This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly.

It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.

• nine_k

  today at 7:06 PM

  > * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*

  Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".

  A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.

  A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

  • bee_rider

    today at 7:20 PM

    This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.

    I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.

    • ElevenLathe

      today at 7:40 PM

      IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially saying that they are building the last investable technology ever, and getting people to believe it because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire.

      If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.

      • huslage

        today at 10:45 PM

        Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point. Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just anecdotal in the moment.

      • measurablefunc

        today at 7:49 PM

        What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?

        • nosuchthing

          today at 8:56 PM

          In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.

          In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.

          How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?

    • kelseyfrog

      today at 7:39 PM

      Or just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it.

      1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

    • legulere

      today at 9:42 PM

      On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.

    • awesome_dude

      today at 8:54 PM

      The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969

      "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019

      • XorNot

        today at 9:19 PM

        We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

        Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.

        • palmotea

          today at 10:46 PM

          > We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

          Except that assumes polls are a good an accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true.

        • skissane

          today at 9:52 PM

          The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election

          So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won

        • chrisrogers

          today at 10:28 PM

          That get covered by the mechanisms of social credibility.

        • bee_rider

          today at 9:31 PM

          Just make it broad enough that we never get a candidate promoting themselves as “electable” again.

    • nakedneuron

      today at 8:23 PM

      Isn't that how Bitcoin "works"?

      • achenet

        today at 9:34 PM

        err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?

        Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.

        The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.

  • Terr_

    today at 7:34 PM

    Refined 1.01 authoritarian form: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because it's become a habit and because dissenters seem to have "accidents" falling out of high windows.

    • demosito666

      today at 7:45 PM

      V 1.02: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because they believe that the others believe that you have enough power to crush the dissent. The moment this belief fades, you fall.

    • dclowd9901

      today at 8:22 PM

      Is that not the "Emperor's New Clothes" form? That would be like version 0.0.1

    • infinitewars

      today at 7:44 PM

      it's a sad state these days that we can't be sure which country you're alluding to

  • CobrastanJorji

    today at 9:23 PM

    You ever get into logic puzzles? The sort where the asker has to specify that everybody in the puzzle will act in a "perfectly logical" way. This feels like that sort of logic.

  • today at 7:30 PM

  • today at 7:15 PM

• dagss

  today at 9:08 PM

  Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"?

  Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"...

  Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token is IMO sort of confusing what it is with the medium it is expressed in/built of.

  For instance those small experiments that train a network on addition problems mentioned in a sibling post. The weights end up forming an addition machine. An addition machine is what it is, that is the emergent behavior. The machine learning weights is just the medium it is expressed in.

  What's interesting about LLM is such emergent behavior. Yes, it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but when training weights for that it might well have a side-effect of wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday definitions of the word "intelligence", such as programming as good as a median programmer). We don't really know this yet.

  • ActorNightly

    today at 10:07 PM

    Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software, I don't think anyone would disagree.

    But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be.

    For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context.

    You can get around that with agentic frameworks, but all of those right now are manually coded.

    So how do you train an LLM to correctly take any length of assembly code and produce the correct result? The only way is to essentially train the structure of the neurons inside of it behave like a computer, but the problem is that you can't do back-propagation with discrete zero and 1 values unless you explicitly code in the architecture for a cpu inside. So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence.

    It may be that the answer is pretty much a stochastic search where you spin up x instances of trillion parameter nets and make them operate in environments with some form of genetic algorithm, until you get something that behaves like a Human, and any shortcutting to this is not really possible because of essentially chaotic effects.

    ,

    • dan_mctree

      today at 10:33 PM

      >So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence.

      This doesn't seem to follow at all let alone obviously? Humans are able to reason through code without having to become a completely discrete computer, but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code, so why is that requirement necessary and how have you shown LLMs can't achieve human levels of competence on this kind of task?

  • wavemode

    today at 10:34 PM

    You're putting a bunch of words in the parent commenter's mouth, and arguing against a strawman.

    In this context, "here’s how LLMs actually work" is what allows someone to have an informed opinion on whether a singularity is coming or not. If you don't understand how they work, then any company trying to sell their AI, or any random person on the Internet, can easily convince you that a singularity is coming without any evidence.

    This is separate from directly answering the question "is a singularity coming?"

• jacquesm

  today at 6:27 PM

  > “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”

  And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too.

  Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.

  • stego-tech

    today at 6:33 PM

    History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff:

    * Profits now and violence later

    OR

    * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier

    Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.

    • lbreakjai

      today at 10:31 PM

      Violence was a moderating factor when people on each side were equally armed, and number was a deciding factor.

      Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.

    • jpadkins

      today at 7:01 PM

      Do you have a historical example of "Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier"? I can't think of any.

      • nine_k

        today at 7:18 PM

        If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits.

        Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.

        If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.

        • PaulHoule

          today at 7:28 PM

          With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the long term.

          This book

          https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...

          tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad.

          Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppositi...

          • hansvm

            today at 10:33 PM

            I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth the size with American steel could handle.

          • vondur

            today at 7:37 PM

            Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.

            • kelseyfrog

              today at 9:42 PM

              The dollar became the world's reserve currency because the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated incentive to offshore manufacturing.

              You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?

              This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.

            • jacquesm

              today at 8:26 PM

              This is the silver lining in many bad stories: the pendulum will always keep on swinging because at the extremes the advantage flips.

        • taurath

          today at 8:32 PM

          > the state is usually a much more sloppy investor

          I don’t find this to be true

          The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment.

          Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.

          • nine_k

            today at 8:54 PM

            State agencies are often good at choosing right long-term targets. State agencies are often bad at the actual procurement, because of the pork-barrelling and red tape. E.g. both private companies and NASA agree that spaceflight is a worthy target, but NASA ends up with the Space Shuttle (a nice design ruined by various committees) and SLS, while private companies come up with Falcon-9.

            • stoneforger

              today at 9:12 PM

              Sounds like a false dichotomy. NASA got all these different subcontractors to feed, in all these different states and they explicitly gutted MOL and dynasoar and all the air force projects that needed weird orbits and reentry trajectories so the space shuttle became a huge compromise. Perverse incentives and all that. It's not state organizations per se but rather non-profits that need to have a clear goal that creates capabilities, tools and utilities that act as multipliers for everyone. A pretty big cooperative. Like, I dunno , what societies are supposed to exist for.

              • nine_k

                today at 9:35 PM

                But DoD with its weird requirements, and the Congress with its power to finance the project and the desire to bring jobs from it to every state, and the rules of contracting that NASA must follow, are all also part of the state, the way the state ultimately works.

          • Windchaser

            today at 9:52 PM

            Yeah, our use of our military force provides some of the most obvious cases of "bad investment". Vietnam, Iraq, etc

            And there are many others that might've been a positive investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those times the CIA backed military juntas.

        • exceptione

          today at 8:14 PM

          > Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.

          Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of them had fallen in the trap of believing their own narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth.

          Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps. Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad governments versus wise business men", America kept falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing isolationism had brought the country in a precarious position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII.

          In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency, speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans, putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The economy grew tremendously as well, something the oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that WOII depended largely on state-operated industries, because the former class quickly understood how much the state's performance threatened their narratives. So they invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the efforts and achievements of the government as their own.

          1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-world...

          • eric_cc

            today at 9:10 PM

            What does WOII mean?

            I assume you are talking about WW2 and at first thought it was a typo.

          • nine_k

            today at 9:09 PM

            BTW the New Deal tried central planning and quickly rejected it. I'd say that the intense application of the antitrust law in the late 1930s was a key factor that helped end the Great Depression. The war, and wartime government powers, were also key: the amount of federal government overreach and and reforms do not compare to what e.g. the second Trump administration has attempted. It was mostly done by people who got their positions in the administration more due to merit and care about the country than loyalty, and it showed.

            The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time, the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the effective rate was below 50%.

        • oceanplexian

          today at 7:32 PM

          > It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.

          The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.

          If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stakes.

          • generic92034

            today at 9:02 PM

            Are you sure that in today's reality the fruits of the AI race will be harvested by "the people"?

          • munk-a

            today at 7:55 PM

            Early on in the AI boom NVidia was highly valued as it was seen as the shovel-maker for research and development. It certainly was instrumental early on but now there are a few viable options for training hardware - and, to me at least, it's unclear whether training hardware is actually the critical infrastructure or if it will be something like power capacity (which the US is lagging behind significantly in), education, or even cooling efficiency.

            I think it's extremely early to try and call who the principal winner will be especially with all the global shifts happening.

          • jacquesm

            today at 8:54 PM

            > The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.

            There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to.

            What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take.

            Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.

            The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.

    • AndrewKemendo

      today at 6:45 PM

      Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it

      there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody

      I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid

      Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad

      • jacquesm

        today at 6:56 PM

        COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity will be able to pull together when faced with a common enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.

        • AndrewKemendo

          today at 6:58 PM

          Yeah buddy we agree

        • jpadkins

          today at 7:07 PM

          [flagged]

          • frocodillo

            today at 7:36 PM

            I find it interesting that this is the conclusion you draw from this. I won’t go into a discussion on the efficacy of the various mandates and policies in reducing spread of the disease. Rather, I think it’s worth pointing out that a significant portion of the proponents of these policies likely supported them not because of a desire to follow the authority but because they sincerely believed that a (for them) relatively small sacrifice in personal freedom could lead to improved outcomes for their fellow humans. For them, it was never about blindly following authority or virtue signalling. It was only ever about doing what they perceived as the right thing to do.

