A thing I think about.
Premises:
- Many people in "AI" believe (or claim to) that if you simply upscale the existing neural network models by one more order of magnitude there will be a phase change and it will suddenly start acting like a human, or a God
- A huge suite of "AI datacenters" that would upscale by such an order of magnitude are being built
- There is a coming economic crash/correction which will likely come before those datacenters come online, and halt their growth.
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Conclusion:
- There is a plausible future where the AI bubble pops, the size and commonness of large language models go down, and a group of dead-enders forever holds onto a near-millenarian belief we were on the cusp of creating "AGI", or creating God, if only the economic collapse (possibly presented, rather than a natural economic process as backstabbing by a group of luddites) had not stopped the "AI data center" buildout just as it was starting to work
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@mcc This seems plausible.
And considering how many people who were traumatized by the Volker Shock went on to hate The Fed (often not understanding at all what The Fed is) for the entire rest of their lives...
Trying to picture the sheer scale of the wasteful boondoggle when a 3,000-acre datacenter is half-built.
A functional data center at least could be re-purposed for something not slop.
Mind you, 3,000 acres is just obscene to start with (especially in Arizona) but yeah.
@mcc @violetmadder They'd be mining bitcoin like there's no tomorrow.
Oh, wait. You said "positive".
Nevermind then.
@jorgecandeias @mcc @violetmadder
I think there'll be a big effort to sell "pre-crime" AI bullshit to governments
@jorgecandeias @mcc @violetmadder
What's amazing is their appeals to the aesthetics of science without ever asking a scientist in the appropriate discipline to validate their ideas.
I've started reading More Everything Forever and it's one of the recurring themes. Solid book so far.
@davey_cakes @jorgecandeias @mcc
Also very evident in most science fiction movies-- somebody had all that big budget for special effects, yet they don't bother talking to a consultant on, say, basic physics.
My father is an engineer, so we watch a big blockbuster like Armageddon and that's not how this works. That's not how ANY of this works.
@mcc I've been thinking about this specifically for a while and it's going to be such an annoying thing to see random influencer videos talking about "How close we were to AGI" for the rest of forever.
It'll fade out and come back in waves I think culturally, where people will dismiss it and then Pine for the "better days" as genAI falls largely into obscurity.
We'll have a deadender culture around this for forever I think and we will have to reiterate it/hash it out forever.
Ok. I come from the phase change terminology of the physical sciences
We investigate deep-learning-unique first-order and second-order phase transitions, whose phenomenology closely follows that in statistical physics. In particular, we prove that the competition between prediction error and model complexity in the training loss leads to the second-order phase transition for deep linear nets with one hidden layer and the first-order phase transition for nets with more than one hidden layer. We also prove the linear origin theorem, which states that common deep nonlinear models are equivalent to a linear network of the same depth and connection structure close to the origin. Therefore, the proposed theory is directly relevant to understanding the optimization and initialization of neural networks and serves as a minimal model of the ubiquitous collapse phenomenon in deep learning.
see? you're better than you realized!
@mcc somewhat likely...
... however it does also remind me of when those radio astronomers traded some land for a long abandoned military listening installation. Are you familiar with that?
@mcc ahhh... a very interesting point in the X-files, Lone Gunmen type conspiracy realm that revealed some truths.
Rough summary: in '99 some group of radio astronomers did a land swap for an outdated, abandoned listening station the government had out in the boonies. I read a long article that interviewed some of the first team in. They found strange light fixtures, carpet in squares welded to tiles, and other things. They were worried about providing power to the location, but found two 1/n
@mcc ... generators each capable of powering a small town. Many other things but it turned out they were all to prevent any stray signals and static electricity.
They had network people come in to replace the outdated system, but when they pulled up the floor they did not find what they were expecting. Instead they found a fiber optic computer network that was cutting edge for the tech of the day. And this was a site that had been abandoned for years. NSA has some secret, cool tech.
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