froztbyte

Too tired to sneer at the book myself right now but the article doesn’t pull punches either

Figured it’s worth posting since the book author has featured here more than once recently and has definitely been an enabler to The Shit

Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it

I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space

starting out[0] with "I was surprised by the following results" and it just goes further down almost-but-not-quite Getting It Avenue

close, but certainly no cigar

choice quotes:

Why is it impressive that a model trained on internet text full of random facts happens to have a lot of random facts memorized? … why does that in any way indicate intelligence or creativity?

That’s a good point.

you don't fucking say

I have a website (TrackingAI.org) that already administers a political survey to AIs every day. So I could easily give the AIs a real intelligence test, and track that over time, too.

really, how?

As I started manually giving AIs IQ tests

oh.

Then it proceeds to mis-identify every single one of the 6 answer options, leading it to pick the wrong answer. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to its misidentifications

if this fuckwit had even the slightest fucking understanding of how these things work, it would be glaringly obvious

there's plenty more, so remember to practice stretching before you start your eyerolls

[open scene]

background: a brightly lit airy Social Gathering space with multicoloured furniture (meeting rooms are so 2010). people have been arriving in clumps of 2~5 for over 30 minutes, and the presentation can start soon

sundar: I want to thank you all for coming. this one should be quick today.

* sundar briefly sweeps his eyes across the room before continuing *

sundar: guys! GUYS! we made the prompt VIDEO CAPABLE! it can follow A STREAMING SEQUENCE OF IMAGES!! you can immediately start testing this from your corporate account (whispers if you're in the right orgs). for the public scoff, we'll start with Ask Us pricing in a few months, and we'll force it on the usual product avenues. the office and mail suites stand ready to roll out the integration updates before anyone can ask. you know how the riffraff gets....

* some motion and noise in the back *

sundar: ... sorry melanie, what's that? speak up melanie I can't hear your question. you know how much that mask muffles your voice...

* a game of broken telephone for moving a handheld microphone to the back of the room ensues *

melanie: hi sundar, congratulations to the team for their achievement. I wanted to ask: how does gemini pro solve the issues other models have faced? what new innovations have been accomplished? how is it dealing with the usual issues of correctness, energy consumption, cultural contexts? how is it trained on areas where no datasets exist? were any results sourced from cooperation with the AI ethics and responsibility workgroups that have found so many holes in our previous models?

sundar: * smiles brightly, stares directly into middle of crowd. moves hand to the electronic shutter control, and starts pressing the increase button multiple times until shutter is entirely opaque *

[sundar walks off into the fake sunset, breaks open the boardroom whiskey]

[inside the private exec room]

sundar: FUCK! that was too close. didn't we fire those types already in the last layoffs...? someone get me HR, we need to do something

[end scene]

archive

"There's absolutely no probability that you're going to see this so-called AGI, where computers are more powerful than people, in the next 12 months. It's going to take years, if not many decades, but I still think the time to focus on safety is now," he said.

just days after poor lil sammyboi and co went out and ran their mouths! the horror!

Sources told Reuters that the warning to OpenAI's board was one factor among a longer list of grievances that led to Altman's firing, as well as concerns over commercializing advances before assessing their risks.

Asked if such a discovery contributed..., but it wasn't fundamentally about a concern like that.

god I want to see the boardroom leaks so bad. STOP TEASING!

“What we really need are safety brakes. Just like you have a safety break in an elevator, a circuit breaker for electricity, an emergency brake for a bus – there ought to be safety breaks in AI systems that control critical infrastructure, so that they always remain under human control,” Smith added.

this appears to be a vaguely good statement, but I'm gonna (cynically) guess that it's more steered by the fact that MS now repeatedly burned their fingers on human-interaction AI shit, and is reaaaaal reticent about the impending exposure

wonder if they'll release a business policy update about usage suitability for *GPT and friends

archive (e: twitter [archive] too, archive for nitter seems a bit funky)

it'd be nice if these dipshits, like, came off a factory line somewhere. then you could bin them right at the QC failure

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process [by the board]

"god, he's really cost us... how much can we get back?"

which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board

not only with the board, kids

hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities

you and me both, brother

nitter archive

just in case you haven't done your daily eye stretches yet, here's a workout challenge! remember to count your reps, and to take a break between paragraphs! duet your score!

oh and, uh.. you may want to hide any loose keyboards before you read this. because you may find yourself wanting to throw something.

will this sure is gonna go well :sarcmark:

it almost feels like when Google+ got shoved into every google product because someone had a bee in their bonnet

flipside, I guess, is that we'll soon (at scale!) get to start seeing just how far those ideas can and can't scale

archive.org | and .is

this is almost a NSFW? some choice snippets:

more than 1.5 million people have used it and it is helping build nearly half of Copilot users’ code

Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

good thing it's so good that everyone will use it amirite

starting around $13 for the basic Microsoft 365 office-software suite for business customers—the company will charge an additional $30 a month for the AI-infused version.

Google, ..., will also be charging $30 a month on top of the regular subscription fee, which starts at $6 a month

I wonder how long they'll try that, until they try forcing it on everyone (and raise all prices by some n%)

The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a quick demonstration that the base model can be easily fine-tuned to achieve compelling performance. It does not have any moderation mechanism. We’re looking forward to engaging with the community on ways to make the model finely respect guardrails, allowing for deployment in environments requiring moderated outputs.

“Whoops, it’s done now, oh well, guess we’ll have to do it later”

Go fucking directly to jail

a friend linked this to me earlier today: nitter (someone else maybe archive it? I don't know what tusky has done to birdsite and how to make wayback play nice)

in one lens/view one could see this as just more of the same (if people were already gunning for YC track shit, there's other things already implied etc), but even so: just how bad is(/must) the "belief" (be) for young people to feel this intensely about it?

I'm over here just watching the arc of likely events and I can barely fathom the anger and disappointment that may[0] come about in a few years after this

[0] - "may" because it seems a lot of folks have their anger redirected far too easily; remains to be seen if it can remain correctly directed in future