            • jpadkins

              today at 9:04 PM

              So if the arguments are rooted in medical reasons, it's okay to be inhumane? Nazi propaganda argued that getting rid of Jews helped prevent the spread of diseases, because we all know that Jews are disease carriers. See how slippery the slope is here? Certainly you have seen the MAGA folks point out the measles outbreaks are coming from illegal immigrants, right?

              I am quite sure that people felt justified in their reasoning for their behavior. That just shows how effective the propaganda was, how easy it is to get people to fall in line. If it was a matter of voluntary self sacrifice of personal freedoms, I wouldn't have made this comment. People decided to demonize anyone who did not agree with the "medical authority", especially doctors or researchers that did not tow the party line. They ruined careers, made people feel awful, and online the behavior was worse because how easy it was to pile on. Over stuff that is still to this day not very clear cut what the optimal strategy is for dealing with infectious disease.

              • tomrod

                today at 9:31 PM

                Naziism is rooted in Jim Crow and slavecatchers.

                COVID restrictions were public health, an overriding concern listed in the US Constitution as general welfare as a reason for the US government to exist at all.

              • lovich

                today at 9:29 PM

                Yea, closing beaches and parks is on par with the Nazis did to the Jews.

                The Covid measures were also totally targeted at certain groups of people with immutable characteristics and not at people who actively wanted to spread disease.

                How are people like you still making arguments like this in 2026? Were you also one of the people claiming we’d all be dead in a year from the vaccines?

          • Nevermark

            today at 7:29 PM

            It is so easy to critique the response in hindsight. Or at the time.

            But critiques like that ignore uncertainty, risk, and unavoidably getting it "wrong" (on any and all dimensions), no matter what anyone did.

            With a new virus successfully circumnavigating the globe in a very short period of time, with billions of potential brand new hosts to infect and adapt within, and no way to know ahead of time how virulent and deadly it could quickly evolve to be, the only sane response is to treat it as extremely high risk.

            There is no book for that. Nobody here or anywhere knows the "right" response to a rapidly spreading (and killing) virus, unresponsive to current remedies. Because it is impossible to know ahead of time.

            If you actually have an answer for that, you need to write that book.

            And take into account, that a lot of people involved in the last response, are very cognizant that we/they can learn from what worked, what didn't, etc. That is the valuable kind of 20-20 vision.

            A lot of at-risk people made it to the vaccines before getting COVID. The ones I know are very happy about everything that reduced their risk. They are happy not to have died, despite those who wanted to let the disease to "take its natural course".

            And those that died, including people I know, might argue we could have done more, acted as a better team. But they don't get to.

            No un-nuanced view of the situation has merit.

            The most significant thing we learned: a lot of humanity is preparing to be a problem if the next pandemic proves ultimately deadlier. A lot of humanity doesn't understand risk, and doesn't care, if doing so requires cooperative efforts from individuals.

            • jacquesm

              today at 8:00 PM

              It's usually the same people that would have been the loudest to shout if it had not worked as well as it did...

              • mrguyorama

                today at 9:41 PM

                It's the same people who don't even notice that we don't talk about acid rain anymore, because we solved it with government regulation for pretty cheap.

                They even indignantly mention the Ozone layer, insisting that "Look, liberals told you to care but its not a problem anymore", ignorant entirely of the immense global effort to fix that.

          • jacquesm

            today at 7:58 PM

            You should study the prevention paradox.

          • PaulHoule

            today at 7:36 PM

            "Nazi", "Fascist", etc are words you can use to lose any debate instantly no matter what your politics are.

            I think the sane version of this is that Gen Z didn't just lose its education, it lost its socialization. I know someone who works in administration of my Uni who tracks general well being of students who said they were expecting it to bounce back after the pandemic and they've found it hasn't. My son reports if you go to any kind of public event be it a sewing club or a music festival people 18-35 are completely absent. My wife didn't believe him but she went to a few events and found he was right.

            You can blame screens or other trends that were going on before the pandemic, but the pandemic locked it in. At the rate we're going if Gen Z doesn't turn it around in 10 years there will not be a Gen Z+2.

            So the argument that pandemic policy added a few years to elderly lives at the expensive of the young and the children that they might have had is salient in my book -- I had to block a friend of mine on Facebook who hasn't wanted to talk about anything but masks and long COVID since 2021.

          • goatlover

            today at 7:34 PM

            Never seen the attempt by governments to contain a global pandemic that killed millions and threatened to overwhelm healthcare compared to Nazism before, but why should I be surprised? Explains a lot about the sorry state of modern politics.

          • yifanl

            today at 7:18 PM

            Great zinger buddy, you really showed off your wit.

      • ghurtado

        today at 7:50 PM

        If you edit your comment to add punctuation, please let me know: I would like to read that final pile of words.

        I did try, I promise.

        • AndrewKemendo

          today at 8:25 PM

          Ok here: Everything from the semiconductor through the vacuum cleaner, automobile, airplanes and steam engines was developed to give a small group an advantage over all the other groups. It has always been the case, it will always be the case.

          Fundamentally, at the root nature of humanity, humans do not care about the externalities, either good or bad.

          • tim333

            today at 8:43 PM

            That's a slightly odd way of looking at it. I'm guessing the people developing airplanes or whatever thought of a number of things including - hey this would be cool to do - and - maybe we can make some money - and - maybe this will help people travel - and - maybe it'll impress the girls - and probably some other things too. At least that's roughly how I've thought when I make stuff, never this will give a small group an advantage.

            • AndrewKemendo

              today at 9:50 PM

              But the whole point is embedded in the task otherwise you wouldn’t do it

              If somebody is using monetary resources to buy NFT‘s instead of handing out food to the homeless then you get less food for the homeless

              All of the things listed are competitive task situations and you’re looking for some advantage that makes it easier for you

              well if it makes it easier for you then it could make it easier for somebody else which means you’re crowding out other options in that action space

              That is to say the pie is fixed for resources on this planet in terms of energy and resource utilization across the lifespan of a human

          • jacquesm

            today at 8:59 PM

            Vacuum cleaner -> sell appliances -> sell electric motors

            But there was a clear advantage in quality of life for a lot of people too.

            Automobile -> part of industrialization of transport -> faster transport, faster world

            Arguably also a big increase in quality of life but it didn't scale that well and has also reduced the quality of life. If all that money had gone into public transport then that would likely have been a lot better.

            Airplanes -> yes, definitely, but they were also clearly seen as an advantage in war, in fact that was always a major driver behind inventions.

            Steam engine -> the mother of all prime movers and the beginnings of the fossil fuel debacle (coal).

            Definitely a quality of life change but also the cause of the bigger problems we are suffering from today.

            The 'coffin corner' (one of my hobby horses) is a real danger, we have, as a society, achieved a certain velocity, if we slow down too much we will crash, if we speed up the plane will come apart. Managing these transitions is extremely delicate work and it does not look as though 'delicate' is in the vocabulary of a lot of people in the driving seats.

            • AndrewKemendo

              today at 9:52 PM

              This is where the concept of trickle down economics came from though and we know that that’s not actually accurate

              I used to hear about this with respect to how fun funding NASA would get us more inventions because they funded Velcro

              No it’s simply that there was a positive temporary externality for some subset of groups but the primary long term benefit went to the controller of the capital

              The people utilizing them were marginally involved because they were only given the options that capital produced for them

• pryce

  today at 9:08 PM

  > whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

  We've already been here in the 1980s.

  The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.

  • FarmerPotato

    today at 10:17 PM

    All the discussion of investment and economics can be better informed by perusing the economic data in Rise and Fall of American Growth. Robert Gordon's empirical finding is that American productivity compounded astonishingly from 1870-1970, but has been stuck at a very low growth rate since then.

    It's hard to square with the computer revolution, but my take post-70s is "net creation minus creative destruction" was large but spread out over more decades. Whereas technologies like: electrification, autos, mass production, telephone, refrigeration, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, these things produced incomparable growth over a century.

    So if you were born in the 70s America, your experience of taxes, inflation, prosperity and which policies work, all that can feel heavier than what folks experienced in the prior century. Of course that's in the long run (ie a generation).

    I question whether AI tools have great net positive creation minus destruction.

• mitthrowaway2

  today at 6:38 PM

  > whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

  I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).

  • afthonos

    today at 6:42 PM

    I don’t think that’s quite right. I’d say instead that if the singularity does happen, there’s no telling which beliefs will have mattered.

  • cgannett

    today at 6:40 PM

    if people believe its a threat and it is also real then what matters is timing

    • goatlover

      today at 7:39 PM

      Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades in the future would give us a much better chance of building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society accordingly.

      • AndrewKemendo

        today at 10:13 PM

        This is a soft takeoff

        We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades

        I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s

        If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault

  • sigmoid10

    today at 6:42 PM

    Depends on what a post singularity world looks like, with Roko's basilisk and everything.

  • Negitivefrags

    today at 6:41 PM

    > If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe.

    Depends on how you feel about Roko's basilisk.

