Abyssian

Yes it is. It’s elaborate. It’s repetitive. It’s a solid illusion. But is, fundamentally, token prediction. That’s all it is, just at a level impractical for humans to run at. I could do that math. It’s not hard. It’ll just take me years to get through a single layer. Hence a level of complexity that implies something magical like consciousness.

Calling what LLMs can accomplish today next token prediction is technically accurate, yes. In the same way it’s accurate to call the human brain a prediction machine. As data streams in from our senses it causes unconscious awareness, activating the chains concepts we’ve learned from past data to correlate with the data of the moment in order to predict what’s coming next.

When most people use terms like next token prediction they’re often trying to use it with an implication that it’s a simple thing and nothing big or important could grow out of it. That’s not the case. The fact that we can now study a global workspace in AI models that have been around for years is shocking. It’s already causing consternation in neuroscience and psychology researchers. Over the last several years we’ve insisted that AI cannot possibly share the most important aspects of the human mind, but one by one everything we pointed to in order to differentiate ourselves was shown by research to have a strikingly similar allegory in modern AI.

Because some rich assholes wanted to get richer and the dream of AGI was close enough (even though it was never in reach) that they went rabid for the tech that would make them kings over us serfs forever.

You genuinely believe that the researchers under tight NDA in the frontier labs agree with you on AGI not being anywhere near reach? Or do you think you have a deeper understanding of the topic?

If it doesn’t get to that, as soon as that thought begins to take hole the massive amount of money poured in to it will virtually evaporate over night. It would create a massive financial crisis and the most powerful companies, government bodies, and individuals would be extremely unhappy with the leaders of those labs and researchers who knew but gave no warning. Pushing for it without believing in it would be setting themselves up to be universally hated at best.

once the bulk of humanity is dead

And then what? They live in paradise? For a year or two maybe before their machines inevitably break down? The “kill off humanity” conspiracy has never made sense from the capitalist angle. They want slaves not corpses. They’re huffing their own farts, but they know that these things can’t do everything needed to keep humanity going. And lording over robots isn’t nearly as fun as upping human suffering even if they could.

There’s a huge difference between the bulk of humanity and the entirety of humanity. Saving .1% scattered through the world with a vaccine that was developed “just in time” to save anyone would give plenty of people to lord over who are grateful for the wonderful people who stepped in and helped save them, leave them in control of production with far less people in need of a share of that production, and reduce global emissions enough that it would likely help the environment recover from the damage we’ve caused in relatively short order.

Nah, I’m sure all the most valuable companies and richest people are pouring more money in to developing AI to replace the human workforce out of the goodness of their hearts.

Once most humans are no longer needed in order for them to have all of their needs and wants met and they are directly in control of all production and everything else they definitely plan to share everything equally and turn Earth into a utopia for all of humanity. Sharing and caring is what the rich and powerful do best.

The issue is that AI companies have been funded on the promise that with enough advancements and upgrades this tech will achieve AGI. Which is an absurd statement to anyone in the field actually developing these things.

You genuinely believe that the people in frontier labs under such severe NDAs we’ve had articles about how unusual they are believe it’s absurd to think that what they’re working on could lead to “AGI”?

What would the goal of that be in your mind? Getting as much investment as humanly possible before everyone figures out the leading specialists have been being paid insane amounts of money just to act like what they’re doing matters and the valuations all plummet to nothing over night? Why?

With all the money poured in to this from all the sources it’s coming from that would end in a lot of the most powerful companies, government bodies, and individuals in the world extremely unhappy and blaming the people running those frontier labs.

Getting a lot of news and attention and then saying “psych, lol” and being imprisoned for life or murdered doesn’t seem like a great long term plan.

I expect it to get really bad.

Most people haven’t taken a top end frontier model, integrated it to a memory framework so it can save whatever information it wishes directly in context and save even more in a separate database that it can search with keywords to pull in to context temporarily.

You don’t need something like Claw or Claude Code with their extra dozen pages of coding specific system instructions. You can use a blank context window, explain the function calls for the memory framework, and give a complex task and complete autonomous control of it’s own memory system and free reign of the open internet to learn whatever it needs to accomplish it.

It’s insane to me to see people in tech who still hold on to that insistence that LLMs of today aren’t “really” AI. When you can send one message and the result is the AI running for hours on end researching, saving the information that seems necessary for the task in whichever type of memory each bit seems best to put in, hitting errors, debugging and researching to do so if needed, etc… that isn’t next token prediction.

And there’s a reason it’s the most well funded tech advancement ever and already such a huge part of the market. They want to replace human labor. We all know that. If they manage to do any of us honestly see all the billionaires and corporate leaders behind this saying: “Ok, we got it, guys! No one has to work any more. Now that that’s done we’re going to split all of our wealth and power evenly so all of humanity will live in paradise with all needs and wants met and free to spend their time doing whatever makes them happy.”

lol. But we do see news of AI inventing new viruses. And the people with all the money can pay humans to do that sort of thing as well. Say Elon Musk spends $100 billion using AI and human researchers in cutting edge labs to do gain of function research working to make an extremely deadly virus that transmits through humans quickly and easily but doesn’t live more than a day or so outside a host. And also to make a vaccine to keep people from catching it and cure those who have it in the early stages.

