella of the initial hypothetical where AI stalled at it’s current level. I don’t believe that existing LLMs systems will destroy the economy. They’re a tool that people are trying to fit into every hole, much like blockchain during the crypto bubble. We’ve already seen companies fire their customer service departments, try to replace them with LLMs, then have to go crawling back when that failed catastrophically.

  If AI systems continue to improve, however? As I said previously, all bets are off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Fine, you want me to be pedantic? When prompted with tokens that appear in an order that humans understand as a question that corresponds to some aspect of the universe as we understand it, the tokens predicted by the LLM correspond to an answer that humans agree is more representative than the tokens provided by the average human. Tell me where in my initial comment I said they weren’t an economic threat. I never said they weren’t. I said they aren’t an existential threat. Please read my comment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t want to get into an argument of semantics, whatever your definition of ‘knowledge’ is, LLMs can recall a greater number of factoids than any individual human. That’s all I meant. Are they perfect? No, I never said that. They’re still far beyond the average human, however, hence superhuman.

  I said that LLMs are not an existential threat to humanity, even economically. I never said that they wouldn’t threaten individual jobs, or cause a bubble. Please don’t strawman me. You and I are looking at completely different levels of effects, I’m looking at the big picture - is humanity or society as we know it going to continue to exist in 100 years (in this hypothetical where AI and/or LLMs stagnated)? If yes, then LLMs are not an existential threat. That’s what an existential threat means, after all.

  Is AI causing en economic bubble? Sure, but like all bubbles they will burst when people realise that they have limited use due to their drawbacks. The world will then return to some semblance of normalcy. That’s a non-existential threat.

  Now, if we’re talking about a world in which AI systems continue to evolve? All bets are off the table.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly? If AI systems stopped improving forever? That’s probably best case scenario. LLMs are already superhuman on a knowledge level, human-level in terms of speed (tokens per sec, etc), but subhuman in many other areas. This makes them useful for some tasks, but not so useful that they could cause any sort of existential threat to humanity (either in an economic sense or in a misalignment sense). If LLMs stagnate here then we have at least one tool in our AI toolbox that we’re pretty sure isn’t conscious/sentient/etc., which is useful since that makes them predictable on some level. Humans can deal with that.

  Unfortunately, I see no reason why AI systems in general wouldn’t continue to improve. Even if LLMs do stagnate they’re only one tiny branch of a much larger tree, and we already have at least one example of an AI system that is conscious and sentient - a human. This means even if somehow the human brain was the only architecture ever capable of sentience (incredibly unlikely), we could always simulate/emulate a human brain to get human-level AGI. Simulate/emulate it faster? Superhuman AGI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Todd Howard Reaffirms Bethesda Is Currently Developing The Elder Scrolls 6⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Call me cynical, but I firmly believe that ES6 is more useful to Bethesda as a perpetual ‘carrot on a stick’ than anything they would get from actually releasing it. The people that made Morrowind, Oblivion, and even Skyrim what they are no longer work at Bethesda, but the goodwill of the series remains in people’s minds, and they associate that with Bethesda, even if a majority of their modern releases have been dumpster fires for one reason or another.

  There’s a reason we’ve gone almost 15 years without a mainline elder scrolls game, and I’m pretty sure it’s because even Bethesda knows that they likely can’t capture that magic again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  GTA online took ages to load, like 10+ minutes on some machines. One guy got really annoyed and investigated. It turned out to be loading a single 10MB JSON file in an incredibly inefficient manner. The JSON file contains about 60,000 items and they need to extract each item from it, but every time they look for the next item they start from the beginning of the file again, despite already knowing where they found the previous item! All the entries in the JSON list are unique, but the code also checks for any duplicate entries, of course it’s also done in the least efficient way possible requiring 1,984,531,500 comparisons for something that has no effect. Not only did this one person find these problems but he also implemented a fix that reduced load times by 70% as a result, shaving off more than 7 minutes of load times for some machines. The fact that Rockstar didn’t notice this is frankly shocking and speaks to the fact that they really just don’t care.

  https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/