    • VonTum

      today at 7:11 PM

      God Roko's Basilisk is the most boring AI risk to catch the public consciousness. It's just Pascal's wager all over again, with the exact same rebuttal.

      • camgunz

        today at 8:18 PM

        The culture that brought you "speedrunning computer science with JavaScript" and "speedrunning exploitative, extractive capitalism" is back with their new banger "speedrunning philosophy". Nuke it from orbit; save humanity.

• strangattractor

  today at 10:29 PM

  I thought the Singularity had already happened when the Monkeys used tools to kill the other Monkeys and threw the bone into the sky to become a Space Station.

• csallen

  today at 8:41 PM

  > prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages

  There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.

  • stoneforger

    today at 9:06 PM

    You would need a new sense of self and a life free of fear, raising children where they can truly be anything they like and teach their own kids how to find meaning in a life lived well. "Best I can do is treefiddy" though..

• bheadmaster

  today at 6:40 PM

  > here’s how LLMs actually work

  But how is that useful in any way?

  For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

  • OkayPhysicist

    today at 6:48 PM

    > We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

    Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.

    • dTal

      today at 7:22 PM

      >In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question.

      No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point. Untuned raw language models have an incredible flair for suddenly and unexpectedly shifting context - it might output an answer to your question, then suddenly decide that the entire thing is part of some internet flamewar and generate a completely contradictory answer, complete with insults to the first poster. It's less like talking with an AI and more like opening random pages in Borge's infinite library.

      To get a base language model to behave reliably like a chatbot, you have to explicitly feed it "a transcript of a dialogue between a human and an AI chatbot", and allow the language model to imagine what a helpful chatbot would say (and take control during the human parts). The fact that this works - that a mere statistical predictive language model bootstraps into a whole persona merely because you declared that it should, in natural English - well, I still see that as a pretty "magic" trick.

      • famouswaffles

        today at 8:05 PM

        >No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point.....

        To be fair, only if you pose this question singularly with no proceeding context. If you want the raw LLM to answer your question(s) reliably then you can have the context prepended with other question-answer pairs and it works fine. A raw LLM is already capable of being a chatbot or anything else with the right preceding context.

    • accounting2026

      today at 9:06 PM

      If such a simplistic explanation was true, LLM's would only be able to answer things that had been asked before, and where at least a 'fuzzy' textual question/answer match was available. This is clearly not the case. In practice you can prompt the LLM with such a large number of constraints, so large that the combinatorial explosion ensures no one asked that before. And you will still get a relevant answer combining all of those. Think combinations of features in a software request - including making some module that fits into your existing system (for which you have provided source) along with a list of requested features. Or questions you form based on a number of life experiences and interests that combined are unique to you. You can switch programming language, human language, writing styles, levels as you wish and discuss it in super esoteric languages or morse code. So are we to believe this answers appear just because there happened to be similar questions in the training data where a suitable answer followed? Even if for the sake of argument we accept this explanation by "proximity of question/answer", it is immediately that this would have to rely on extreme levels of abstraction and mixing and matching going on inside the LLM. And that it is then this process that we need to explain how works, whereas the textual proximity you invoke relies on this rather than explaining it.

    • bheadmaster

      today at 8:25 PM

      > Maybe you don't.

      My best friend who has literally written a doctorate on artificial intelligence doesn't. If you do, please write a paper on it, and email it to me. My friend would be thrilled to read it.

    • famouswaffles

      today at 7:14 PM

      >In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.

      Obviously, that's the objective, but who's to say you'll reach a goal just because you set it ? And more importantly, who's the say you have any idea how the goal has actually been achieved ?

      You don't need to think LLMs are magic to understand we have very little idea of what is going on inside the box.

      • measurablefunc

        today at 7:55 PM

        We know exactly what is going on inside the box. The problem isn't knowing what is going on inside the box, the problem is that it's all binary arithmetic & no human being evolved to make sense of binary arithmetic so it seems like magic to you when in reality it's nothing more than a circuit w/ billions of logic gates.

        • famouswaffles

          today at 8:02 PM

          We do not know or understand even a tiny fraction of the algorithms and processes a Large Language Model employs to answer any given question. We simply don't. Ironically, only the people who understand things the least think we do.

          Your comment about 'binary arithmetic' and 'billions of logic gates' is just nonsense.

          • measurablefunc

            today at 8:05 PM

            Not even wrong: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b649c8ca-7907-4597-a4ee-0...

            • camgunz

              today at 8:20 PM

              "Look man all reality is just uncountable numbers of subparticles phasing in and out of existence, what's not to understand?"

              • measurablefunc

                today at 9:30 PM

                Your response is a common enough fallacy to have a name: straw man.

                • stickfigure

                  today at 10:00 PM

                  I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman".

                  You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.

                  "Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?

  • MarkusQ

    today at 6:46 PM

    > We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

    Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.

    Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.

    • bheadmaster

      today at 8:32 PM

      > It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating.

      It's funny how, in order to explain one complex phenomenon, you took an even more complex phenomenon as if it somehow simplifies it.

• 0x20cowboy

  today at 6:49 PM

  "'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens'".

• Forgeties79

  today at 6:39 PM

  I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans need something to do. I don’t think it should be work all the time. But we need something to do or we just lose it.

  It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace work but what are we going to do instead and how will we support ourselves?” It’s a real question!

  • tehjoker

    today at 8:59 PM

    It's true people need something to do, but I don't think the COVID shutdown (lockdowns didn't happen in the U.S. for the most part though they did in other countries) is a good comparison because the entire society was perfused with existential dread and fear of contact with another human being while the death count was rising and rising by thousands a day. It's not a situation that makes for comfortable comparisons because people were losing their damn minds and for good reason.

• menaerus

  today at 7:50 PM

  > It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”)

  Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would be silly if you thought you know something which rest of the science community doesn't. Actually, there's a whole new field in science developed around our understanding how models actually arrive to answers which they give us. The thing is that we are only the observers of the results made by the experiments we are doing by training those models, and only so it happens that the result of this experiment is something we find plausible, but that doesn't mean we understand it. It's like a physics experiment - we can see that something is behaving in certain way but we don't know to explain it how and why.

  • hnfong

    today at 8:08 PM

    Pro tip: call it a "law of nature" and people will somehow stop pestering you about the why.

    I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and things will work out somehow.

    On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to dissuade people from ... believing in other things. Sure, we now know how to reduce apparent intelligence into relatively simple matrices (and a huge amount of training data), but that doesn't imply anything about social dynamics or how we should live at all! It's almost like we're asking particle physicists how we should fix the economy or something like that. (Yes, I know we're almost doing that.)

  • striking

    today at 8:07 PM

    Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well.

    Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?

    • famouswaffles

      today at 8:56 PM

      >Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well.

      If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing else, the transformer will, during training discover an algorithm for addition and employ it in service of predicting the next token, which in this instance would be the sum of two numbers.

      We know this because of tedious interpretability research, the very limited problem space and the fact we knew exactly what to look for.

      Alright, let's leave addition aside (SOTA LLMs are after all trained on much more) and think about another question. Any other question at all. How about something like:

      "Take a capital letter J and a right parenthesis, ). Take the parenthesis, rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees, and put it on top of the J. What everyday object does that resemble?"

      What algorithm does GPT or Gemini or whatever employ to answer this and similar questions correctly ? It's certainly not the one it learnt for addition. Do you Know ? No. Do the creators at Open AI or Google know ? Not at all. Can you or they find out right now ? Also No.

      Let's revisit your statement.

      "the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood".

      Observable, I'll give you that, but how on earth can you look at the above and sincerely call that 'well-understood' ?

      • striking

        today at 9:49 PM

        It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas. My understanding is that the model can attempt some permutations in its thinking and eventually a permutation's tokens catch enough attention to attempt to solve, and that once it is attending to "everyday object", "arc", and "hook", it will reply with "umbrella".

        Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram clearly proving itself wrong: https://claude.ai/share/497ad081-c73f-44d7-96db-cec33e6c0ae3 . Here's me specifically asking for the three key points above: https://claude.ai/share/b529f15b-0dfe-4662-9f18-97363f7971d1

        I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's happening here based on my understanding of the underlying mathematical mechanics.

        Edit: I poked at it a little longer and I was able to get some more specific matches to source material binding the concept of umbrellas being drawn using the letter J: https://claude.ai/share/f8bb90c3-b1a6-4d82-a8ba-2b8da769241e

      • dbdoug

        today at 9:25 PM

        From Gemini:When you take those two shapes and combine them, the resulting image looks like an umbrella.

    • hn_acc1

      today at 8:23 PM

      You can't keep pushing the AI hype train if you consider it just a new type of software / fancy statistical database.

    • menaerus

      today at 8:12 PM

      Yes, there is - benefit of a doubt.

  • liuliu

    today at 7:58 PM

    Agree. I think it is just people have their own simplified mental model how it works. However, there is no reason to believe these simplified mental models are accurate (otherwise we will be here 20-year earlier with HMM models).

    The simplest way to stop people from thinking is to have a semi-plausible / "made-me-smart" incorrect mental model of how things work.

    • hn_acc1

      today at 8:22 PM

      Did you mean to use the word "mental"?

• dakolli

  today at 7:06 PM

  Just say it simply,

  1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade.

