They didn’t even watch Age of Ultron, as pointed out they claim Ultron wasn’t smart enough to try reading the internet, when in the movie the first thing he does upon being activated is read the internet

‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck

The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder

Often, you can just think more and think better, and obviate the need for a test, because you realize that previous observations contain the answer already. Compare the ability of modern AIs to learn how to pilot robots, sometimes using pure simulation.

Sometimes you can think harder until you find a similarly reliable but faster test.

A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.

They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder

okay last one for today I promise

In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them.

Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.”

…and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.

Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet.

Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie???

Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better.

Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there

Previously on awful

Haven’t seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails

The banks are having an AI problem

” These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.”

”In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents — programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user’s behalf — contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.”

I’m no finances guy so take this with a grain of salt, but since boosters are apparently acting like the convertibles will automatically work out, wouldn’t Anthropic still be losing more than they earn even if all those convertible notes work out due to compute/training costs? Since they got a discount from Elon earlier. Plus the BetterOffline post pointed out how they can’t even break even on an operating basis

So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs ‘found’ the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)

Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow

It’s true that there’s more to success than intelligence. There’s also sensors, actuators and metabolism. However, machines look set to master those too.

r/BetterOffline post about the article

Brief comment snippet:

A convertible note is a loan from an investor, but instead of paying them back with cash you give them stock options. It’s still a loss, you’re taking cash from an investor because you can’t break even with revenue.

To single out a specific review

For example, they describe trees as “self-replicating factories that spin air into wood” and conclude that “any intelligence capable of comprehending biochemistry at the deepest level is capable of building its own self-replicating factories to serve its own purposes.”

So an AI could self replicate…because a tree can?? not all trees even self-replicate so the metaphor isn’t even right

Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow

I first learned of it through a comment under a Yudkowsky interview, comparing his messages to the book’s, which is not exactly confidence inspiring

I definitely reeks of conspiracy theory, per this description Edit 2: and the way it talks about the decline in birth rates is also setting off red flags

Two ‘its not x, its y’ statements in close proximity also raise my ‘ai generated’ suspicions

Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn’t find anything)

There’s a youtube video (edit:podcast) on it that I’ll watch later

The pumpkin spice maximiser

AI will make free ice cream for everyone

I believe so

Also, ‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’ is just the vaguest thing ever. ‘yeah bro AI is gonna make everything super good. How? Why? uhhh i dont know it just will’