I see only two outcomes at this point. LLMs evolve into AGI or they evolve into something perceptually indistinguishable from AGI. Either way the result is the same and we’re just arguing semantics.
It's like saying an 8086 will never be able to render photorealistic graphics in realtime. They fuel the investment in technology and research that will likely lead there.
And the result of the industrial revolution has been a reduction of about 85% of all wild animals, and threatened calamity of the rest in the next few decades. Hardly can be summarized as "yet here we are."
Could’ve said the same for any major technological advance. Luddism is not a solution. If these models are easily run on a laptop then yes some people are going to hurt themselves or others but we already have laws that deal with people doing bad things. The world is not going to end though. Your Taiwan scenario has a much higher probability of ending the world than this yet you seem unconcerned about that.
You could have saved some money by writing tests. How much text were you sending at a time? I’ve been summarizing multiple 500 word chunks per query in my app as well as generating embeddings and haven’t broken $10 over the course of a couple weeks.
Sure but at some point you're testing prompt generation and what happens with the model, thats what Im talking about. This is a basic session with a couple of people clicking cost that much. So clearly Im doing something far more wrong from the API side to get whats clearly magically worse billing than everyone else here.
They charge per 1k tokens so you must have high volume somehow, are you maxing out the prompt length every time? That’s the only thing I can think of besides sending a ridiculous number of requests that would cost that much in an evening.
Blaming the Catholic church specifically for high birth rates is a misstep especially since the author compares to England which has a long and varied history with Protestantism. The argument should be reframed around religiosity in general or he should show data for England that indicates a difference in fertility during the periods of stronger and weaker Catholic influence in England.
He never says the high birth rate is because of the Roman Catholic Church. Every place in Europe was deeply religious and had high birth rates at that time, regardless of the religion. He only blames secularization for the decline in birth rate. It just happens that the rapid secularization happened fastest where the Roman Catholic Church was strongest.
> I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline
> ...the Catholic Church, threatened by the spread of the Protestant Reformation, took ‘be fruitful and multiply’ seriously and the purpose of marriage became explicitly multiplicative
> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several
The first and third quotes only say that the birth rate diminished as Catholicism declined, which in a Roman Catholic area means secularization is occurring. Again, this is logically not the same thing as saying that Catholicism itself is the cause of the high birth rate. A birthrate can be high because of one thing and decrease because of something else.
The second quote still doesn’t show that the birth rate was high because of Catholicism. It doesn’t even say what the effect of that position was.
Could catholicism have been the cause of the high birth rate in France before it dropped? Sure. But the article never makes that claim. And it implies otherwise, because it mentions high birth rates around Europe including places that weren’t catholic.
Why would someone only ask an LLM questions when they were in the market to buy a book? Most people I know don't buy books in order to look up the answer to a question, sure some people buy reference books and use them but that's not really what we think of when talking about authors and books. If I'm in the market for a book, I'm looking to read a book, not query something or someone for answers. I think your example should go like this:
Tomorrow: 1) you do research, write posts, publish a book, 2) it is all consumed by a for-profit operated LLM. 3) People ask LLM to get answers to some related question or interest 4) They ask the LLM for a list of recent books that go in depth on the topic or are in the genre etc. 5) Your name comes up in the list 6) Goto step 2 from Yesterday
> 4) They ask the LLM for a list of recent books that go in depth on the topic or are in the genre etc. 5) Your name comes up in the list
My belief is that ChatGPT is actually not quite capable of that, after seeing examples of how it manufactures non-existing references. Besides, if it were capable of that, why would it not show your name as part of the answer already now?
The cynic in me thinks it’s not capable of that primarily because it is not a priority for OpenAI and training data strips attribution, with an explicit purpose: if the public knows that ChatGPT can trace back the source, OpenAI would be on the hook for paying all the countless non-consensual content providers on which work it makes money.
We should treat OpenAI as we treat Google and Microsoft. It has great talent and charismatic people working for it, but ultimately it’s a for-profit tech company and the name they chose ought to make us all the more suspicious (akin to Google’s “don’t be evil”).
> Why would someone only ask an LLM questions when they were in the market to buy a book?
Why would you be in a market for a book when you can learn the same and more by asking an LLM that already consumed said book? And therefore why would the author spend effort writing and publishing a book knowing it’d sell exactly one copy (to LLM operator)?
It's very much in their interest, if the information their models provide is impossible to verify then it severely limits its uses. You essentially can't use it as a source for anything that requires any type of citation or reliability. That's a huge handicap for selling it to businesses and researchers. The general problem of determining what training data was used to produce an output is an open problem in ML and one that is being very actively worked on since it would greatly further the field.
You believe correctly that ChatGPT is not capable of showing sources, it's currently impossible to do but we were discussing Tomorrow so I included it as a possibility. You could potentially hack it in now using traditional search or nearest neighbours but it wouldn't be 100% accurate, probably not even 50%, it would just show a bag of similar texts so not really worth doing.
I'd still be in the market for a book even if we had a perfect LLM that could answer every question I had with impeccable accuracy. I read books because I want to find out about things I don't know that I don't know. It's pretty hard to find those things if you just do question response. It's like a graph, if you start at one node it may take you a very long time to traverse the graph to another node but if you have some outside source that gives you the address of a new node you can just jump straight to it.
You can also invert this and say that without a system like ChatGPT it is physically impossible for most people to find or use those 570GB of data. A search engine can only get you so far and over time they are becoming less useful as the net floods with junk content. If you don't even know what terms to search for then ChatGPT wins out since you can start with a very simple question and then interrogate it further on details it produces. The best way to think about it is as a better search engine, a fully interactive one that also has some degree of its own agency when it comes to synthesizing data. It could be better, it would be nice to have the option to show sources for the output so that you can verify the facts or do your own research.