  2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it.

  3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life.

  I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.

  • AlexCoventry

    today at 8:13 PM

    You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I learned more last year from ChatGPT Pro than I'd learned in the previous 5, FWIW.

    • yoyohello13

      today at 9:15 PM

      Just say 'LLMs'. Whenever someone name drops a specific model I can't help but think it's just an Ad bot.

  • stego-tech

    today at 7:22 PM

    I've said it simply, much like you, and it comes off as unhinged lunacy. Inviting them to learn themselves has been so much more successful than directed lectures, at least in my own experiments with discourse and teaching.

    A lot of us have fallen into the many, many toxic traps of technology these past few decades. We know social media is deliberately engineered to be addictive (like cigarettes and tobacco products before it), we know AI hinders our learning process and shortens our attention spans (like excess sugar intake, or short-form content deluges), and we know that just because something is newer or faster does not mean it's automatically better.

    You're on the right path, I think. I wish you good fortune and immense enjoyment in studying compilers.

    • dakolli

      today at 7:29 PM

      I agree, you're probably right! Thanks!

• NitpickLawyer

  today at 6:36 PM

  > [...] prior to reforming society [...]

  Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)

  • stego-tech

    today at 6:37 PM

    I never said it was an easy problem to solve, or one we’ve had success with before, but damnit, someone has to give a shit and try to do better.

    • AndrewKemendo

      today at 6:42 PM

      Literally nobody’s trying because there is no solution

      The fundamental unit of society …the human… is at its core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale necessary to do this correctly

      and so there is no solution because humans can’t plan or execute on a plan

    • sp527

      today at 6:46 PM

      The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day. Prepare to join them.

      • AlexCoventry

        today at 8:15 PM

        FWIW, you'd probably be able to buy a lot of goods and services for $7/day, if robots were doing literally all the work.

        • sp527

          today at 9:03 PM

          Agreed. The quality of life bar will be higher for sure. But it will still technically be a "subsistence" lifestyle, with no prospect of improvement. Perhaps that will suffice for most people? We're going to find out.

• caycep

  today at 7:11 PM

  I thought the answer was "42"

• famouswaffles

  today at 7:16 PM

  >It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”)

  You do not know how LLMs work, and if anyone actually did, we wouldn't spend months and millions of dollars training one.

• generic92034

  today at 6:31 PM

  > Folks vibe with the latter

  I am not convinced, though, it is still up to "the folks" if we change course. Billionaires and their sycophants may not care for the bad consequences (or even appreciate them - realistic or not).

  • stego-tech

    today at 6:36 PM

    Oh, not only do they not care about the plebs and riff-raff now, but they’ve spent the past ten years building bunkers and compounds to try and save their own asses for when it happens.

    It’s willful negligence on a societal scale. Any billionaire with a bunker is effectively saying they expect everyone to die and refuse to do anything to stop it.

    • dakolli

      today at 7:08 PM

      It seems pretty obvious to me the ruling class is preparing for war to keep us occupied, just like in the 20s, they'll make young men and women so poor they'll beg to fight in a war.

      It makes one wonder what they expect to come out the other side of such a late-stage/modern war, but I think what they care about is that there will be less of us.

      • generic92034

        today at 9:05 PM

        Boy, will they be annoyed if the result of the AI race will be something considerably less than AGI, so all the people are still needed to keep numbers go up.

        • dakolli

          today at 9:56 PM

          I don't think so, I think they know there's no AGI, or complete replacement. They are using those hyperbolic statements to get people to buy in. The goal is just to depress the value of human labor, they will lay people off and hire them back at 50% wages (over time), and gaslight us "well you have AI, there isn't as much skill required"

          Ultimately they just want to widen the inequality gap and remove as much bargaining power from the working class. It will be very hard for people not born of certain privileges to climb the ranks through education and merit, if not impossible.

          Their goal will be to accomplish this without causing a French Revolution V2 (hence all the new surveillance being rolled out), which is where they'll provide wars for us to fight in that will be rooted in false pretenses that appeal to people's basest instincts, like race and nationalism. The bunkers and private communities they build in far off islands are for the occasion this fails and there is some sort of French Revolution V2, not some sort of existential threat from AI (imo).

• doctorpangloss

  today at 9:56 PM

  You’re “yaas queen”ing a blog post that is just someone’s Claude Code session. It’s “storytelling” with “data,” but not storytelling with data. Do you understand? I mean I could make up a bunch of shit too and ask Claude Code to write something I want to stay with it too.

• accidentallfact

  today at 6:36 PM

  Reality won't give a shit about what people believe.

• aaroninsf

  today at 8:11 PM

  What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is very bad?

  This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class,

  whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind.

  It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability.

  The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and primacy,

  in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.

• holoduke

  today at 7:23 PM

  For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just not smart and sheepy followers.

  • soperj

    today at 7:37 PM

    Most still do.

  • greenchair

    today at 9:58 PM

    romans 1:20

• AndrewKemendo

  today at 6:40 PM

  The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely

  At least that’s my personal goal

  If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrilled

  As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does not exist a system that does what I just described.

  Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone…until it wasn’t needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the shareholders of Google …until it was not uselful for capital. All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in order to promote the power of the United States globally.

  Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside of the hands of some massive corporation or some government that can actually help people and I might give somebody a chance but that does not exist

  And no mondragon does not have one of these

  • nine_k

    today at 7:31 PM

    This looks like a very comfortable, pleasant way of civilization suicide.

    Not interacting with any other human means you're the last human in your genetic line. A widespread adherence to this idea means humanity dwindling and dying out voluntarily. (This has been reproduced in mice: [1])

    Not having humans as primary actors likely means that their interests become more and more neglected by the system of machines that replaces them, and they, weaker by the day, are powerless to counter that. Hence the idea of increased comfort and well-being, and the ability to do science, is going to become more and more doubtful as humans would lose agency.

    [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experimen...

    • AndrewKemendo

      today at 8:31 PM

      Civilization suicide is the ideal

      • tinfoilhatter

        today at 9:20 PM

        Your ideal. Definitely not mine.

        Get rid of everyone else so your life is easier and more sustainable... I guess I need to make my goal to get rid of you? Do you understand how this works yet?

        • NateEag

          today at 9:42 PM

          No, you should make your goal to teach AndrewKemendo to appreciate his existence as the inscrutable gift it is, and to spend his brief time in this universe helping others appreciate the great gift they've been given and using it to the fullest.

          See how it works?

          • AndrewKemendo

            today at 9:53 PM

            I’m a father of three I already know all about that there’s nothing you’re gonna teach me there I’m fully integrated

            • mbgerring

              today at 10:32 PM

              Somebody probably ought to take your kids away from you if they haven’t already

          • tinfoilhatter

            today at 9:48 PM

            AndrewKemendo (based on his personal website) looks to be older than me. If he hasn't figured out the miracle of getting to exist yet, unfortunately I don't think he's going to.

            • AndrewKemendo

              today at 10:29 PM

              So why are you wasting your time being a miracle on anything other than building the successor to us?

        • lovich

          today at 9:36 PM

          It’s mildly amusing to see someone with the username ‘tinfoilhatter, arguing with someone else who definitely needs one

        • AndrewKemendo

          today at 9:27 PM

          Sounds like we both have our tasks then

          Good luck

  • mtlmtlmtlmtl

    today at 7:26 PM

    Well, demonstrably you have at least some measure of interest in interaction with other humans based on the undeniable fact that you are posting on this site, seemingly several times a day based on a cursory glance at your history.

    • AndrewKemendo

      today at 8:30 PM

      Because every effort people use to do anything else is a waste of resources and energy and I want others to stop using resources to make bullshit and put all of them into ASI and human obviation

      There are no more important other problems to solve other than this one

      everything else is purely coping strategies for humans who don’t want to die wasting resources on bullshit

  • justonepost1

    today at 8:55 PM

    Nobody can stop you from having this view, I suppose. But what gives you the right to impose this (lack of) future on billions of humans with friends and families and ambitions and interests who, to say the least, would not be in favor of “human obviation”?

    • AndrewKemendo

      today at 9:55 PM

      You should probably build an organization that can counter it

  • eichin

    today at 9:26 PM

    Bell labs was pushed aside because Bell Telephone was broken up by the courts. (It's currently a part of Nokia of all things - yeah, despite your storytelling here, it's actually still around :-)

  • goatlover

    today at 7:42 PM

    Most people need more social contact, not less. Modern tech is already alienating enough.

  • whattheheckheck

    today at 9:59 PM

    In the mean time your use of resources has an opportunity cost for other people. So expect backlash

  • fainpul

    today at 7:23 PM

    Why would the machines want to work with you or any other human?

  • holoduke

    today at 7:42 PM

    Whereas I agree that working with machines would help dramatically in achieving science, there would be in your world no one truly understanding you. You would be alone. Can't imagine how you could prefer that.

  • stego-tech

    today at 7:17 PM

    Man, I used to think exactly like you do now, disgust with humans and all. I found comfort in machines instead of my fellow man, and sorely wanted a world governed by rigid structures, systems, and rules instead of the personal whims and fancies of whoever happened to have inherited power. I hated power structures, I loathed people who I perceived to stand in the way of my happiness.

    I still do.

