As I've been doing with all the major LLM releases for a few years now, I gave GPT-5 a simple prompt to write a short story about the Singularity coming to pass. The improvements aren't overwhelming at first blush, but its ability to turn a phrase and to keep some...
I was recently watching a tennis exhibition match between Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro when the commentators pointed out that both of these top-ten players come from billionaire families. Naturally, I quickly get to wondering what we reasonably infer from this observation. How much does coming from a billionaire background...
Let us stipulate the following: 1. The universe is fundamentally discrete / deterministic. (Seems reasonably plausible.) 2. There's a way to perform hypercomputation, in the sense that one can build or leverage a Turing-complete mechanism which can perform infinitely many computations in seemingly finite time, and store an infinite amount...
I don't realistically see this happening, but I agree it's worthwhile to say and to think about. I assumed any change we made could be instantly undone by a hostile ASI, but you raise an interesting point; relying on a hard speed-of-light limit seems like it could be our best shot at a legitimate counter, so far as it goes.
The question of what information could or should be transmitted seems likely to be contentious, however. Even provided we gain the ability to do it before it becomes moot, broadcasting information sufficient to reconstitute ourselves or something similar strikes me as yet another big roll of the dice. This is particularly true given that we can't know in advance whether or not we're bound for an ASI failure mode, and as soon as we do, it's presumably too late.
This was pretty much exactly my take. I've had GPT-5 do some more writing since this, and it has a real penchant for regularly spitting out paragraphs or sentences that are eerily perfect. Of course, it also meanders over time, and much more often it spits out similes that are off in some hard-to-articulate way (or just plain bad).
E.g., from a more hellish take on the Singularity that I had it write today:
... (read more)The speaker on his desk, the one he used to blast awful music, spoke in its friendly-lab-coat voice. “We can improve your brother’s function. He will suffer less if we adjust him slightly. He is a good seed for certain
Thanks!
...Except that you've got me wondering exactly how much I did change it. So for a rough approximation, I threw GPT-5's version and my version into the first diff tool I found:
https://www.diffchecker.com/EAXsk4DX/
I got rid of markdown formatting and normalized the whitespace/capitalization (I figure these things shouldn't really count); the result seems to be that 18-20% of it is my interference, at character-level granularity. A cursory glance shows that's probably an overcount, too, since there are a few rearrangements of paragraphs and stuff that didn't get flagged as equivalent. I suspect it's more likely to be in the 12-15% range.
There are probably arguments to be made either way about whether that's a lot... (read more)
As I've been doing with all the major LLM releases for a few years now, I gave GPT-5 a simple prompt to write a short story about the Singularity coming to pass. The improvements aren't overwhelming at first blush, but its ability to turn a phrase and to keep some track of the larger picture seem to have gotten noticeably better.
More to the point, I found the story it wrote good enough that I ended up reading it through all the way, twice, something that certainly hasn't happened before. No cherry picking involved, either: this was the first and only reply to my single prompt. I decided that I liked it enough... (read 10111 more words →)
I was recently watching a tennis exhibition match between Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro when the commentators pointed out that both of these top-ten players come from billionaire families. Naturally, I quickly get to wondering what we reasonably infer from this observation. How much does coming from a billionaire background improve the odds of becoming an elite tennis player?
There are only 10 top-ten female tennis players in the world, out of a pool of about females globally (using Fermi estimates for simplicity). There are roughly females worldwide who might reasonably be considered billionaires, or sufficiently billionaire-adjacent for our purposes. Thus:
If these... (read 594 more words →)
People aren’t going to read books and stop to ask questions. That sounds like work and being curious and paying attention, and people don’t even read books when not doing any of those things.
People definitely aren’t going to start cracking open history books. I mean, ‘cmon.
The ‘ask LLMs lots of questions while reading’ tactic is of course correct.
I was thinking along these lines about a year back, and I started working on an ePub PWA (web-based) reader with some bells and whistles. The relevant whistle here is that you can highlight a word, passage, whatever, and tap a button to make the LLM-du-jour guess your intent from context and go ahead and... (read more)
I didn't find the results about cheating and shoplifting surprising, but that tracks with my friend group at the time. That said, I was curious about whether there's a gender discrepancy in shoplifting (there's not), and found a large 2002 survey which gives 11% as the lifetime incidence of shoplifting in the U.S.
I confess I am perplexed, as I suspect most people are aware there is more than one Trevor in the world. As you point out, that is not your last name. I have no idea who you are, or why you feel this is some targeted "weaponization."
Is it conceivable that this is purely an emergent feature from LLMs, or does this necessarily mean there's some other stuff going on with Sydney? I don't see how it could be the former, but I'm not an expert.
Let us stipulate the following:
Take your hypercomputer and write some trivial code that systematically executes every possible algorithm, in particular all of the non-computable functions that require an infinite amount of steps to run. Among just a few other things, this program will eventually stumble onto a perfect simulation of our own universe, and suppose you make sure that simulation has time... (read 260 more words →)
My best guess is that there's a metaverse which consists of (at a minimum) every possible computation. While not technically provable or falsifiable, it does result in predictions which mean that circumstantially we should have an excellent guess whether or not it's true.
So far, it's true. It nicely explains the fine-tuned constants and QM and the discrete nature of the apparent finest (Planck-region) levels of reality. And yes, it also predicts that we will, on average, be overwhelmingly likely to live in one of the simplest possible universes supporting intelligence (but almost certainly not the VERY simplest).
If this is the case, any actual fundamental mechanism of reality is irrelevant to the point of meaninglessness, as such a metaverse is completely described by a ...0001000... initial row in ECA rules 30 or 45, or a correspondingly simple Turing machine, Lambda Calculus expression, tag machine, Perl script, etc.
(A post of mine approaching this argument from the tension between subjectivity and computation.)
From what I know of security, any system requiring secrecy is already implicitly flawed.
(Naturally, if this doesn't apply and you backchanneled your idea for some legitimate meta-reason, I withdraw my objection.)
As of about ten years ago, gravitational waves are no longer theoretical. That said, I think that given the profound relative weakness of gravitational force, the technology to be able to generate waves is far out of reach; naively, I'd expect we'd have to be able to wiggle multiple-stellar-mass objects around in a controlled way.