I'm of the opinion that all kids books should be heavy on metaphor and allegory and all of the other important and joyful aspects of language. Restricting children to books that have been "written at their level" or "made easy to read" is doing them a disservice. It's no wonder so many people grow up to be seldom readers if their first exposure to reading is saccharin pablum that presents no challenge, no meaning, no mystery, and no danger. A proper children's book should be one which an adult can also read and enjoy if they give way to that childlike wonder that still lives within them.
Yes, indeed! Children have a huge capacity for stories that engage their imaginations, creativity, and open sense of wonder. And, I think if we're honest, kids are often more honest critics than adults.
Author of "A Wrinkle in Time" Madeleine L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
Nah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE they'll win a bigger share of the market with a far superior engine. It waits to be seen.
It's more that the industry is bearish on long bets in a tight financial climate. The tech for VR/AR is too clunky to seamlessly integrate into peoples' daily lives like mobile phones and smart phones did. There will need to be an iPhone-like leap in affordable and portable vision tech before VR/AR becomes a feasible marketplace.
Iirc there was some face-punching resistance to people recording discreetly. I suspect that may have subsided some in many areas due to the longer them of high-res-video-recorder ubiquity.
don't disagree, i find it interesting that people get unbelievably angered when individuals record them in public, but could care less when business do. I could understand some difference in reaction between the two, but the actual gulf displayed is astounding.
The pizza place's security camera isn't going to prank me or ask me about a sensitive topic and then same day blast my reaction on 7 vertical format video platforms as an out of context meme with sensationally misleading captions.
I’m not familiar with the google glass incidents but surely people have good reason to feel differently about being singled out and clandestinely recorded by an individual compared to a business that automatically records everyone who enters. I don’t think carrying a camera down the street would get you punched.
I never understood why they didn't let the camera flip up (to give visual appearance you weren't recording directly ahead). A simple physical move could have helped it gain acceptance
I don’t think Google Glass provides any augmented reality functionality? It’s just a mobile head-up display. You need a lot more processing power (and clunkier hardware) to be able to do augmented reality
On the price point, the original iPhone retailed for $499USD which in inflation adjusted dollars today would be $714USD. The Quest 2 is significantly cheaper than that as a standalone device. The Quest Pro is much more expensive but is targeted at businesses, watch Zuck's intro of it if you doubt that. The biggest barrier is that for really good performance on any headset you need to tether to a gaming PC. That's a lot more cost and complication for non-technical people. That said, the hardware is there and capable of delivering outstanding visuals and inside out tracking. The compute and networking are lagging behind, we really need a small, user friendly and powerful device that anyone can go buy, plug in and then connect their VR headset to with 0 frustration. That would free up headsets to only worry about the displays and tracking.
I don't think the future of VR is portable. I have an aversion to lumping AR in with it since they are fundamentally different. If it makes it easier, VR is desktop, AR is mobile. Similar but not at all the same. The way I envision the future of VR is that it does for your physical experiences what computers and the internet did for your paperwork and documents. Thinking about VR as a cellphone is the wrong mental model, it's not a peripheral that exists in your physical environment. It is a replacement for your physical environment or more congenially, it is another physical environment to which you can travel in addition to the places you currently go to.
I am afraid you are not paying much attention to the xr dev community which is overwhelmingly Unity vs UE. Both have their shortcomings but the new UE features like Nanite don't work out of the box double rendered and thats just one reason.
Yes, Alex and his team(s) are out there in the front pushing what's possible but its not off the shelf he has a lot of talent. Big fan of his Heavenue work on live rendered VR/XR/3D shows & the one they did for A Christmas Carroll is still state of the art theater.
I've also played a few indie VR games that are using it. It's not like you have to be some technical wizard to enable it, you just need to make sure you aren't stomping on your FPS with a bunch of other stuff at the same time.
If we're talking about galactic distances and timescales I don't see why we couldn't safely assume enough technological advancement for either aliens or humans to modify their own biology to the point where centuries would be a small fraction of your total lifespan. I think the bigger question is why any significant number of people would travel to more than a few star systems if you had to do it slowly. If the system is uninhabited then you would be isolating yourself from the rest of society for a long time. If it's inhabited then you would have the excitement of discovery and contact but it would still be difficult being separated from your own civilization and you would want to return at some point even if just to share what you've learnt.
How many people today travel to places that are completely uninhabited and have no infrastructure in place for getting there? I'm talking end of the road, getting on a bush plane and landing in the middle of an open field kind of isolated. How long do they stay? Same for contacting the few remaining hunter gatherers on the planet. What if those trips took thousands of years instead of a few weeks?
I think there's a big stretch of time for the development of any technological civilization where they spend most of their effort on developing their own solar system and only send small flyby probes to their nearest neighbours. After that there may be an even longer period during which they colonize those near by stars but each colony likely takes an extremely long time to fully develop. The civilization may send out automated probes to look and listen and maybe the occasional explorer or anthropologist but I doubt there are any galaxy conquering civilizations out there.
So I think I do agree that if anything visits us it is likely to be an automated probe. Bracewell probes would be well suited to any chatty civilization that is seeking contact. Von Neumann probes are more suited to brute force exploration.
This is all assuming that the speed of light is the fastest you can travel and communicate. If it isn't, then I'd say all bets are off.
If the Internet has told us anything, it's that as soon as the production of a self-replicating probe becomes accessible to a hobbyist, some people will do it even if there's no benefit to them. And it only takes one. The far future human colonists won't be landing on unspoilt wilderness; they'll be reclaiming systems from some 25th century script kiddy.
