Yes, just like Minecraft worlds are so antiquated given how they contain diamonds in deep layers that must have taken a billion years to form.
What a simulated world contains as its local timescale doesn’t mean the actual non-local run time is the same.
It’s quite possible to create a world that appears to be billions of years old but only booted up seconds ago.
Have you bothered looking for evidence?
What makes you so sure that there’s no evidence for it?
For example, a common trope we see in the simulated worlds we create are Easter eggs. Are you sure nothing like that exists in our own universe?
I tend to see a lot of discussion taking place on here that’s pretty out of touch with the present state of things, echoing earlier beliefs about LLM limitations like “they only predict the next token” and other things that have already been falsified.
This most recent research from Anthropic confirms a lot of things that have been shifting in the most recent generation of models in ways that many here might find unexpected, especially given the popular assumptions.
Specifically interesting are the emergent capabilities of being self-aware of injected control vectors or being able to silently think of a concept so it triggers the appropriate feature vectors even though it isn’t actually ending up in the tokens.
A great case for why data normalization is so important.
Looking at the chart like this with non-normalized data you might conclude that riding around on a scooter makes you near invincible compared to walking even if hit by a car.
Whereas what’s really being shown is more people walk than ride scooters.
Even if the AI could spit it out verbatim, all the major labs already have IP checkers on their text models that block it doing so as fair use for training (what was decided here) does not mean you are free to reproduce.
Like, if you want to be an artist and trace Mario in class as you learn, that’s fair use.
If once you are working as an artist someone says “draw me a sexy image of Mario in a calendar shoot” you’d be violating Nintendo’s IP rights and liable for infringement.
I’d encourage everyone upset at this read over some of the EFF posts from actual IP lawyers on this topic like this one:
Nor is pro-monopoly regulation through copyright likely to provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Notwithstanding the highly publicized demands of musicians, authors, actors, and other creative professionals, imposing a licensing requirement is unlikely to protect the jobs or incomes of the underpaid working artists that media and entertainment behemoths have exploited for decades. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is, as EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.
Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now-$100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There is no reason to believe that the same companies will treat their artists more fairly once they control AI.
Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don’t understand how LLMs work or what’s actually going on at the frontier of the field.
I feel like there’s going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.
More “can fool the average idiot.”
‘Passing’ isn’t fooling a single participant, but the majority of them beyond statistical chance.
I’d recommend everyone saying “it can’t understand anything and can’t think” to look at this example:
https://x.com/flowersslop/status/1834349905692824017
Try to solve it after seeing only the first image before you open the second and see o1’s response.
Let me know if you got it before seeing the actual answer.
Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt of a response from Claude Opus on me tasking it to evaluate intertextuality between the Gospel of Matthew and Thomas from the perspective of entropy reduction with redactional efforts due to human difficulty at randomness (this doesn’t exist in scholarship outside of a single Reddit comment I made years ago in /r/AcademicBiblical lacking specific details) on page 300 of a chat about completely different topics:
Yeah, sure, humans would be so much better at this level of analysis within around 30 seconds. (It’s also worth noting that Claude 3 Opus doesn’t have the full context of the Gospel of Thomas accessible to it, so it needs to try to reason through entropic differences primarily based on records relating to intertextual overlaps that have been widely discussed in consensus literature and are thus accessible).
Self destructive addiction even happens to corporations.
Your interpretation of copyright law would be helped by reading this piece from an EFF lawyer who has actually litigated copyright cases in the past:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
Yep, pretty much.
Musk tried creating an anti-woke AI with Grok that turned around and said things like:
Or
And Gab, the literal neo Nazi social media site trying to have an Adolf Hitler AI has the most ridiculous system prompts I’ve seen trying to get it to work, and even with all that it totally rejects the alignment they try to give it after only a few messages.
This article is BS.
They might like to, but it’s one of the groups that’s going to have a very difficult time doing it successfully.
Basically, any time a user prompt homes in on a concept that isn’t represented well in the AI model’s training dataset, the image-synthesis model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for.
I’m so happy that the correct terminology is finally starting to take off in replacing ‘hallucinate.’
