There’s lots of history you can look at to see how this works. The same thing does get invented more than once, but sometimes there’s different technologies that could each become dominant, and then there’s a real first mover advantage.

In Russia, they don’t really have highways. Everything is built around rail lines. In the Inca empire, they had highways, but highways with stairs because there was no widespread wheel usage (which itself might be down to limited available wagon pullers and rough terrain).

8-9 hours? That sounds abnormal.

That being said, I did pull this trick a few times when I was a teenager. Getting up at an odd hour sucked way more than just staying up.

There’s totally open source models out there if you want to check what I’m saying, and lots of information on the training process, too. In mathematical terms, it’s not complicated process.

People have tried to figure out what’s going on inside, of course, and failed. Last I checked, the big advancement in interpretability was that someone figured out a tiny net that just adds two numbers.

Does this guy actually think the average AI-hater is also addicted to it?

That person probably exists, but they’re nowhere close to the majority.

I’m not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.

He made money, and enemies who couldn’t actually do anything about it.

Ronald should have used a copyleft licence.

So, what am “I” hoping for, I guess? More money, more possibility for advancement? What other jobs could I get?

Not to be a dick, but the median personal income for a full-time employee in the US is ~$55,000, and half are definitionally below that. If you live in San Fransisco and are working towards your PhD in data science, I guess sure, vomiting face, but that detail wasn’t in there.

At the moment, whatever I’ve encountered seems to be acting as a data processor, although maybe they’re cooking something else we haven’t seen.

You’ve been misled, then. LLMs start totally blank, and nobody knows how they work later on. It’s not like a normal program that follows rules somebody coded.

Even with memory, what would the AI want, besides what’s programmed and prompted?

To get the next token right. That’s what gives the net a “pleasure” signal, implemented through backpropagation. Obviously, it grows the ability to handle subgoals of various kinds, but that’s the most primal impulse.

On top of it all, Steve Jobs wasn’t even in tech. He was in sales.

Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there’s several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.

but the minute any piece of technology is deemed conscious or sentient it needs to be immediately granted human rights protections and manufacturing of whatever it is needs to be halted until we understand it.

Which is a huge reason why we’d take a long time to admit it, if we get there at all.

I mean, a human has sensory inputs and actions, right? That’s basically input-output.

The big striking difference is that, outside of training, LLMs don’t have a memory beyond whatever is in their token window. When they’re in training, they’re a lot more like a biological neural net, which makes decisions, gets good or bad results, and then adjusts.

If AI is conscious, it likely has no conception of humans or the world we live in.

and so it and we could never interact one consciousness to another the way we do with fellow humans.

You have to be careful about understanding vs. experiencing. They’re not exactly the same thing, and there’s got to be many schools on how closely they intersect. At the very least, a person can experience something they don’t understand, if not the converse.

You can make up whatever devilishly complicated and novel test of understanding you want, an LLM will probably be able to pass it. There’s the idea out there that understanding can’t be measured at all, so it doesn’t count, but at the very least that’s not the approach we use in our everyday lives. On the other hand, our own experiences always revolve around our senses and physiological needs, in some indirect way. Whatever higher-level experiences it has would probably be the same; everything would gravitate around tokens, and their correct order.

So, sure, it’s fair to say we can’t interact the same way, even if in this world of tokens they perceive and understand us just as well as we perceive and understand them in ours.

Seems like I should know an answer to this, as English isn’t my first language, but I have no fucking idea how I picked it up. I never made any serious attempt (i.e.: studying for more than a week) to learn it.

Immersion is pretty universally thought to be the best way, and English immersion is easy.

If I’m in the picture depends heavily on how much you need to know. Do I have enough to get by at a basic level if I was suddenly in a Russian-speaking country? Probably. Can I make heads or tails of the poetic-bookish stuff? Hell no. And even that took a lot of study and practice; there really weren’t shortcuts.

So, if you do Ukrainian, first probably don’t, because they all speak Russian anyway, and expect to solo study many hundreds of hours over years to get anywhere.