Wilhelm Arcturus: VCs and Wall Street want it to be true sooo badly because if only they could stop the need to pay human beings to do things, they would all be incrementally richer and the constantly demanding god of shareholder value would be momentarily appeased

working in the area of math that led to this tech has been so fucking wild because there's just no way you can trick yourself into believing a lot of linear algebra is going to add up to consciousness unless you have been marinating in the bad brain juices for decades now

I cannot overstate how important it is to understand that these guys are into AI because they’re in a literal eschatological cult

I'm not sure how to explain all this to non-math people but these folks have taken a branch of mathematics and ascribed religiosity to it. "information theory" sounds impressive but I cannot emphasize enough: these are basic functions on distributions. it's all distributions at the bottom of it.

the disconnect is insane. I was at a conference recently where a bunch of academics admitted that the specific extension of info theory intended to work for neuroscience has been a near-total failure and we need to go back to the drawing board. then you read the news and it's like "AGI SOLVED"

bruh there certain kinds of nonlinear informational relationships we can't even detect with a single theory. and then these LLM models aren't even incorporating any of that, they're still doing linear stats, it's just. come on. come the fuck on

then the MOST insane part is that people who know this, who UNDERSTAND THE MATH, still get caught up. that's how seductive this is, apparently

everyone wants it to be true so badly

VCs and Wall Street want it to be true sooo badly because if only they could stop the need to pay human beings to do things, they would all be incrementally richer and the constantly demanding god of shareholder value would be momentarily appeased

Post