I mean that is how it works if you can buy it in full with cash. If you can’t then it’s an unpleasant process that ends up costing far more.

It’s cute, everyone wants to feel heard. Age is guaranteed, growing up is not. The world is a much more understandable place when you realize most people are like 9 years old but in a 30+ year old body.

I’ve just started playing around more seriously and I bounce between cursor and Claude code in CLI. I’ll check out how chat behaves and sometimes random tools like blackbox.

No website / desktop access?

You shifted to a private news network? There’s supposedly some really good ones with extremely niche music available.

Yeah, the Turing test has essentially been solved and at least in a digital format aka text, audio, video call it is now quite difficult to fully determine if what you are getting is from a human or a machine. I think it won’t be long now until there’s a push for a biometric verification for the web and the internet is essentially split into agents only, agents and humans, and humans only.

There is quite the gamble going on currently. Strong AI will happen, the problem now is the timeframe. Investors of course want it to occur on the timeframe of months, of financial quarters. In that timeframe even I feel unsure. In the timeframe of five or ten years it’s more likely. You also have essentially the entire field of mathematicians and computer scientists convinced and financial investors who quickly over leveraged themselves and are now beginning to get cold feet just before the big payout.

Now I think you’re not seeing the bigger picture. Cash is flowing in like crazy and not every investor is wise in where they’re putting it, that is tons of nonsense projects are being funded right now. Also we have major players taking different approaches. For example OpenAI has been more heavily focused on monetizing consumers whereas anthropic has seen this waiver and is now shifting more towards B2B. So you have a lot of competitors, a lot of which are nonsense projects all looking right now to return something so investors boots stop shaking but none of this is new. It took Uber 14 years before it started showing any profits. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. In the meantime dozens of competitors died and so did their VC.

To add fuel to the fire of all this, China has been releasing very competitive open source models they spent tens of millions of dollars to train, not out of the kindness of their heart but in an attempt to stifle US AI development. This also allows tons of people without the means otherwise to edit the model into some essentially useless use case and pitch it to investors aka one of the big reasons there are ten thousand AI pop up companies and this isn’t more so in the hands of one or two AI labs.

What’s your timeframe? Currently yes, will that forever continue to be the case particularly if it becomes as or more intelligent than us? I have doubts. This is a well known problem

To be clear I never said anything about it being conscious. It’s more than possible for something to be intelligent and not conscious, what is typically referred to as a philosophical zombie. I really seriously hope you are right but I’ve been working in the field directly since 2020 and have my degree in computational mathematics. That’s to say I’ve seen things maybe others have not and have been paying close attention to the growth of this for a while. There’s currently no reason to assume development will halt. Now many implementations are more so useless toys, and right now that’s most people’s experience or awareness of what’s going on.

Most technology was seen as silly or useless at the beginning. Cars were nothing but novel toys for the wealthy. People couldn’t imagine them ever being useful, not like a horse and carriage. Don’t see what already is, see how things are growing and what direction they are generally heading and you will see what will be.

Sounds like an easy lawsuit then so long as you didn’t commit slander, liable, or call for violence you’ll be very well covered by the constitution and I hope you enjoy the tax money you’ll receive.

Unfortunately what is happening with AI development is serious and is an existential threat to humanity and not because of the data centers or environmental impact, although I do seriously wish you were right. As someone who is working in the field and is an academic it’s not looking good for us, my hope is that it’s more compassionate than us.

Like in the US I can put up a booth and talk about tienimen square or for that matter anything the US or any other country has done that was unjust. I can criticize the president and the government openly. I can lawfully use a VPN or Tor.

That would be nice if you were correct. I’ll give an example, neurons don’t think, even large bundles of neurons don’t think, they just respond to stimulus in relationship to their training. They are non-deterministicly guessing based on past experiences.

Now as for AI not having novel or unplanned behavior, I’m guessing you’ve never tried training one or interacting with one long enough.

It’s unfortunately not that and there is a wider context here. I personally wish it was all flimflam or that the development naturally hits a roadblock. The problem is there’s no evidence currently to suggest either of those statements are true of the current approach towards AI. I’m saying this as a computational mathematics academic. I would much prefer for us all that you were right. So far though I only have reason to have extreme worries about what is happening and what is being built. There really should be a global armistice on AI development, but there won’t be.

I would be arrested there for things that are my right elsewhere.

In China would you still be alive?

Me neither, it’s an unfortunate circumstance because there is an adversary and their population doesn’t have a say about it therefore they will likely catch up and overtake the US. As of now I would prefer the US to achieve AGI over China. Personally I wish there wasn’t this race at all, the way things are going I have doubts we will solve the control problem and I’m essentially praying this essentially alien entity we’re creating is far more compassionate than us.

The US or China, pick your poison. At least as of now I can go outside or online and say whatever I want in the US so long as it isn’t slander, liable, or a threat of violence. I’m not sure I can do the same in Bejing.

I think you aren’t aware of what’s happening. I’ll give an analogy. You have GPS in your phone, that doesn’t make it an intercontinental ballistic missile. The AI I think you’re interfacing with is watered down and for the masses like technology is in most regards. What is already possible and what is being built is just a touch stronger than the chatGPT you get to use.

Humans are the dominant lifeform on earth because humans are the most intelligent. What happens if that is no longer the circumstance? There are already glimpses of AI providing mathematical proofs that are currently unverifiable, and not because they are necessarily incorrect, but because it is beyond us currently.

I understand that. The problem is what happens when another nation who doesn’t like you has the AI or their AI goes rogue. The problem with trying to outthink a thinking thing that can outthink you is you are in essence a thinking thing and you can’t outthink it. I understand data centers are problematic to say the least, what’s far more problematic is a rogue artificial super intelligence and no way to counter it.