Humans can't develop safety until there is enough blood in the streets. Only issue with AI is that threshold may come at a point where its too far gone to recover. But humans can't put in seatbelts until we're losing 40k people per year in car crashes. Unfortunately its just how we're wired. Those that are careful are outcompeted by the brash and the fast-moving, until the relative value of moving fast is removed, then we consider the value of making things safe. We didn't start with safe electricity, we started by killing lots of people and starting lots of fires. Many many years later, we ended up with electrical codes and standards.

The AI proponents who originally spoke of safety did so because they are aware of the dangers. However they, like all of us, are not able to change human nature or society. Molloch will drag them into the most dangerous game or eliminate them from the competition. Only with time, death, and damage (and many lawsuits) will any measure of safety be gained. The righteous will say "see we said AI was dangerous!" but that will be the only satisfaction they can have, many years after the damage is done.

If we want to speedrun safety, the only real mechanism is to make legal recourse more viable (e.g. $1M penalty per copyright infringement, $100M per AI-related death, etc.). If this was the case, lawyers self-interest and greed will compete with the self-interest and greed of the AI corps, balancing the risk (but there is no altruistic route to solving this).

Not sure if that's true, what are your reasons for believing that? Are you saying we couldn't have invented the machines we used if we took safety measures along the way (e.g. having guards on machines that chopped of arms and legs)? Perhaps progress would have been slower -- since rather than just using the saw, you'd need a saw with a guard and emergency switch -- but it seems like if humans were more circumspect, we would have the industrial revolution, but more deliberate and controlled. Agreed it probably wouldn't have been "overnight factories in every city", but then again, you probably wouldn't have many of the externalities we're still learning about and paying for?

Yes, it would probably have been better to have industrial evolution instead. Or are you arguing that all the countless deaths, maimings, child labor, 16-hour workdays, robber barons, black lung, radium jaws, and so on and so on were simply how it had to go? Or do you simply not care because all of that happened to other people?

Is it possible to construct an ID using some kind of centralized observable phenomena? Due to how time and distance distinguish things, would they always be unique? Like only one person will ever simultaneously observe stars in certain positions and intensities, color, etc. Similar to how I've heard some companies use lava lamps or other noisy processes to generate entropy.

I guess I'm wondering if there is a way to construct a universal coordinate frame for the whole universe? If so, then its possible to trivially assign local time + x + y + z + salt to make unique ids.

This is a smart play. Models aren't going to be a moat, performance is too easy to replicate and all the big players (and even OSS) are following quickly behind. The only moat that will be stable is having something with network effects and adoption overhead, something that can grab eyes and has sticking power. This was probably the idea behind Sora (although it hasn't worked).

Filling the team with people who come up with novel and interesting ways to grab attention that could possibly create vendor lock-in is probably the goal.

It will only in the same way computers and machines that automated past work such as farming and textiles has created lots of free time for today's workers.

Not the GP, but I've noticed that because if you don't anticipate how you might need to mutate or share state in the future, you can have a "footgun" that forces large-scale code changes for relatively small "feature-level" changes, because of the rust strictness. Its not a footgun in the sense that your code does what you don't expect, its a footgun in that your maintenance and ability to change code is not what you expect (and its easy to do). I'm sure if you are really expert with rust, you see it coming and don't use patterns that will cause waves of changes (but if you're expert at any language you avoid the footguns).

That’s not a footgun and happens in any language. I have not observed rust code to be more prone to it. Certainly less so than c++ for various reasons around the build time and code organization.

The models are differentiable, they are trained with backprop. You can easily just run it in reverse to get the input that produces near certainty of producing the output. For a given sequence length, you can create a new optimzation that takes the input sequence, passes to model (frozen) and runs steps over the input sequence to reduce the "loss" which is the desired output. This will give you the optimal sequence of that length to maximize the probability of seeing the output sequence. Of course, if you're doing this to chatGPT or another API-only model, you have no choice but to hunt around.

Of course the optimal sequence to produce the output will be a series of word vectors (of multi-hundreds of dimensions). You could match each to its closest word in any language (or make this a constraint during solving), or just use the vectors themselves as the compressed data value.

Ultimately, NNets of various kinds are used for compression in various contexts. There are some examples where guassian-splatting-like 3d scenes are created by comrpessing all the data into the weights of a nnet via a process similar to what I described to create a fully explorable 3d color scene that can be rendered from any angle.

interestingly, with the Guthrie disappearance, her camera had been disabled with no subscription, but they were still able to "find the footage" that was being stored on backend servers. Whoops... Looks like it just always records, they just don't let you access it unless you pay subscription. I'm sure the prospect of using it for AI training and surveillance is just too juicy to pass up.

It wasn't ring (amazon), it was Nest (google), but same thing. I have no doubt that "disabled no-subscription ring cams" are probably streaming video that is stored in perpetuity as well. (Most of which you aren't allowed to see yourself, even of your own property).

Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness.

Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!

> once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!

The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?

You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.

Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.

It truly is beautiful.

On the one hand, I like blunt descriptions like yours - the reasons why loving a romantic partner, sex, and caring for children feels good is because that makes the species (or your genes more specifically) continue to exist.

The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.

But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.

The issue is - fundamentally - whether you think life is "mostly good" isn't based on measurement.

Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.

Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.

Is life mostly good?

Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing. After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.

Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.

If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.

Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc. This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.

70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.

I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).

> Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child.

Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning. But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.

Sorry man, that's rough. Best wishes to you. Definitely agree there are some things you lose, but for me at least, when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time.

It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionally hanging out with ever shrinking groups or random strangers.

> when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time

Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)

Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)

Yep, but people can only understand the stresses and challenges they have faced, its very hard to understand something you haven't experienced. Even if you try to imagine it, you really can't understand it until you're living it. But yeah, after kids I think any rational parent would instantly without question abandon or sacrifice a pet for a child. A pet is literally 0 out of 10 compared to a child -- no comparison whatsoever. But I appreciate the "I have a cat" people are at least trying to relate. But its a bit like when my plumber came over and tried to tell me how he's really into programming because he's dabbled in a bit of HTML on his drag and drop website. I was friendly and appreciated relating to it, but he's only grazed the surface. I'm sure in his circles he's the "computer wiz".

Yep this is 100% it -- my partner and I who stayed single and lived out our 20s and early 30s "experiencing life" only wish we could have met and settled down 10 years earlier. Its way more important and rewarding than all the shallow stuff that people talk about. Of course sometimes you miss the freedom, but sometimes I missed high school when I was in college -- didn't mean it was a step down. Sometimes I missed college and my old job when I got a "real job", of course, it was still a strict upgrade, but you can always look back and appreciate what was good about the old days.