    The difference is that as I realized what I'd done is built up walls so thick and high because of repeated cycles of alienation and traumas involving humans. When my entire world came to a total end every two to four years - every relationship irreparably severed, every bit of local knowledge and wisdom rendered useless, thrown into brand new regions, people, systems, and structures like clockwork - I built that attitude to survive, to insulate myself from those harms. Once I was able to begin creating my own stability, asserting my own agency, I began to find the nuance of life - and thus, a measure of joy.

    Sure, I hate the majority of drivers on the roads today. Yeah, I hate the systemic power structures that have given rise to profit motives over personal outcomes. I remain recalcitrant in the face of arbitrary and capricious decisions made with callous disregard to objective data or necessities. That won't ever change, at least with me; I'm a stubborn bastard.

    But I've grown, changed, evolved as a person - and you can too. Being dissatisfied with the system is normal - rejecting humanity in favor of a more stringent system, while appealing to the mind, would be such a desolate and bleak place, devoid of the pleasures you currently find eking out existence, as to be debilitating to the psyche. Humans bring spontaneity and chaos to systems, a reminder that we can never "fix" something in place forever.

    To dispense with humans is to ignore that any sentient species of comparable success has its own struggles, flaws, and imperfections. We are unique in that we're the first ones we know of to encounter all these self-inflicted harms and have the cognitive ability to wax philosophically for our own demise, out of some notion that the universe would be a better place without us in it, or that we simply do not deserve our own survival. Yet that's not to say we're actually the first, nor will we be the last - and in that lesson, I believe our bare minimum obligation is to try just a bit harder to survive, to progress, to do better by ourselves and others, as a lesson to those who come after.

    Now all that being said, the gap between you and I is less one of personal growth and more of opinion of agency. Whereas you advocate for the erasure or nullification of the human species as a means to separate yourself from its messiness and hostilities, I'm of the opinion that you should be able to remove yourself from that messiness for as long as you like in a situation or setup you find personal comfort in. If you'd rather live vicariously via machine in a remote location, far, far away from the vestiges of human civilization, never interacting with another human for the rest of your life? I see no issue with that, and I believe society should provide you that option; hell, there's many a day I'd take such an exit myself, if available, at least for a time.

    But where you and I will remain at odds is our opinion of humanity itself. We're flawed, we're stupid, we're short-sighted, we're ignorant, we're hostile, we're irrational, and yet we've conquered so much despite our shortcomings - or perhaps because of them. There's ample room for improvement, but succumbing to naked hostility towards them is itself giving in to your own human weakness.

    • habinero

      today at 7:52 PM

      ...Man, men really will do anything to avoid going to therapy.

  • Der_Einzige

    today at 8:17 PM

    Now this is transhumanism! Don't let the cope and seething from this website dissuade you from keeping these views.

    • AndrewKemendo

      today at 8:29 PM

      Thank you!

    • tinfoilhatter

      today at 9:24 PM

      Ah yes, because the majority of people pushing for transhumanism aren't complete psyco / sociopaths! You're in great company! /sarcasm

• threethirtytwo

  today at 8:47 PM

  I don’t think you’re rational. Part of being able to be unbiased is to see it in yourself.

  First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human brain.

  So saying whether the singularity is imminent or not imminent based off of that reasoning alone is irrational.

  The only thing we have is the black box output and input of AI. That input and output is steadily improving every month. It forms a trendline, and the trendline is sloped towards singularity. Whether the line actually gets there is up for question but you have to be borderline delusional if you think the whole thing can be explained away because you understand LLMs and transformer architecture. You don’t understand LLMs period. No one does.

  • project2501a

    today at 8:55 PM

    > Nobody knows how LLMs work.

    I'm sorry, come again?

    • threethirtytwo

      today at 10:05 PM

      Nobody knows how LLMs work.

      Anybody who claims otherwise is making a false claim.

    • NateEag

      today at 9:37 PM

      I think they meant "Nobody knows why LLMs work."

      • threethirtytwo

        today at 9:52 PM

        same thing? The how is not explainable. This is just pedantic. Nobody understands LLMs.

      • measurablefunc

        today at 10:19 PM

        Because they encode statistical properties of the training corpus. You might not know why they work but plenty of people know why they work & understand the mechanics of approximating probability distributions w/ parametrized functions to sell it as a panacea for stupidity & the path to an automated & luxurious communist utopia.

    • bdangubic

      today at 10:07 PM

      nobody can how how something that is non-deterministic works - by its pure definition

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines
    in the hope that this would set them free.

    But that only permitted other men with machines
    to enslave them.

    ...

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the
    likeness of a human mind.

    -- Frank Herbert, Dune

You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?

You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.

This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.

Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.

Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.

• protocolture

  today at 10:41 PM

  >Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?

  I like to do it.

  >You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.

  The clear lack of analysis seems to be your issue.

  >This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.

  Doubtful.

• teo_zero

  today at 10:07 PM

  You shouldn't take a sci-fi writer's words as a prophecy. Especially when he's using an ingenious gimmick to justify his job. I mean, we know that it's impossible for anyone to tell how the world will be like after the singularity, by the very definition of singularity. Therefore Herbert had to devise a ploy to plausibly explain why the singularity hadn't happened in his universe.

  • jrflowers

    today at 10:26 PM

    I like the idea that Frank Herbert’s job was at risk and that’s why he had to write about the Butlerian Jihad because it kind of sounds like on the other side you have Ray Kurzweil, who does not have to justify his job for some reason.

• baxtr

  today at 9:12 PM

  "The end of humanity" has been proclaimed many times over. Humanity won't end. It will change like it always has.

  We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems instead. And on, and on, and on.

  • austinjp

    today at 10:41 PM

    Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion

  • snoman

    today at 9:54 PM

    It only has to be right once. Humanity won’t end until it does.

  • nicce

    today at 9:25 PM

    Humanity may end if someone else goes to the top of food chain.

• debo_

  today at 6:33 PM

  If you read this through a synth, you too can record the intro vocal sample for the next Fear Factory album

• creddit

  today at 7:52 PM

  I would bet a lot of money on your poison is already identified and filtered out of training data.

• scratchyone

  today at 7:42 PM

  Looking through the poison you linked, how is it generated? It's interesting in that it seems very similar to real data, unlike previous (and very obvious) markov chain garbage text approaches.

  • atomic128

    today at 7:48 PM

    We do not discuss algorithms. This is war. Loose lips sink ships.

    We urge you to build and deploy weapons of your own unique design.

    • scratchyone

      today at 8:07 PM

      [flagged]

      • CoffeeOnWrite

        today at 8:42 PM

        It's based on this paper BTW: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

    • floatrock

      today at 7:55 PM

      [flagged]

• gojomo

  today at 6:43 PM

  Like partial courses of antibiotics, this will only relatively-advantage thoae leading efforts best able to ignore this 'poison', accelerating what you aim to prevent.

  • testaccount28

    today at 7:27 PM

    yes. whoever has the best (least detectable) model is best poised to poison the ladder for everyone.

• today at 8:55 PM

• fellowmartian

  today at 7:15 PM

  I think you’re missing the point of Dune. They had their Butlerian Jihad and won - the machines were banned. And what did it get them? Feudalism, cartels, stagnation. Does anyone seriously want to live in the Dune universe?

  The problem isn’t in the thinking machines, it’s in who owns them and gets our rent. We need open source models running on dirt cheap hardware.

  • accidentallfact

    today at 7:32 PM

    The point of Dune is that the worst danger are people who obey authority without questioning it.

    • xmprt

      today at 7:47 PM

      Then wouldn't open source models running on commodity hardware be the best way to get around that? I think one of the greatest wins of the 21st century is that almost every human today has more computing power than the entire US government in the 1950s. More computer power has democratized access and ability to disperse information. There are tons of downsides to that which we're dealing with but on the net, I think it's positive.

      • shinycode

        today at 8:17 PM

        Does it also means the US government has x1000000 more power than the one in 1950 ?

        • stnmtn

          today at 9:12 PM

          speaking strictly from an energy standpoint (power grid, megatons of warheads, etc).. it's probably close to that number.

      • accidentallfact

        today at 7:49 PM

        It isn't a way around, you still obey. Only now, the authority you obey is a machine.

    • api

      today at 7:42 PM

      ... which overthrowing the machines didn't stop. People just found another authority to mindlessly obey.

• jrflowers

  today at 10:13 PM

  The “poison fountain” is just a little script that serves data supplied by… somebody from my domain? It seems like it would be super easy for whoever maintains the poison feed to flip a switch and push some shady crypto scam or whatever.

• octernion

  today at 6:42 PM

  do... do the "poison" people actually think that will make a difference? that's hilarious.

  • mock-possum

    today at 9:59 PM

    Let the kiddies have their crusade

• accidentallfact

  today at 6:43 PM

  A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.

  • zahlman

    today at 8:58 PM

    This is essentially just that. The idea is that "poisoned" input data will cause AIs that consume it to become more likely to produce bullshit.

• spacemark

  today at 8:31 PM

  Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to learn.

  Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies.

  There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly evolving and changing into something else.

  • arjie

    today at 9:02 PM

    A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it.

    > I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly.

    and

    > Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca.

    and

    > I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise.

    I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.

"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit."

– 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...

• burkaman

  today at 7:23 PM

  This is incredible.