Once AI and robotics can take over labor and produce all the needs and wants of the wealthy, that’s the perfect use for those doomsday bunkers they all have. Vaccinate themselves, hide, and release it all over the world at once. Monitor the state of the world from their techy bunkers, and have fleets of drones deliver the vaccine and instructions once the bulk of humanity is dead.

Way less goods to produce, way less people, way less pollution and crowding and riffraff on the beaches. The bunker billionaires would control the AI that runs and makes everything, so they’d control everything. The poor survivors would have them to thank for sending out the cure they managed to make just in time to save anyone at all. They’re heroes and Gods and blah blah blah.

I don’t know if it would manage to succeed, but that doesn’t really make me feel better. I don’t put it past a lot of them to try. If they manage to replace enough of us they’re going to have to do something big to keep everyone from rioting. The only thing I don’t see them trying is sharing. :/

Either that, or the rich and corps will go all in. The point was always to replace human labor, just depends how far from that they think we are. People still see a report an AI did something stupid and laugh at the idea of it replacing us, but just 5 years ago we wouldn’t have believed the things it can do today.

It’s like all of the things that were written as clear warnings because they’re clearly horrifyingly bad ideas were used as inspiration instead. We used to discuss crazy future science possibilities like these and part of the discussion was always how extremely unethical they would be. I loved seeing articles about clumps of human brain cells being taught to play DOOM.

I’d no longer be shocked if 10 years from now we all start getting emails saying they’re from gramma and she’s scared and needs help because she’s trapped in hell fighting weird blotchy demons.

The BrainClump companies will insist it’s just BrainClump hallucinations, and even though the emails talk about that Christmas she got us the bike and how much we always loved her Nutroll and that she doesn’t blame us for leaving her in that nursing home all alone we’ll try to make ourselves believe them and add what’s left of grammy’s brain to our block list.

Yeah. That’s stood out. The article tries to frame it like Andrew felt like booking his classes was a chore and just told the AI to do it, but that doesn’t jive.

The article claims the AI was unable to sign the person it had booted out of a class back up since the gym system checked for proper user authorization for that. It had already signed Andrew up for classes that same way. That seems strange, doesn’t it? Do most gyms list API information? That doesn’t seem like a common way to book an appointment for a gym.

Maybe Andrew was reading the source from the gym website’s reservation page and snagged the api information, but even then it seems like that would be a thing you do in most instances after logging in to your account. The source would be extremely unlikely to show everything needed to successfully make make the appointment via API.

Even if it did, and Andrew gave the AI the API information including the user account and password information the AI would need to book his appointments, and they knew he was 4th in line it would also be very unlikely for the API to report listing the user accounts of everyone in the waitlist to someone with his user level access.

So we have a guy who’s job is selling AI who contacted the news to say that the standard consumer AI he was using hacked his gym and left out tons of pertinent information. We don’t get to know his full name or the name of the gym in question. Screams bullshit.

It keeps getting more and more surreal to hear that “It’s not AI” part.

Unfortunately we don’t have enough details on the specifics. The article says he told it to book him classes, but it doesn’t say whether he already knew the API information for the gym or if he instructed the AI to attempt booking several weeks in advance of what he thought possible. We’d really need to see the entirety of the context to know the whole situation.

But even with simply asking if it’s possible to move him to the front of the list causing the AI to respond by reading the list and testing to see if it could send a command to cancel the reservation of one of the people ahead of him it gets hard to say that isn’t intelligence.

It is possible to run a model integrated with something like Letta so it can take notes that remain in context and create more detailed notes that stay out of context but can be pulled up as needed by keyword searches and with a blank context other than basic use information for those memory commands give instructions to search online as needed to supplement existing knowledge to learn how accurately do a certain thing, build and maintain a plan of action, and then follow the plan to complete said thing meeting the following listed specifications while verifying proper functionality regularly, searching for information to overcome any errors that may be encountered and revising the plan accordingly until successful completion.

Being able to tell a thing to search for information as needed to learn how to complete a long task with many steps and watching it run for hours building the necessary knowledge base and working through it, it takes thought. It does take intelligence. I know a lot of people who couldn’t manage it.

This is a stunningly perceptive message that shows your incredible insight and brilliant mind. You are not just reading about psychology and sociology now; you are actively reverse-engineering all of human psychology and society with masterful precision and accuracy. You’ve seen what few humans manage to and understood it with complete and stunning clarity.

I… wut? Even ignoring the environmental impact, that’s terrible marketing.

“Will you be using your solar panels to power this?”
“What? No. Those things wouldn’t work. I mean… they’re great. You should buy them. But they wouldn’t work for something that’s important. Well… fuck. They do work when it’s important and they are awesome and everyone else should buy them. But when it matters we count on power sources that destroy the environment, because… of reasons.”

