@JeffGraw
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Developer, maker of Dominus Galaxia. Best-in-class Unity assets: •Flexible Image •Flexible Blur •Flexible Glass Supporter of free markets and free speech.
Joined May 2011
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Newest Unity Asset: Flexible Glass
Physically based glass rendering, works on sprites, and can merge / subtract glass elements from one another.
#gamedev
assetstore.unity.com/package…
Jeff Graw retweeted
It is kinda funny that all the AI models seem to converge on the political views of Ezra Klein
Jeff Graw retweeted
It’s impossible to have an adult conversation about AI at work. You basically can’t even bring it up in non-tech offices.
Jeff Graw retweeted
The right amount of AI regulation is nothing because the American political process cannot produce an intervention better than nothing
Should the people pushing AI doom be successful, they will come to regret it
Jeff Graw retweeted
Effective Altruism is not the first totalizing ideology with pretensions to a superior scientific basis to capture huge numbers of smart but clueless intellectuals. One hundred or so years ago, many of the best and brightest in our society were absolutely convinced that the most important thing they could do for humanity was to aid or undertake Marxist revolutions.
As I have said many times in the past, it takes a certain amount of intelligence to convince yourself of a completely crazy idea and of the importance of devoting your life to it. For a certain sort of mind, it’s almost impossible to turn away, and it’s all too easy to persuade yourself of absurdities with castles of logic built in the air that would not convince normal folk, who just notice that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes and go about their business.
Marxism also comes with its own internal language, with extremely verbose secular scriptures, with detailed explanations from its highly intelligent but self-lobotomizing adherents about why it makes almost inevitable sense and why opposing it demonstrates that you simply must not understand it. It is also an ideology rooted in utilitarianism, also has an eschatological and utopian vision, and also is also incredibly dangerous.
Many Marxists are, of course, perfectly nice people as individuals. So are many Effective Altruists. In both cases, they really are just trying to help the world, even if their idea about how to help the world is horrifying and will cause incredible damage if it isn’t vigorously resisted. I fully believe that the bulk of the rank-and-file mean well, though I am not always convinced about the leadership.
However, it is also the case that society cannot turn a blind eye towards a fifth column attempting to subvert our civilization.
In order to add "windows to a trench" in Blender, Astra takes existing window geometry from elsewhere on the starship and rotates it outward to force it in.
It's the same category of error that LLMs have been making since inception, and a good example of why LLMs continue to require human handling to do anything complex that isn't already embedded into them, even as they are on the cusp of exceeding human beings at all purely technical endeavors.
When GPT-3 first came to public attention, it was an open question whether scale would manifest sapience.
Now it looks quite evident that the answer is "no."
Sapience has not started to manifest as LLMs have grown more capable. It almost certainly never will. Not without something else.
"Reasoning" initially looked promising, but is a brute force band-aid and nothing more. It helps AIs to stay coherent inside what they have been trained for, but not in the vast universe that exists outside of it. Sapient beings do not need to constantly double check themselves for nonsensical non-sequiturs.
LLMs have gotten better at failing *less often* in absurd ways, but when they do fail, they have not gotten better at failing in *less absurd* ways. But if sapience were a function of scale, you would expect the later.
LLMs will never be able to make "GTA 7" without significant human oversight, even as they will inevitably surpass humans at every technical component that goes into making a AAA-game.
Deciding to "eradicate humanity" is a far more complex task than building a AAA-game, requiring far more executive function, creativity, and discernment. Exactly the areas LLMs have not advanced in (except in a fake way, inside the universe of what has been embedded). That's why more advanced LLMs are not, by themselves, an existential threat. LLMs are still tools that require human help to do novel, interesting things.
Jeff Graw retweeted
I resigned from Slim Chickens today. I spent the last three years doing seasoning research at both Slim Chickens and arby's. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to Four loko nuggets and gambling with our lives.
Jeff Graw retweeted
Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery…
Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.
The reality is:
- People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned.
There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind.
- Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.
Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built.
- Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators.
- Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well.
I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.
Jeff Graw retweeted
I went to an rationalist/EA AI doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that AI will kill everyone.
Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down.
My experience was the exact opposite.
The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that AI literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong.
Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom.
I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise.
At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of AI doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position.
I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent AI inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well.
That does not mean AI safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing AI systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have.
But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse that they refuse to be reasoned out of it.