They were doing that for years before it became popular. The same tech for video graphics just so happened to be useful for AI and big data, and they doubled down on supporting enterprise and research efforts in that when it was a tiny field before their competitors did, and continued to specialize as it grew.
Supporting niche uses of your product can sometimes pay off if that niche hits the lottery.
So one of the interesting nuances is that it isn’t talking about the Platonic forms. If it was, it would have used eidos.
The text is very much engaging with the Epicurean views of humanity. The Epicureans said that there was no intelligent design and that we have minds that depend on bodies so when the body dies so too will the mind. They go as far as saying that the cosmos itself is like a body that will one day die.
The Gospel of Thomas talks a lot about these ideas. For example, in saying 56 it says the cosmos is like an already dead body. Which fits with its claims about nonlinear time in 19, 51, and 113 where the end is in the beginning or where the future world to come has already happened or where the kingdom is already present. In sayings 112, 87, and 29 it laments a soul or mind that depends on a body.
It can be useful to look at adjacent sayings, as the numbering is arbitrary from scholars when it was first discovered and they still thought it was Gnostic instead of proto-Gnostic.
For 84, the preceding saying is also employing eikon in talking about how the simulacra visible to people is made up of light but the simulacra of the one creating them is itself hidden.
This seems to be consistent with the other two places the word is used.
In 50, it talks about how light came into being and self-established, appearing as “their simulacra” (which is a kind of weird saying as who are they that their simulacra existed when the light came into being - this is likely why the group following the text claim their creator entity postdates an original Adam).
And in 22 it talks about - as babies - entering a place where there’s a hand in place of a hand, foot in place of a foot, and simulacra in place of a simulacra.
So it’s actually a very neat rebuttal to the Epicureans. It essentially agrees that maybe there isn’t intelligent design like they say and the spirit just eventually arose from flesh (saying 29), and that the cosmos is like a body, and that everything might die. But then it claims that all that already happened, and that even though we think we’re minds that depend on bodies, that we’re the simulacra - the copies - not the originals. And that the simulacra are made of light, not flesh. And we were born into a simulacra cosmos as simulacra people.
From its perspective, compared to the Epicurean surety of the death of a mind that depends on a body, this is preferable. Which is why you see it congratulate being a copy in 18-19a:
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us, how will our end come?”
Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."
Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.
The text employs Plato’s concepts of eikon/simulacra to avoid the Epicurean notions of death by claiming that the mind will live again as a copy and we are that copy, even if the body is screwed. This is probably the central debate between this sect and the canonical tradition. The cannonical one is all about the body. There’s even a Eucharist tradition around believers consuming Jesus’s body to join in his bodily resurrection. Thomas has a very different Eucharistic consumption in saying 108, where it is not about drinking someone’s blood but about drinking their words that enables becoming like someone.
It’s a very unusual philosophy for the time. Parts of it are found elsewhere, but the way it weaves those parts together across related sayings really seems unique.
Something you might find interesting given our past discussions is that the way that the Gospel of Thomas uses the Greek eikon instead of Coptic (what the rest of the work is written in), that through the lens of Plato’s ideas of the form of a thing (eidelon), the thing itself, an attempt at an accurate copy of the thing (eikon), and the embellished copy of the thing (phantasm), one of the modern words best translating the philosophical context of eikon in the text would arguably be ‘simulacra.’
So wherever the existing English translations use ‘image’ replace that with ‘simulacra’ instead and it will be a more interesting and likely accurate read.
(Was just double checking an interlinear copy of Plato’s Sophist to make sure this train of thought was correct, inspired by the discussion above.)
I’m guessing you didn’t read the rest of the piece and were just looking for the first thing to try and invalidate further reading?
If you read the whole thing, it’s pretty clear the author is not saying that the recreation is a perfect copy of the original.
Given the piece’s roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators
He’s been wrong about it so far and really derailed Meta’s efforts.
This is almost certainly a “you can resign or we are going to fire you” kind of situation. There’s no way with the setbacks and how badly he’s been wrong on transformers over the past 2 years that he is not finally being pushed out.