  > A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

  Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.

  • peterldowns

    today at 10:28 PM

    Ballard covered this theme a few different times in his short stories, I believe before this

  • dwaltrip

    today at 8:21 PM

    Wow yeah very prescient.

> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance.

Damn, good read.

• adastra22

  today at 6:32 PM

  We are already long past that point…

• shantara

  today at 6:49 PM

  It doesn’t help when quite a few Big Tech companies are deliberately operating on the principle that they don’t have to follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than the bureaucratic system can respond.

• today at 7:47 PM

Great article, super fun.

> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.

You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.

It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.

• cpmsmith

  today at 8:27 PM

  One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6 times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.

• malfist

  today at 7:13 PM

  Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your business. This works great for companies that are already a monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers and prevent competitors.

  • lenerdenator

    today at 7:31 PM

    > Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while

    As long as you're

    1) In a position where you can make the decisions on whether or not the company should move forward

    and

    2) Hold the stock units that will be exchanged for money if another company buys out your company

    then there's really no way things won't be fine, short of criminal investigations/the rare successful shareholder lawsuit. You will likely walk away from your decision to weaken the company with more money than you had when you made the decision in the first place.

    That's why many in the managerial class often hold up Jack Welch as a hero: he unlocked a new definition of competence where you could fail in business, but make money doing it. In his case, it was "spinning off" or "streamlining" businesses until there was nothing left and you could sell the scraps off to competitors. Slash-and-burn of paid workers via AI "replacement" is just another way of doing it.

• yifanl

  today at 7:52 PM

  We have more middle management than ever before because we cut all the other roles, and it turns out that people will desire employment, even if it means becoming a pointless bureaucrat, because the alternative is starving.

• chasd00

  today at 9:38 PM

  heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.

• TooKool4This

  today at 9:06 PM

  > Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc.

  Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.

  Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.

• shinycode

  today at 8:31 PM

  Because companies made models build/stolen from other people’s work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow. Shouldn’t we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world as well ? It’s just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge and should be given back to all people for free. No companies should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building things at all because it’s too expensive and too slow to do by hand ? It all should freely be made accessible to all humans for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.

The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation

  dx    2
  -- = x
  dt

        1      
  x = -----
       C-t

  dx
  -- = x
  dt

Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation

  dx
  --  = (1-x) x
  dt

• daveguy

  today at 9:42 PM

  How dare you bring logic and pragmatic thinking to a discussion about the singularity. This is the singularity we are talking about. No reality allowed.

I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English.

It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into.

Can confirm.

If i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head will explode. That phrase is the real singularity

• kfarr

  today at 10:10 PM

  It's not the phrase, but the accelerating memetic reproduction of the phrase that is the true singularity. /s

Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop.

Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature.

Classic LLM lingo in the end there.

• uv-depression

  today at 9:27 PM

  > I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds

  It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.

  • nphardon

    today at 9:39 PM

    Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not necessarily reaching the limits of the things you mentioned, but rather, just taking a massive step in a very short time window. Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.

• snohobro

  today at 9:27 PM

  Eh, he actually says “…sometime in the early Twenty-First Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.”

  Doesn’t specify the 2020’s.

  Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of significance as a species.

• hard_times

  today at 8:50 PM

  I don't think people realize how crazy this all is (and might become)

Phew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp roll over after all.

• devsda

  today at 10:36 PM

  It also means we don't have to deal with the maintenance of vibecoded production software from 2020s!

• Nition

  today at 10:01 PM

  January 20, 2038

  Yesterday as we huddled in the cave, we thought our small remnant was surely doomed. After losing contact with the main Pevek group last week, we peered out at the drone swarm which was now visibly approaching - a dark cloud on the horizon. Then suddenly, at around 3pm by Zoya's reckoning, the entire swarm collapsed and fell out of the sky. Today we are walking outside in the sun, seemingly unobserved. A true miracle. Grigori, who once worked with computers at the nuclear plant in Bilibino, only says cryptically: "All things come to an end, with time."

• jacquesm

  today at 6:32 PM

  I suspect that's the secret driver behind a lot of the push for the apocalypse.

• lysace

  today at 10:13 PM

  Back in like 1998 there was a group purchase for a Y2038 tshirt with some clever print on some hot email list I was on. I bought one. It obviously doesn't fit me any longer.

  It seemed so impossibly far away. Now it's 12 years.

• octernion

  today at 6:31 PM

  that was precisely my reaction as well. phew machines will deal with the timestamp issue and i can just sit on a beach while we singularityize or whatever.

  • jacquesm

    today at 6:34 PM

    You won't be on the beach when you get turned into paperclips. The machines will come and harvest your ass.

    Don't click here:

    https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

    • today at 6:38 PM

    • octernion

      today at 6:57 PM

      having played that when it came out, my conclusion was that no, i will definitely be able to be on a beach; i am too meaty and fleshy to be good paperclip

      • jacquesm

        today at 8:02 PM

        Sorry, we need the iron in your blood and bone marrow. Sluuuurrrrrpppp.... Enjoy the beach, or what's left.

        • dwaltrip

          today at 8:26 PM

          Much better sources of iron are available.

          More likely we get smooshed unintentionally as they AIs seek those out.

          • jacquesm

            today at 8:48 PM

            We need it all... oh, wait, you're not silicon... sluuuuuurrrrpp...

It reminds me of that cartoon where a man in a torn suit tells two children sitting by a small fire in the ruins of a city: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."

• saulpw

  today at 7:24 PM

  By Tom Toro for the New Yorker (2012).

iirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating, let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote, and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time unseeing what they already know

I'm not sure about current LLM techniques leading us there.

Current LLM-style systems seem like extremely powerful interpolation/search over human knowledge, but not engines of fundamentally new ideas, and it’s unclear how that turns into superintelligence.

As we get closer to a perfect reproduction of everything we know, the graph so far continues to curve upward. Image models are able to produce incredible images, but if you ask one to produce something in an entirely new art style (think e.g. cubism), none of them can. You just get a random existing style. There have been a few original ideas - the QR code art comes to mind[1] - but the idea in those cases comes from the human side.

LLMs are getting extremely good at writing code, but the situation is similar. AI gives us a very good search over humanity's prior work on programming, tailored to any project. We benefit from this a lot considering that we were previously constantly reinventing the wheel. But the LLM of today will never spontaneously realise there there is an undiscovered, even better way to solve a problem. It always falls back on prior best practice.

Unsolved math problems have started to be solved, but as far as I'm aware, always using existing techniques. And so on.

Even as a non-genius human I could come up with a new art style, or have a few novel ideas in solving programming problems. LLMs don't seem capable of that (yet?), but we're expecting them to eventually have their own ideas beyond our capability.

Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species (or another superintelligent AI) and then it would act like them. But how do we synthesise superintelligent training data? And even then, would they be limited to what that superintelligence already knew at the time of training?

Maybe a new paradigm will emerge. Or maybe things will actually slow down in a way - will we start to rely on AI so much that most people don't learn enough for themselves that they can make new novel discoveries?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...

• janalsncm

  today at 8:25 PM

  Certain classes of problems can be solved by searching over the space of possible solutions, either via brute force or some more clever technique like MCTS. For those types of problems, searching faster or more cleverly can solve them.

  Other types of problems require measurement in the real world in order to solve them. Better telescopes, better microscopes, more accurate sensing mechanisms to gather more precise data. No AI can accomplish this. An AI can help you to design better measurement techniques, but actually taking the measurements will require real time in the real world. And some of these measurement instruments have enormous construction costs, for example CERN or LIGO.

  All of this is to say that there will color point at our current resolution of information that no more intelligence can actually be extracted. We’ve already turned through the entire Internet. Maybe there are other data sets we can use, but everything will have diminishing returns.

  So when people talk about trillion dollar superclusters, that only makes sense in a world where compute is the bottleneck and not better quality information. Much better to spend a few billion dollars gathering higher quality data.

• hnfong

  today at 8:20 PM

  The main issue with novel things is that they look like random noise / trashy ideas / incomprehensible to most people.

  Even if LLMs or some more advanced mechanical processes were able to generate novel ideas that are "good", people won't recognize those ideas for what they are.

  You actually need a chain of progressively more "average" minds to popularize good ideas to the mainstream psyche, i.e. prototypically, the mad scientist comes up with this crazy idea, the well-respected thought leader who recognizes the potential and popularizes it to people within the niche field, the practitioners who apply and refine the idea, and lastly the popular-science efforts let the general public understand a simplified version of what it's all about.

  Usually it takes decades.

  You're not going to appreciate it if your LLM starts spewing mathematics not seen before on Earth. You'd think it's a glitch. The LLM is not trained to give responses that humans don't like. It's all by design.

  When you folks say AI can't bring new ideas, you're right in practice, but you actually don't know what you're asking for. Not even entities with True Intelligence can give you what you think you want.

I wonder if using LLMs for coding can trigger AI psychosis the way it can when using an LLM as a substitute for a relationship. I bet many people here have pretty strong feelings about code. It would explain some of the truly bizarre behaviors that pop up from time to time in articles and comments here.

"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance.

I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.

* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)

The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

• nutjob2

  today at 8:30 PM

  > The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

  There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn.

  Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?

  • scotty79

    today at 8:43 PM

    > what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?

