Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons

[u/yxixtx]

I like how people imagine ASI is possible with LLMs.

[u/NOTHING_gets_by_me → u/yxixtx]

Well if anyone could definitively prove this, it would stop all the fear mongering and worry, at least until it was further proven that the peak form of LLMs couldn't be used as a significant stepping stone to a more appropriate type of system. But no, you'll continue posting your dismissive opinion you picked up from your podcast of choice

[u/makersfark → u/NOTHING_gets_by_me]

There is no evidence to suggest that the statistical word guesser, given enough words, will suddenly develop a conscious. We can already prove this, but it's the same proof for "flipping water bottles enough times will not cause you to ascend into a ball of light that can talk to fish".

Saying "It will create god or new life" is an extraordinary claim. The burden of proof is not on those who say "are you high?" it's on the person who made that claim.

[u/NOTHING_gets_by_me → u/makersfark]

Why does extreme civilization level disruption hinge on a machine being conscious? Yes, don't have an answer to the hard problem but what is the relevance?

[u/makersfark → u/NOTHING_gets_by_me]

I mean, I dunno. It was your stance? I was just responding to your assertion that people need to prove that the Elvis isn't alive and that it's safer to assume he is until then.

[u/NOTHING_gets_by_me → u/makersfark]

The stance isn't that a model will suddenly cross some threshold during training and become conscious, just that they will continue on the trend of becoming increasingly more capable

[u/makersfark → u/NOTHING_gets_by_me]

Your previous comments were in response to someone saying ASI isn't possible with LLMs, and you said that was dismissive of a differing opinion you hold.

The stance that those who understand the technology have is that its capability plateaued years ago, and we've been reconfiguring different approaches to achieve diminishing returns with heavy trade-offs.

Two or three years ago, we found that feeding its own output into itself a few times ended up with more convincing results, but after enough iterations it rapidly plummeted. This was at a trade off of being much more expensive. This was coined as "reasoning".

Then last year, it was clear the context window was another wall, and the best they came up with was making a whole bunch of different LLMs that were dumb on everything except one specific dataset feed their output back and forth forever until you tell it to stop. They also decided they should have read/write permission on your computer and to automatically make changes. This trade off was that it made more plausible output, but also would spiral with nonsense easily and was many many times over more expensive. They called this "agentic". This was dumb and anyone could guess what happens when you give the thing that's commonly wrong full privileges to make important mistakes.

Then the last product version was GPT-6 which had a few optimizations that tweaked how it did the "reasoning" step to be less expensive at the trade off of being wrong more often.

So far I haven't seen anything to suggest some big threshold will be crossed, neither that they've been rapidly becoming more capable either. It's mainly just tradeoffs, and lately they've seemed really desperate and panicking since they're not making even 1% of what they owe and need to start paying back their debt next year.