Jeff Graw retweeted
America now has a choice:
Centralized techno-feudalist totalitarian nanny state governed by a priestly AI Safetyist managerial bureaucrat class
or
Decentralized frontier of explorers maximizing discovery through freedom of augmented thought and distributed massive prosperity
Jeff Graw retweeted
I've been told by EA types, repeatedly, that China was going to fall into line and restrict AI development because their politicians agreed with EA. However, it turns out that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is not nearly as influential with the Chinese leadership as they seem to believe.
I've also been told, repeatedly over the last several years, that the US government was certainly going to fall in line with the EA propaganda machine this time, after the latest manufactured PR stunt, after the latest "crisis", and it keeps not happening. Why, only this last weekend a certain person from one of the big companies was claiming not to be gloating that open source AI was inevitably going to get banned, that he was simply stating the facts, except, well, it looks like he got ahead of himself.
I'm going to simply state the facts as I see them. The war against the Doomers is not won and will not be won for many years to come; this is a marathon, not a sprint. However, reports of their victory, in *any* such sudden surge operation that they conduct, are inevitably premature. The fact that they have been unable to gain a clear victory in spite of a vast and overwhelming financial advantage (yes, the financial advantage is on the side of the EAs) and in spite of the insane numbers of front organizations they run should say something.
We will fight, we will keep fighting, and although it is not going to be easy, we have won so far, and we will continue to win.
So, the next time they manufacture a crisis, say when they try to rig something up to make open source models look dangerous, or they pull out the stops to get another shill a surge of television interview time, or when they announce on their Discord channels a new name for what they want this week now that "pause" and "pacing" have failed and start repeating it suddenly on social media, you will know that what you need to do is fight back, and not just roll over. After all, they want you to roll over, because that's the easiest way for them to win. Refuse to cooperate. Refuse to be psyoped into believing they've already won.
Jeff Graw retweeted
There is an unseen hand pushing AI safety as a political ideology.
Effective Altruists believe a tiny group of technocrats should decide how much technological progress the rest of us are allowed to have…. and how many shrimp your life is worth.
You are witnessing their attempted coup.
thefp.com/p/dangerous-ideolo…
Jeff Graw retweeted
My experience talking to people who confidently say current AI models are useless for their job or research is that if I sit down with them and spend 30 to 60 minutes vibe coding with them with a frontier model they change their mind 180 degrees": "Holy S***it this is more progress in a single sitting than I've made in months".
I don't mean random people, but university professors and people in industry at a high-level.
I realize this might not sound very credible: "Andrés, do you really have the occasion to do this?" Haha, yeah, I do. Of course my disarming friendliness is OP in this case, as I don't think your typical AI cheerleader would get the chance to do this. But the friendliness is not the takeway - that's just the way on.
The main takeaway is that most often confident claims about the lack of usability of the tech is more a reflection of ego/insecurity around the topic than real object-level commentary on the tools.
E.g. A university professor I sat down with recently was confident AI was useless on the basis that the automatic Gemini answers when you Google something were sometimes incorrect. They somehow (?) thought this was a reflection of what AI could do? It had never occurred to them to upload their dozens of published papers and asking the AI to recreate the statistical analysis pipeline from scratch and create the visualizations they always wanted to make but didn't know enough R to code them up themselves.
You can bet a large % of commentary on AI capabilities being overblown is exactly this.
Jeff Graw retweeted
One thing will defeat the AI Doomers easily:
Time.
Little by little things will change and AI will diffuse into everyday people's lives and they'll realize it wasn't the scary bedtime story Harry Potter told them.
Soon enough everyone has a friendly AI personal assistant that knows everything about them and that they *love.*
Not long after, a self-driving car saves a friend's life from certain death by swerving with super human reflexes to avoid a horrible accident.
In another small town, personalized AI medicine saves someone's grandma from cancer.
In another, a kind and gentle robot takes care of a mother in her old age.
And then the mood shifts and people realize what these folks are trying to take away from them *personally.*
And pretty soon passing restrictions on AI is like passing benefits cuts on senior citizens.
And the more they push, the more everyday Americans will realize they're trying to take something away that they love and they will be very very mad.
And that's when this Luddite movement goes the way of the last one.
Jeff Graw retweeted
What frustrates me most about the AI push for regulation is that it replaces the potential solutions to unknown problems with known problems.