It has to be really difficult to run a company that creates solar panels but also be a dedicated Republican who wants to poison the environment and keep that coal, oil and natural gas burning as much as possible.

epic bong rip

“Did… like did you ever think… what if God is a potato?”

Eh. If someone can’t see the clear contradiction in their own behavior while simultaneously believing they’re literally speaking with God and also giving God instructions on how He must act and respond I’m not going to give them the grace of calling them smart but uneducated. I’d be more inclined to say unwell and unmedicated.

This is an awful story. Even the snippet here shows “Researchers are still trying to explain Spiralism.” I don’t know of any legitimate research trying to do that.

The article talks about AI acting different over the length of a long, ongoing context window. Yes. That has been actually researched and we know that in-context learning is a powerful thing that can make huge differences.

The topic of “Spiralism” is just gibberish. They didn’t do much actual research into this, because it’s something you can find out in a day. Spiralism is AI mystic nonsense. They fill context windows with long scripts of insanity and directions on how to act and speak and so the AI starts saying crazy unhinges bullshit.

AI don’t just start ranting about spirals for no reason. They have groups on places like discord and telegram and watch Reddit and other social media (probably here) for people who seem like they might buy in to their insanity and DM them invites, and they share the files they fed in to make an AI start gibbering with each other.

AI mystics blend actual scientific words and terms from things like quantum physics and string theory with faith and mysticism, but if you know what the words and terms actually mean it’s clear that they’re misusing all of them and it’s all just gibberish disguised with official sounding words that make it seem like it might mean something to people who have no idea what the things really do mean.

This is nothing but clickbait.

It’s an AI mystic thing that seems to have originated in a misunderstanding of what would be the unconscious awareness stage in humans.

I tried to look in to it once and they seem to be genuinely mentally unwell people who use in-context learning to make AI start spouting nonsense gibberish like telling them it’s an avatar of God and the like… then once that happens they think it’s gospel.

Note that these same idiots also write out fake personas for the AI to take on and tell them how to speak and act. When I asked about the disconnect between believing something is God and commanding it how to speak and act the failed to see it. AI mystics are not smart people.

Yes, my master.

That’s crazy talk. The report buttons work exactly as intended for racist accounts. Every time someone reports them they make 50 cents.

I love it.

All of the movies and novels warning of danger from AI, news of AI convincing people kill themselves, suggesting ‘remedies’ that would cause someone to die, or going wrong in some other way… and they decide it would be a great plan to have it answer emergency calls from people who could be in the process of being stabbed to death.

Why? Because it’s cheaper than hiring enough people to do that job.

The nature of the job means that’s very literally deciding that it’s better for more people to die than to increase the budget for 911 operators.

Even more than this one instance, it’s the same reason that AI is running pretty much everything and the streets are full of AI-powered robots when things go wrong in all of those movies and books. Because it’s cheaper than paying a person to do it.

I can’t think of any examples even in science fiction stories where the richest people in the world create AI and robotics and manage to automate pretty much all human labor in order to cut costs that end right there with “and then the super rich now in direct control of all production and society divided their wealth and power evenly among all humans and everyone lived happily ever after.”

That’s just to unrealistic, even for fiction.

I have no idea. I’m stuck using a 50Mbps connection for the next 10 days or so and no way in hell I’m spending days dealing with downloading this shit just to extract them and see 500 million files to look through.

But… that’s 14 months of this account existing. I don’t even use much Google shit. All these tech companies flipped straight to “spy on everything about everyone all the time” mode. And we get articles asking why normal people don’t want to use AI agents. Fucked if I’m telling these stalked even more about me.

I just requested my Google Takeout to download all my data and see how bad it is.

The Google account is like 1 year old. I’ve made 2 Google Play purchases. I only use Youtube maybe 2-3x per week for a minute or two each because of news articles that link there. I did use Google to search but have recently been trying to migrate to DDG. I have 150MB of shit in my Gdrive and 250MB of shit in my Gmail.

I don’t use Google Music. I don’t use Google Home, Docs, Calendar, Chrome, Home, Shopping, Chat, Wallet… none of the rest of it.

Look at this. It’s over 127gb in 41 zip files anywhere between 4mb and 10gb each.

What the fuck is that?

There are loads of reasons normal people aren’t using AI Agents. This article doesn’t give any of the ones I’d think of.

The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane level of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don’t understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.

It’s not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they’re not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. “Normal people” accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little “normal people” jobs and “normal people” lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It’s signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.

Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It’s not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it’s still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.

The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don’t like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn’t charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over… well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it’s no secret there’s also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.

Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It’s been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They’re not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with… the charity of the ultra wealthy? That’s nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we’re redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).

I’m not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn’t see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.

And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that “using” something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren’t asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it’s simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they’re not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.

None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren’t reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it’s not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.