An excerpt has surfaced from the AI2027 podcast with siskind and the ex AI researcher, where the dear doctor makes the case for how an AGI could build an army of terminators in a year if it wanted.

It goes something like: OpenAI is worth as much as all US car companies (except tesla) combined, so it could buy up every car factory and convert it to a murderbot factory, because that’s kind of like what the US gov did in WW2 to build bombers, reaching peak capacity in three years, and AGI would obviously be more efficient than a US wartime gov so let’s say one year, generally a completely unassailable syllogism from very serious people.

Even /r/ssc commenters are calling him out about the whole AI doomer thing getting more noticeably culty than usual edit: The thread even features a rare heavily downvoted siskind post, -10 at the time of this edit.

The latter part of the clip is the interviewer pointing out that there might be technological bottlenecks that could require upending our entire economic model before stuff like curing cancer could be achieved, positing that if we somehow had AGI-like tech in the 1960s it would probably have to use its limited means to invent the entire tech tree that leads to late 2020s GPUs out of thin air, international supply chains and all, before starting on the road to becoming really useful.

Siskind then goes “nuh-uh!” and ultimately proceeds to give Elon’s metaphorical asshole a tongue bath of unprecedented depth and rigor, all but claiming that what’s keeping modern technology down is the inability to extract more man hours from Grimes’ ex, and that’s how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don’t need sleep. And didn’t you know, having non-experts micromanage everything in a project is cool and awesome actually.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    15 hours ago

    and that’s how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don’t need sleep.

    Wonder how many people stopped being AI-doomers after this. I use the same argument against ai-doom.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      12 hours ago

      He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes

      Others as in specifically his co-writer for AI2027 Daniel Kokotlajo, the actual ex-OpenAI researcher.

      I’m pretty annoyed at having this clip spammed to several different subreddits, with the most inflammatory possible title, out of context, where the context is me saying “I disagree that this is a likely timescale but I’m going to try to explain Daniel’s position” immediately before. The reason I feel able to explain Daniel’s position is that I argued with him about it for ~2 hours until I finally had to admit it wasn’t completely insane and I couldn’t find further holes in it.

      Pay no attention to this thing we just spent two hours exhaustively discussing, it’s not really relevant context.

      Also the title is inflammatory only in the context of already knowing him for a ridiculous AI doomer, otherwise it’s fine. Inflammatory would be calling the video economically illiterate bald person thinks evaluations force-buy car factories, China having biomedicine research is like Elon running SpaceX .

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        7 hours ago

        I couldn’t find further holes in it

        Here’s a couple:

        1. iirc it claims we’ll have reliable “agents” in mid 2025. Fellas it’s almost June in the year of the “agents” and frankly I don’t see shit. We are not starting strong here.
        2. they predict a 10k person anti-AI protest in DC. For context, the recent “Hands Off” protest in DC saw 100k person turnout. Israel / Palestine protest saw 300K in DC in 2023. A ten-thousand-person protest isn’t really anything out of the ordinary? It’s almost like the authors have never been to a protest, don’t understand collective action because they live in a bubble or something? But they assure us, this document is thoroughly researched maybe their point was self-deprecating, “woe is us, only 10K people show up :(”
        3. When they get into their super agi fanfic, they describe Agent-n as “never stops training” continuously learning from the environment. Like the only way I read this is that somehow, we discover paradigm shifting algorithmic discoveries by coincidence in the next couple years that make DL obsolete so we can abandon train-inference approaches and instead have this embodied entity that is constantly taking feedback from the environment to “train” but the system itself is still described under the massive data center heavy DL framework. It’s like they know that bio intelligence has this continuous feedback mechanism, so obviously ai researchers will just patch that in, how hard can it be?
        4. Ong, i swear they just put in there at some point “hallucinations are solved” the thing they have been claiming will be solved in the next month since 2023.
        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          4 hours ago
          1. You get better at being smart by INT-grinding. A machine could be INT-grinding the whole time. It’s like in Oblivion if you wanted to grind Speed you could go into a city, stand in a doorway and place something heavy on the jump key on the keyboard. Then while you take care of the dishes or something, your character grinds. But for INT!

          If it gets smart enough it will start finding hacks, like those INT- increasing potions in Morrowind that increased your Alchemy so you could make even better INT-potions.

          It might even get smart enough to escape the Elder Scrolls; and start playing another game!

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        8 hours ago

        Daniel Kokotlajo, the actual ex-OpenAI researcher

        Unclear to me what Daniel actually did as a ‘researcher’ besides draw a curve going up on a chalkboard (true story, the one interaction I had with LeCun was showing him Daniel’s LW acct that is just singularity posting and Yann thought it was big funny). I admit, I am guilty of engineer gatekeeping posting here, but I always read Danny boy as a guy they hired to give lip service to the whole “we are taking safety very seriously, so we hired LW philosophers” and then after Sam did the uno reverse coup, he dropped all pretense of giving a shit/ funding their fan fac circles.

        Ex-OAI “governance” researcher just means they couldn’t forecast that they were the marks all along. This is my belief, unless he reveals that he superforecasted altman would coup and sideline him in 1998. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, and they have evidence that Daniel actually understands how computers work.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 hours ago

      He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes, but if that is so, why are you so aggressively defending the stance?

      Literally the only difference between Scott’s beliefs and AI:2027 as a whole is his prophecy estimate is a year or two later. (I bet he’ll be playing up that difference as AI 2027 fails to happen in 2027, then also doesn’t happen in 2028.)

      Elsewhere in the thread he whines to the mods that the original poster is spamming every subreddit vaguely lesswrong or EA related with engagement bait. That poster is katxwoods… as in Kat Woods… as in a member of Nonlinear, the EA “organization” whose idea of philanthropic research was nonstop exotic vacations around the world. And, iirc, they are most infamous among us sneerer for “hiring” an underpaid (really underpaid, like couldn’t afford basic necessities) intern they also used as a 24/7 live-in errand girl, drug runner, and sexual servant.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        11 hours ago

        Deleted earlier message, sorry I called Scott out for not doing things he had done. Even if the whole mods ‘restricting her messages now only after she went after Scott’ is quite iffy. (LW people write normally challenge failed “One upfront caveat. I am speaking about “Kat Woods” the public figure, not the person. If you read something here and think, “That’s not a true/nice statement about Kat Woods”, you should know that I would instead like you to think “That’s not a true/nice statement about the public persona Kat Woods, the real human with complex goals who I’m sure is actually really cool if I ever met her, appears to be cultivating.”” (The idea is good, this just reads like a bit of a sovcit style text and could have been replaced with ‘I mean this not as an attack on her personally, I’m just doubting the effectiveness of her spammy posting style’).

        Also: ‘Mods mods mods, kat spill my jice help hel help help’