Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid — welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      My colleagues in math are now frightened about the (very expensive) mathematical theorem proving ability of these AIs, and many of them really do think that if they can do math, they can do all cognitive tasks. Running a store like this should be so easy! Every single conversation about AI with them has become more frustrating. They are so confused when I still say that the AI companies will die a painful death. When I give my usual points about their expense and their failures in other domains, I am given the usual spiel of “it’ll get better in other areas” and “it’ll get cheaper”.

      Unlike them, I have actually been paying attention to this stuff from the beginning. What they think is going on is AI solving math first and shortly getting around to all the other stuff, but what I’ve seen is that AI labs had already tried all the other stuff first and only managed to win the booby prize of theorem proving, which doesn’t pay the bills. And what’s the point of spending thousands or millions to output random blobs of Lean that technically compile if there is no one around to bother making sense of them?

      One example I gave is when Anthropic vibe coded an entire C compiler from scratch back in February, which turned out to be a pile of shit. I’ve said that if AI had made similarly rapid progress on software engineering, we would have seen Anthropic continue to put out these demonstrations, and they would have become truly high quality. They would release a compiler more efficient than gcc one week, and a browser better than Chrome the next. (OpenAI’s actual attempt at a browser didn’t go so well.) And if they could do this, they would actually have a shot of making money!

      If they could do this, they would have already. The theorem proving stuff actually works (for certain things, in certain ways, at enormous expense), and look at how OpenAI and Anthropic do not hesitate to snipe mathematicians for results rather than being content as tool vendors. But lately I haven’t heard of any software demonstrations. Silence is much louder than noise. More Millennium prize problems bashed with tens of millions in compute costs are not going to change my mind very much.

      The counterargument I got was that AI can already one-shot most programming tasks and I shouldn’t be cherry-picking the failures. I am far too tired to argue at this point.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      “Could rogue agent swarms take over the entire internet in the next six months?”

      Nobody tell these three stooges about dead Internet theory

    • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      They can’t even swarm their own corporate content writing.

      In this role, a given day might include drafting, editing, brainstorming, on-site event support, and coordinating executive response to breaking news, all in close collaboration with the External Communications team and other leaders.
      - Executive Communications Writer Job Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)

      A swarm of large language models is capable of shutting down the entire internet in 6 months, but for some reason they need to pay a single human over a quarter of a million dollars to draft and edit language.

      • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        My line break produced some good comedy:

        Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)

  • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    So Altman and Musk agree with Amodei’s latest assessment that AI should slow down, whether or not they actually stick to that is to be seen

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    So the news is now filled with stories about how AI will take over and the Ai companies might lose control of it gets smarter and at least one employee quit because it might kill us all. You know what I seem to be missing?

    Actual employees doing sabotage. That is a bit odd right? They think Altman doesnt care about safety, but nobody has tried to wipe the backups. And we know they dont think that much about security.

    And it isnt like sysadmins messed with systems in the past over lesser disputes.

    Not even a “im turning whistleblower, here are all the internal chatlogs and documents of the employees and management”.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      I’m reminded of Yudkowsky’s take that AI is totally going to kill us all and we should treat this seriously enough to bomb foreign datacenters if we think they’re involved in AI development, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to bomb local datacenters involved in AI development work. Please don’t think about what you as an individual should do about the problems facing the world; you’re just an NPC after all.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        Yud isn’t necessarily inconsistent here: he really really wants the robot god to become real so it can invent the blowjob machine and win utilitarianism, but he only trusts people he’s met personally to do it, and certainly not those shifty celestials.

        Please don’t think about what you as an individual should do about the problems facing the world; you’re just an NPC after all.

        Or as the AI2027 blog put it:

        We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed!

        Despite the urgency, please do not pursue extreme uncooperative actions. If something seems very bad on common-sense ethical views, don’t do it.

        • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          God that blog is so hysterical. “Please remain calm and Rational even though we’re telling you that AI companies are going to kill you”

    • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      No other Linux or FOSS project ever gets this kind of funding. You should be suspicious of it, not celebrate it. You have been tricked into playing defense for millionaires that don’t give a shit about you.

      one million times this

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).

    Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.

    The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

    Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

    Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:

      1. this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasn’t been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.

      2. possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but it’s very clear that that is what the author believes happened

      3. openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense they’re engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didn’t even stop to consider that they can’t threaten an academic’s career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)

      4. openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see “we spent $2000 to compute these proofs” ask how much they spent on attempts that didn’t work). but what they’re saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense