Mankind created the atomic bomb, used it twice, then turned the science into power for people all over the world. Let’s hope we can harness AI in a similar way.

Yeah, let’s forget the 4 decades of terror where everyone lived at the edge under the threat of inminent apocalyptical destruction. Kids had to do nuclear incident drills and we almost had a Doom’s day, twice.

But it’s OK, then the 1% became anti nuclear anyways in order to hold back the transition to fossil free renewables for another two decades. So you can say it was all a 1,5° net positive.

They’re still using nuclear fear to rationalize war. The entire premise of the Iran war was to keep them from having a nuclear weapon.

And ironically, if they did have a nuclear weapon, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war

And so much has come out that Russia never really had the capabilities they said they had. They were just saying it so they could laugh as we poured all of our money into giant useless defense projects instead of social services and infrastructure. The result, $40 trillion in debt and no bullet trains. In a way, they kinda won the cold war.

I think you meant the USSR. They most certainly had a lot of destructive capability regardless of inflating their numbers.

Most of US debt came long after the USSR was dissolved.

Considering that Russia is attempting USSR 2.0, you may have a point about them winning in the long run.

Of course the ussr. Im definitely not saying they didnt have destructive capabilities, they just were never going to try to use them on the US or Europe. It sure seems that Russia is trying ussr 2 and the us is trying for the fourth reich

The US created the atomic bomb and tested not knowing if it would cause a chain reaction destroying the atmosphere and all life on Earth. It was a risk they were willing to take.

They then used nuclear weapons on two of the largest civilians massacares ever recorded. The proliferation of nuclear arms lead to the cold war and to this day still threatens to end all of humanity. It’s cool though, nothing like knowing the world can end at any moment, no stress.

Are you seriously suggesting AI should be used in a similar way!?

No, what I’m suggesting is the splitting the atom has eventually lead to using nuclear power as a massive source of energy that has powered countries all over the world. I feel as though AI already is already a knife dangling over humanities head, but I hope and believe that it will mostly be used for good and not as a threat to a proxy war or continually enriching the already rich.

Indeed. Nothing I’ve seen thus far gives me the impression LLMs will ever be truly useful outside of a few niche tasks.

Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

The problem with them is two-fold:

1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.

This might be one of the best summaries of LLMs in their current state I’ve seen here. People claiming they’re useless are stuck in 23’ but to say they’re at AGI/ASI is accelerationist techo-paganism.

Based and levelheaded take

Good ducking point. We really can’t trust anyone.

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

Have you looked at the current state of LLMs? The list of things that it’s missing to be an AGI is growing smaller every month.

Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

What do you seriously think the result of that would be?

If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.