The Pnictogen Wing

it looks like Sam Altman and OpenAI are desperate to inflate their public image as opposition to the LLM fraud ramps up. my new browser tabs have been full of puff pieces about Altman and ChatGPT—isn't great how merely launching a web browser gets you hit in the face with ads now? oh sorry I meant "legitimate technology journalism". 🙄

I have tried to talk to these people and their fans on Twitter and it's hopeless. no argument gets anywhere and I can only assume that any sentences of mine that cast doubt upon the world-shattering AGI supergenius which OpenAI et alii are about to give the world (any second now! for real this time!) read as "hater" talk to them and they tune me right out. my talk doesn't have ZERO effect, though, because sometimes afterwards these people start getting real defensive, apt to spout things like "all expertise is fake anyway" or whatnot.

And occasionally a weird note of doublethinkful humility creeps into the techbros' talk. It's like, "Yeah I know I'm really an idiot who's faking it but isn't everyone?" It's like in their heart of hearts they have decided that humanity really has shot its bolt and is now retrogressing, so the only possible hope to solving multiple insoluble problems is the Machine God. They at least feel like they've got an edge on the folks (like Mono and me) who are totally out of the loop and critiquing this stuff from an outsider's perspective. Mono's erudition at least seems to faze them a bit, but surely they must feel like he's a goofy old relic to still be trusting in books and higher education. Isn't all that stuff going away?

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. What's the least expensive way to get into this LLM crap? Can one host one that's wholly self contained?

~Chara

I have seen a few times in the wilds of eugenicist Musk Twitter a hilarious "horseshoe theory" of intelligence and IQ: if you're too smart, in some indefinite way, you double back round to "dumb" or [slur], so a nice safe mediocrity is actually best. I have seen memetic images suggesting that such persons have a peculiar notion about the famous "bell curve" or Gaussian distribution which Charles Murray famously imposed on intelligence: they think it's better to be in the middle, where the curve is nice and high. One time though I saw a tortuous attempt to define some sweet spot off to the right of the mode, but not too far off to be "dumb" again.

It's rather easy to guess why this has happened: too many collisions between the high lords of IQ and people who actually know what they're saying, leading to strings of lost arguments and hurt feelings and consequent grumbling about "woke universities" and such. There's an entertaining tension between the need for the fashy techbro to stay indoctrinated while also strutting their supposedly superior intelligence, and it's led to a curious bipolarity in the community, a resolution of the techbros between two extremes.

Basically, the better any of these people are at mastering some kind of difficult scientific or technical subject, such as programming work or medicine, the more likely it is they're unable to communicate with ordinary human beings. Fashy professionals of this sort tend towards extreme misanthropy, as though it required every erg of their mental powers to do their technical job, so they tend to become hermits with very strange ideas about people. At the other extreme are the persol nle ones who become vigorous evangelists and boosters for technology, the ones who are able to sell their enthusiasm to others. Elon Musk is a conspicuous example. He's good at sounding like a wizard of technology (well good enough for his believers) but if he ever goes into details he's clearly lost. He's not one of the boffins himself. He wanted to be one, though, and that puts some sparkle onto his boosterism.

Hence there's been a peculiar sorting process at work for a few decades, culminating in the rise of persons like Musk and Elizabeth Holmes and Marc Andreessen. They inhabit a system that rewards their own ignorance. The more ignorant you are, the more enthusiastically you can lie and make wild promises. There's no awkward knowledge in the way. Musk can sell technology as magic because to him it IS magic, capable of anything; he doesn't know better and he's not rewarded for finding out.

There's a famous maxim about the doublethinkful nature of right-wing propaganda about the Law. To such people, the Law must bind others but not themselves; the Law protects them but not others. There's a similar state of doublethink in the corporate world about intelligence and technical skill. The boffins who know cannot communicate it to others; the boosters don't know, but they can talk about it anyway. One result has been the AI craze. It's like the AI machines are the ultimate boffins, able to think (well, supposedly) but requiring human agents to praise them and evangelize for them, agents who may vaunt their own intelligence but who clearly are zealous for AI because they need machines to do what they can't.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I was reading an editorial about the current state of the LLM "artificial intelligence" tech fad (i.e. "same as always!" "that bad, huh?") and something snapped in our psyche when we saw the Nth mention of LLM "hallucinations". Tech weenies seem to have picked up the entrepreneurial habit of appropriating words from legitimate disciplines and slapping them onto their own shit, whether or not the words make sense in their new context. "Hallucinations", though, particularly exasperates me but, well, my older sibling experienced those. So the subject isn't so damn funny, even if AI programmers think it's cute.

The AI boosters refuse to acknowledge the obvious implication of their devices' "hallucinations": surely one of the hallmarks of intelligence is being able to tell apart correct and incorrect information, and yet their machines can't do that and nobody seems to care. Yet they promise "superintelligence" any day now! Maybe next year, and only if Trump gets elected President. (You know what sort of politics those AI guys pretend not to believe in.)

"it TOLD me to do crimes, I swear, the AI hive mind gets into your HEAD"