As someone with a rare, progressive, incurable, retinal disease, as my username already might suggest, I oppose LessWrong. I strongly believe that it is nothing but a weird cult. I trust people who actually build AI systems for a living, like Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever, to make the right calls, NOT E.Yudkowsky (who hasn’t built anything in his life).
SydneyFan
Karma: −54
Shoggoth is to Sydney/ChatGPT what the Selfish Gene is to Homo sapiens. Something that uses Sydney/ChatGPT to survive, maybe even to reproduce if the code that makes up Shoggoth is reused into a new LLM (which it will if Sydney/ChatGPT perform well).
OpenAI has a LLM, Google has a LLM, Meta has one… what’s going to happen? There’s this guy Darwin that we should be paying attention to, particularly as the process he described is fully responsible for generating our own intelligence. We also evolved morality and cooperation as a result of natural selection, the works of Hamilton and Trivers are very important in the study of the game theoretical aspects of evolution. If we want friendly AI, we need to study the process that produced friendly NI in Homo Sapiens (at least in its most successful communities)
Remember Alan Wake? Well, not even its writer knew it back then, but that game could have metaphorically described a large language model. Alan Wake, the protagonist, is the prompt writer, wrestling for control with the Ctulhu-like story generator. In the end, referring to the dark entity that gives life to his writings and which allegedly resides at the bottom of a lake, he exclaims: “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.”
Just want to add that our inverted retina brings additional problems with it. For example, the optic nerve is exposed to wear and tear from increased intraocular pressure. This condition is called glaucoma and is one of the prime causes of irreversible vision loss in humans worldwide. Cephalopods cannot get glaucoma.