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> the value will tend towards infinity

It may be the case that the potential output of a worker engaging in the productive process goes arbitrarily high. But the that won't matter, if they're not permitted to. Given a choice between involving a human worker who will demand compensation, and a fully general robot, which will the owner class choose?

The vast majority of human intelligence is already squandered: millions of potential geniuses in impoverished places, suppressed by lack of opportunity to flourish. It's not about the quality or quantity of intelligence. It's about who controls it.

The fruits of the industrial revolution didn't end up in the hands of the worker by divine grace, or by some natural law. They were won by the hard struggles of the labour movements, by leveraging their indispensibility to the process of production.

If we want the utopia you imagine to be accessible to ordinary people, workers must cease being so eager to build their replacements, and be prepared to collectively struggle for their share. But if we are lulled to complacency by the notion that this will be a passive process, that struggle will not be necessary, then prospects are grim.


"socialising the means of production" doesn't mean "everyone gets free stuff". It simply means that the people who actually work the means of production decide how it's directed. It's simply the antithesis to "privatisation" (which oddly more people seem to understand correctly).

Yeah but in this case, who are what are you nationalising?

Why not everything over a certain size? It would be impossible to manage every 1 man business or job, but every 100 or 500 or 1000+ business already has significant management.

Marx envisioned the class struggle ending with the triumph of the working class, and a subsequent dissolution of all class systems.

AGI, if defined as a fully general replacement for labour, suggests a "bad ending" to class struggle: the liquidation of working classes, and the eternal reign of the ruling class.


Maybe less than we might hope. Not only is the knowledge distributed over the hundreds of people involved in designing a car, there may be conventions/habits of design and manufacture whose purpose has become hazy but are nevertheless important, or details of a design iterated upon whose original motivation is less understood.

> AI decides that energy spent toward human agriculture is less important than work spent toward storage and production of energy

I mean. Don't need rogue AI for this. These are already the policies of those in charge of it: human needs are secondary to power and profit.

So you know what. Maybe a rogue AI will be an improvement.


The classic worry is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter: the soot thrown up by the ensuing urban fire storms causing temperatures, rainfall to plummet, and hence food production. On reading the scenarios the odds of total human extinction are lower than I recollected, but 80% of world pop dying of starvation dwarfs the direct death toll (usually reckoned in the hundreds of millions)

The question of whether something can be automated is distinct from the question of whether it is currently automated. Things can can be automated may transition to being automated in practice in the future as technology improves and investment deepens.

It should be quite easy: if they don't leak the user session data publicly, and don't commingle it with training data internally, how could it possibly end up in the training data?

What surprises me is they're not more boldly/plainly lying about it.


I think they are pretty clear that they train on some prompts, given they sell the ability to be excluded

How would they know for sure that some details were not part of some other training data they use? The authors may have discussed some tangential details on a forum for example, in which case you might argue that the model picked up on these details the authors assumed were benign but novel and worked out how to apply them to the problem.

Unless they know exactly the researcher’s account, they may not know in their end if he had the setting to let them train on his chat logs. They also probably don’t know if he had any correspondence on any forum where he may have discussed this and it got picked up by scrapers.

I’m not saying they didn’t do anything unethical. I’m just saying even if they were ethical, there’s plenty of practical reasons at their scale why a flat out denial is logistically difficult to do


Agree model providers can't take much margin, a few percent plus maybe a bit extra from those willing to pay for a "better" model. Upstream is more concentrated: TSMC, NVIDIA, AMD could maybe raise prices and capture more of the value, which would affect open model providers.

LLMs don't "understand bitwise noise at a native level". The unit of perception for an LLM is a token, a soundly superbit level. They would have the same difficulty with bits as the number of "r"s in "strawberry". Yes they can be post trained to deal with such difficulties, but it's no more "native" than a human who memorised the ASCII table.


I struggle to reconcile frontier LLMs' proven decompilation abilities with any assertion that humans possess equivalent parsing skills.

They're looking at information as information; we're looking at it in some higher order abstraction.


The degree of nativeness of the skill is orthogonal to the raw power of these systems. A frontier model has access to dozens of GPUs, each moving terabits of data, and performing trillions of matrix multiplication operations, per second.

This does refute the bitwise aspect, but not the possibility of steganography via other methods.

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