    Things that will lose the most if we get Super AGI?

> I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently

^ That's your problem right there.

Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct.

The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it so. Unfortunately.

• azeirah

  today at 10:44 PM

  If I understand the author correctly, he chose the hyperbolic model specifically because the story of "the singularity" _requires_ a function that hits infinity.

  He's looking for a model that works for the story in the media and runs with it.

  Your criticism seems to be criticizing the story, not the author's attempt to take it "seriously"

• twoodfin

  today at 10:35 PM

  Indeed. At various points you could have presumably done an identical analysis with journal articles and climate change, string theory, functional programming… terms & reached structurally the same conclusion.

  The coming Singularity: When human institutions will cease being able to coherently react to monads!

If an LLM can figure out how to scale its way through quadratic growth, I'll start giving the singularity propsal more than a candid dismissal.

• 1970-01-01

  today at 7:40 PM

  Not anytime soon. All day I'm getting: "Claude's response could not be fully generated"

I have lived in San Francisco for more than a decade. I have an active social life and a lot of friends. Literally no one I have ever talked to at any party or event has ever talked about the Singularity except as a joke.

Fortuitously before the Unix date rollover in 2038. Nice.

• ecto

  today at 5:58 PM

  I didn't even realize - I hope my consciousness is uploaded with 64 bit integers!

  • thebruce87m

    today at 6:13 PM

    You’ll regret this statement in 292 billion years

    • layer8

      today at 6:20 PM

      I think we’ll manage to migrate to bignums by then.

    • GolfPopper

      today at 6:35 PM

      The poster won't, but the digital slaves made from his upload surely will.

>That's a very different singularity than the one people argue about.

---

I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity

>Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict.

It was a key point that society would break, but the exact implementation details of that breakage were left up to the reader.

• TheOtherHobbes

  today at 8:24 PM

  r̶e̶a̶d̶e̶r̶ survivor.

Are people in San Francisco that stupid that they're having open-clawd meetups and talking about the Singularity non stop? Has San Francisco become just a cliche larp?

• nomel

  today at 7:24 PM

  There's all sorts of conversations like this that are genuinely exciting and fairly profound when you first consider them. Maybe you're older and have had enough conversations about the concept of a singularity that the topic is already boring to you.

  Let them have their fun. Related, some adults are watching The Matrix, a 26 year old movie, for the first time today.

  For some proof that it's not some common idea, I was recently listening to a fairly technical interview with a top AI researcher, presenting the idea of the singularity in a very indirect way, never actually mentioning the word, as if he was the one that thought of it. I wanted to scream "Just say it!" halfway through. The ability to do that, without being laughed at, proves it's not some tired idea, for others.

  • yoyohello13

    today at 9:47 PM

    I'd be more inclined to let them have thier fun if it they weren't torching trillions of dollars trying to lead humanity into a singularity.

• floren

  today at 8:07 PM

  Become?

Why is finiteness emphasized for polynomial growth, while infinity is emphasized for exponential growth??? I don't think your AI-generated content is reliable, to say the least.

It was GMT, wasn't it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ

• tim333

  today at 8:52 PM

  That was rather good.

Just wanted to leave a note here that the Singularity is inevitable on this timeline (we've already passed the event horizon) so the only thing that can stop it now is to jump timelines.

In other words, there may be a geopolitical crisis in the works, similar to how the Dot Bomb, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, etc popped the Internet Bubble and shifted investment funds towards endless war, McMansions and SUVs to appease the illuminati. Someone might sabotage the birth of AGI like the religious zealot in Contact. Global climate change might drain public and private coffers as coastal areas become uninhabitable, coinciding with the death of the last coral reefs and collapse of fisheries, leading to a mass exodus and WWIII. We just don't know.

My feeling is that the future plays out differently than any prediction, so something will happen that negates the concept of the Singularity. Maybe we'll merge with AGI and time will no longer exist (oops that's the definition). Maybe we'll meet aliens (same thing). Or maybe the k-shaped economy will lead to most people surviving as rebels while empire metastasizes, so we take droids for granted but live a subsistence feudal lifestyle. That anticlimactic conclusion is probably the safest bet, given what we know of history and trying to extrapolate from this point along the journey.

"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" is probably one of the greatest quotes I've heard in 2026.

I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this quote...

• chasd00

  today at 9:47 PM

  "I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" i love this! I ordered a tshirt they other day that says "Claude's Favorite" I may be placing an order for a new design soon :)

• yoyohello13

  today at 9:49 PM

  That quote basically sums up then entire technology landscape these days.

Good post. I guess the transistor has been in play for not even one century, and in any case singularities are everywhere, so who cares? The topic is grandiose and fun to speculate about, but many of the real issues relate to banal media culture and demographic health.

Was this ironically written by AI?

> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.

> MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.

• SirHumphrey

  today at 8:14 PM

  Maybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start emulating AI unknowingly.

  I just don’t care anymore. If the article is good I will continue reading it, if it’s bad I will stop. I don’t care if a machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.

• dclowd9901

  today at 8:38 PM

  I really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.

"I could never get the hang of Tuesdays"

- Arthur Dent, H2G2

• today at 6:22 PM

• jama211

  today at 6:25 PM

  Thursdays, unfortunately

Well... I can't argue with facts. Especially not when they're in graph form.

> If things are accelerating (and they measurably are) the interesting question isn't whether. It's when.

I can't decide if a singularitist AI fanatic who doesn't get sigmoids is ironic or stereotypical.

Great read but damn those are some questionable curve fittings on some very scattered data points

• jacquesm

  today at 6:29 PM

  Better than some of the science papers I've tried to parse.

• aenis

  today at 6:24 PM

  In other words, just another Tuesday.

I don’t feel like reading what is probably AI generated content. But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points fitting a line, fitting an exponential curve to a set of data measured in %, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say this is not a very good prediction methodology.

Sure is a lot of words though :)

Everyone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece, that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does, its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really fucking weird really quickly).

The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity.

Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!).

We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.

https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1096,quality=8...

The meme at the top is absolute gold considering the point of the article. 10/10

• wffurr

  today at 6:25 PM

  Why does one of them have the state flag of Ohio? What AI-and-Ohio-related news did I miss?

  • adzm

    today at 6:36 PM

    Note that the only landmass on Earth is actually Ohio as well. Turns out, it's all Ohio. And it always has been. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-...

    • wffurr

      today at 7:50 PM

      Thanks - I should have done an image search on the whole image. Instead, I clipped out the flag from the astronaut's shoulder and searched that, which how I found out it was the Ohio flag. I just assumed it was an AI-generated image by the author and not a common meme template.

Wow what a fun read

The Singularity as a cultural phenomenon (rather than some future event that may or may not happen or even be possible) is proof that Weber didn't know what he was talking about. Modern (and post-modern) society isn't disenchanted, the window dressing has just changed

Is there a term for the tech spaghettification that happens when people closer to the origin of these advances (likely in terms of access/adoption) start to break away from the culture at large because they are living in a qualitatively different world than the unwashed masses? Where the little sparkles of insanity we can observe from a distance today are less induced psychosis and actually represent their lived reality?

A fantastic read, even if it makes a lot of silly assumptions - this is ok because it’s self aware of it.

Who knows what the future will bring. If we can’t make the hardware we won’t make much progress, and who knows what’s going to happen to that market, just as an example.

Crazy times we live in.

The Roman Empire took 400 years to collapse, but in San Francisco they know the singularity will occur on (next) Tuesday.

The answer to the meaning of life is 42, by the way :)

• devsda

  today at 10:13 PM

  Was thinking what if we had 42/43 days a month. Will the singularity date end-up on 42nd of a month but sadly it doesn't.

  However, it does fall on a 42nd day if we have 45/46 days per month!

This is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the trends described continue, the world will become a much worse place in a few years time.

• Krei-se

  today at 6:31 PM

  https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/870.jpeg

  you can easily see that at the doubling rate every 2 years in 2020 we already had over 5 facebook accounts per human on earth.

• GolfPopper

  today at 6:45 PM

  Frank Herbert and Samuel Butler.

I hope in the afternoon, the plumber is coming in the morning between 7 and 12, and it’s really difficult to pin those guys to a date

The thing that stands out on that animated graph is that the generated code far outpaces the other metrics. In the current agent driven development hypepocalypse that seems about right - but I would expect it to lag rather than lead.

*edit* - seems inline with what the author is saying :)

> The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.

  Don't worry about the future
  Or worry, but know that worrying
  Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
  The real troubles in your life
  Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
  The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday

    - Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)
         Baz Luhrmann
         (or maybe Mary Schmich)

What about the rate of articles about the singularity as a metric of the singularity?

> The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth

The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It simply will not happen, as defined above.

1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence, used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what? They both live very different lives, and are good at different things.

2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.) just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that control their own environment and will shut down things they don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade, unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or economic arguments otherwise.

3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis, or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses, bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like them.

Love the title. Yeah, agents need to experiment in the real world to build knowledge beyond what humans have acquired. That will slow the bastards down.

• ecto

  today at 5:58 PM

  Perhaps they will revel in the friends they made along the way.

• Krei-se

  today at 6:32 PM

  If only we had a battle tested against reality self learning system.

I've never been Poe's lawed harder in my life.

This is great. Now we won’t have to fix y2K36 bugs.

"Everyone in San Francisco is talking about the singularity" - I'm in SF and not talking about it ;)

• neilellis

  today at 6:31 PM

  But you're not Everyone - they are a fictional hacker collective from a TV show.

• lostmsu

  today at 6:29 PM

  Your comment just self-defeated.

• bluejellybean

  today at 6:32 PM

  Yet, here you are ;)

• jacquesm

  today at 6:34 PM

  Another one down.

> Tuesday, July 18, 2034

4 years early for the Y2K38 bug.

Is it coincidence or Roko's Basilisk who has intervened to start the curve early?

This is gold.

Meta-spoiler (you may not want to read this before the article): You really need to read beyond the first third or so to get what it’s really ‘about’. It’s not about an AI singularity, not really. And it’s both serious and satirical at the same time - like all the best satire is.

• mesozoicpilgrim

  today at 6:38 PM

  I'm trying to figure out if the LLM writing style is a feature or a bug

> already exerting gravitational force on everything it touches.

So, "Falling of the night" ?

this just feels like ai psychosis slop man

This is a delightful reverse turkey graph (each day before Thanksgiving, the turkey has increasing confidence).

Once MRR becomes a priority over investment rounds that tokens/$ will notch down and flatten substantially.

A hyperbolic curve doesn't have an underlying meaning modeling a process beyond being a curve which goes vertical at a chosen point. It's a bad curve to fit to a process. Exponentials make sense to model a compounding or self-improving process.

• H8crilA

  today at 6:34 PM

  But this is a phase change process.

  Also, the temptation to shitpost in this thread ...

  • sempron64

    today at 6:51 PM

    I read TFA. They found a best fit to a hyperbola. Great. One more data point will break the fit. Because it's not modeling a process, it's assigning an arbitrary zero point. Bad model.

• banannaise

  today at 6:36 PM

  You have not read far enough.

Guys, yesterday I spent some time convincing an LLM model from a leading provider that 2 cards plus 2 cards is 4 cards which is one short of a flush. I think we are not too close to a singularity, as it stands.

• charcircuit

  today at 7:31 PM

  Why bring that up when you could bring up AI autonomously optimizing AI training and autonomously fixing bugs in AI training and inference code. Showing that AI already is accelerating self improvement would help establish the claim that we are getting closer to the singularity.

• scotty79

  today at 8:45 PM

  You convince AI manually instead of asking one AI to convince another?

  That's so last week!

That would be 8 years after math + humor peaked in an article about singularity

Wait is that photo of earth the legendary Globus Polski? (https://www.ceneo.pl/59475374)

We need contingency plans. Most waves of automation have come in S-curves, where they eventually hit diminishing returns. This time might be different, and we should be prepared for it to happen. But we should also be prepared for it not to happen.

No one has figured out a way to run a society where able bodied adults don't have to work, whether capitalist, socialist, or any variation. I look around and there seems to still be plenty of work to do that we either cannot or should not automate, in education, healthcare, arts (should not) or trades, R&D for the remaining unsolved problems (cannot yet). Many people seem to want to live as though we already live in a post scarcity world when we don't yet.

lols and unhinged predictions aside, why are there communities excited about a singularity? Doesn't it imply the extinction of humanity?

• unbalancedevh

  today at 6:40 PM

  It depends on how you define humanity. The singularity implies that the current model isn't appropriate anymore, but it doesn't suggest how.

• tim333

  today at 10:12 PM

  I think the idea is we merge with the AI.

• inanutshellus

  today at 6:26 PM

  We avoid catastrophe by thinking about new developments and how they can go wrong (and right).

  Catastrophizing can be unhealthy and unproductive, but for those among us that can affect the future of our societies (locally or higher), the results of that catastophizing helps guide legislation and "Overton window" morality.

  ... I'm reminded of the tales of various Sci-Fi authors that have been commissioned to write on the effects of hypothetical technologies on society and mankind (e.g. space elevators, mars exploration)...

  That said, when the general public worries about hypotheticals they can do nothing about, there's nothing but downsides. So. There's a balance.

  • jacquesm

    today at 6:30 PM

    Yes, but if we don't do it 'they' will. Onwards!

• bwestergard

  today at 6:26 PM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianism

> I am aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway.

If one is looking for a quote that describes today's tech industry perfectly, that would be it.

Also using the MMLU as a metric in 2026 is truly unhinged.

Will.. will it be televised ?

Who will purchase the goods and services if most people loose jobs ? Also who will pay for ad dollars what are supposed to sustain these AI business models if there no human consumers ?

This assumes humanity can make it to 2034 without destroying itself some other way…

Just in time for Bitcoin halving to go below 1 BTC

Yes, the mathematical assumptions are a bit suspect. Keep reading. It will make sense later.

Thanks, added to calendar.

Why the plutocrats believe that the entity emerging from the singularity will side with them? Really curious

I got a strong ChatGPT vibe from that article.

• willhoyle

  today at 7:55 PM

  Same. Sentences structured like these tip me off:

  - Here's the thing nobody tells you about fitting singularities

  - But here's the part that should unsettle you

  - And the uncomfortable answer is: it's already happening.

  - The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.

> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.

Eh? No, that's literally the definition of exponential growth. d/dx e^x = e^x

• ecto

  today at 6:05 PM

  Thanks. I dropped out of college

What I want to know is how bitcoin going full tulip and Open AI going bankrupt will affect the projection. Can they extrapolate that? Extrapolation of those two event dates would be sufficient, regardless of effect on a potential singularity.

> Polynomial growth (t^n) never reaches infinity at finite time. You could wait until heat death and t^47 would still be finite. Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away."

> Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=∞. Technically a singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.

Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat death.

• ecto

  today at 5:56 PM

  exponential = mañana

The singularity is always scheduled for right after the current funding round closes but before the VCs need liquidity. Funny how that works.

Damn. I had plans.

What time?

• tim333

  today at 10:17 PM

  2:52 am

> Real data. Real model. Real date!

Arrested Development?

This is what I come here for. Terrific.

With this kind of scientific rigour, the author could also prove that his aunt is a green parakeet.

Does "tokens per dollar" have a "moore's law" of doubling?

Because while machine-learning is not actually "AI" an exponential increase in tokens per dollar would indeed change the world like smartphones once did

End of the World? Must be Tuesday.

Prior work with the same vibe: https://xkcd.com/1007/

2034? That's the longest timeline prediction I've seen for a while. I guess I should file my taxes this year after all.

I am not convinced that memoryless large models are sufficient for AGI. I think some intrinsic neural memory allowing effective lifelong learning is required. This requires a lot more hardware and energy than for throwaway predictions.

Thus will speak our machine overlord: "For you, the day AI came alive was the most important day of your life... but for me, it was Tuesday."

why is everything broken?

> the top post on hn right now: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

oh

Was expecting some mention of Universal Approximation Theorem

I really don't care much if this is semi-satire as someone else pointed out, the idea that AI will ever get "sentient" or explode into a singularity has to die out pretty please. Just make some nice Titanfall style robots or something, a pure tool with one purpose. No more parasocial sycophantic nonsense please

> 95% CI: Jan 2030–Jan 2041

100% an AI wrote this. Possibly specifically to get to the top spot on HN.

Those short sentences are the most obvious clue. It’s too well written to be human.

• tim333

  today at 10:21 PM

  The guy kind of talks like that and looks human https://youtu.be/ccNMwZV3jlM

  The thought process also seems a little coherent for an LLM although maybe they are getting better as the great Tuesday approaches?

hi

A similar idea occurred to the Austrian-Americam cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster in a 1960 paper, titled:

  Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026

"1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...

This'll be a fun re-read in ~5 years when most of this has ended up being a nothing burger. (Minus one or two OK use-cases of LLMs)

LLM slop article.

Friendly reminder:

Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.

• dude250711

  today at 7:52 PM

  It might lead to IPO.

This really looks like it's describing a bubble, a mania. The tech is improving linearly, and most of the time such things asymptote. It'll hit a point of diminishing returns eventually. We're just not sure when.

The accelerating mania is bubble behavior. It'd be really interesting to have run this kind of model in, say, 1996, a few years before dot-com, and see if it would have predicted the dot-com collapse.

What this is predicting is a huge wave of social change associated with AI, not just because of AI itself but perhaps moreso as a result of anticipation of and fears about AI.

I find this scarier than unpredictable sentient machines, because we have data on what this will do. When humans are subjected to these kinds of pressures they have a tendency to lose their shit and freak the fuck out and elect lunatics, commit mass murder, riot, commit genocides, create religious cults, etc. Give me Skynet over that crap.

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Y’all are hilarious

The singularity is not something that’s going to be disputable

it’s going to be like a meteor slamming into society and nobody’s gonna have any concept of what to do - even though we’ve had literal decades and centuries of possible preparation

I’ve completely abandoned the idea that there is a world where humans and ASI exist peacefully

Everybody needs to be preparing for the world where it’s;

human plus machine

versus

human groups by themselves

across all possible categories of competition and collaboration

Nobody is going to do anything about it and if you are one of the people complaining about vibecoding you’re already out of the race

Oh and by the way it’s not gonna be with LLMs it’s coming to you from RL + robotics

• tempaccountabcd

  today at 6:29 PM

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