If someone read the OP article and came away presuming there are no legitimate other reasons why reasonable people have safety concerns [1] it seems to show the article did the opposite of informing people about such concerns.
The fear of the general populace is itself a propaganda campaign
In the agricultural era, which was the most violent time in human history, we accepted any beggars that came to our front door. Now we live in the safest time in human history and were so terrified of the masses that we disempower them completely
I'm in the same boat, and have been meaning to try immich but slightly worried about migration effort. Should I import fresh into Immich or setup my existing photoprism as an external library? I think the former is probably correct, but the latter might be easier?
Anyone have experience with this? I haven't done much modification or album creation in photoprism, so am happy to start from scratch on that front.
The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. So what you’re saying doesn’t really make much sense
> The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful.
AI doesn't deal with reality, it deals with tokens. This is why all those vibe-coded harnesses, little more than glue between various text IO interfaces, are several hundreds of thousands of source lines of code.
It's why a SOTA model took 100kSLoK to write a C compiler to compile one specific project.
It's why, when I asked for a simple markdown -> ansi escape codes converter (for terminal output) in Python, SOTA Claude and SOTA ChatGPT both give me +- 150 SLoC when my own LUT-based version came to under 10 lines of code + a LUT.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but LLMs don't exist in reality, they exist in a virtual world made up off tokens.
The discretization of those tokens can be manipulated to get any result you want. If it meaningfully benefits the AI to have a more fine-grained discretization, then you can do that. AI only compresses as much as we want it to. I understand your sentiment, but the logical conclusion of what you’re saying is that no form of compression is ever valuable. That’s just not a defensible argument.
All information gets compressed. Even your own perception of reality gets compressed.
Do you exist in reality? Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? Do you have access to the Ding an sich any more than a (multimodal) LLM?
How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective. (I agree that "reality" is the most parsimonious explanation by far, btw, but that's never been the point of the simulation thought experiment.)
I think the more interesting corollary of this article is that if we're living in a simulation, it's an impossibly, improbably detailed one. I really want some compute time on the HPC that's running it.
> How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective.
Okay, lets go with that :-)
I might be living in a virtual reality, correct, I have no way of knowing.
What I do know is that the reality I am in is many thousands of times higher in resolution than the reality of the LLM.
As an analogy, the LLM is seeing a downscaled 32x32 pixel image while I see the original 8k image. Whether there is a larger 1b^2 image that I cannot see is not relevant to the question of whether the LLM can see my reality or not - it can't.
Reality is by definition our physical reality, which is about an infinite number of levels more detailed than the, you know, _virtual_ digital world computers exist in.
Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
It follows then that any insight gained in the virtual world is at best a rough approximation which can be quite useful at times but also utterly faulty on occasion.
How often it is useful vs. wrong is (partially) a function of how complete the real-to-virtual approximation for a given domain.
Certain domains, given their limited degrees of freedom, can be quite accurately modeled, such as a subway map.
But many domains cannot, and it's important to be aware of that inherent limitation in digital models including but not limited to LLM """reasoning"""
>Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
I don't know exactly why but I never really understood this argument. Might be some kind of control thing? Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I can argue you can make them perceive reality even better than we (humans) do, just enlarge the audio/video spectrums. Bam...more reality. The whole point of the argument is we're missing information.
Again, I get the need for controlling the environment for what LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be, but that will always cost more than giving them access to like...reality. Same reason I don't really believe in the whole simulation argument, it's just more expensive all around, loses resolution, let alone control. I don't doubt there will be some people that would indulge in neverending hedonism but not all people. You need to give up control for that.
> Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were.
I dunno what you mean by "free". The model is trained on text. To "give" the model sensory organs it would need to be trained on those sensory organs.
Current models can predict text, because that's what the weights represent. Models with sensory organs will need to be trained on the output of those sensory organs.
That sounds close to impossible in the foreseeable future.
Sure, in much the same way that veggie burgers are "like" beef burgers, and NES Duck Hunt is "like" clay pigeon shooting, or Dirt Rally is "like" driving a real rally race!
But no one is going to claim that being good at Duck Hunt means you know anything about firing a gun, nor winning all the races in Dirt Rally is anything close to driving a real car.
Right but the 'surprising level of detail' can often exhibit itself as exactly not a pattern. There are many jobs where you employ a human not because of the rote/pattern based work, but their ability to handle all the edge cases that are just frequent enough to need them, but not frequent enough for AI to be able to handle. That is the events that in this example would require the AI to ask the human to make some decision for them.
There's also the Telegony. Odysseus has a son through Circe who winds up killing him and marrying Penelope. Odysseus son through Penelope, Telemachus, marries Circe. There's some wild stuff that doesn't survive.
Looking through these it’s crazy to find out that The Iliad is only 1 of like 5 original texts on the Trojan war. We’re reading book 2 of a 5 book series
Hikaru Nakamura had a good comment on famous chess moves like this: All the famous chess moves are famous sacrifices, genius saves, and last minute checkmates, but when you plug the games into stockfish you find out that these scenarios only happened cause the players made a series of awful moves early on in the game
IMO this is the greatest argument against AI as technofascism. The general public seems to believe that AI will usher in technofascism by claiming corporate ownership of AI output: the independent entrepreneur will be unable to compete against the corporations compute, every piece of data about you will be stolen and monetized by AI, and you will own nothing.
But AI might in fact do the exact opposite and reverse the privatization trend that the West has been going through for the last 400 years. All of our copyright laws rely on the idea that there is a human consciousness behind the copyright. The more AI has input, the less we can claim ownership. If AI returns everything to the commons, then it results in a much more egalitarian world.
Hilariously, many people, especially artists, see the return of the commons as an assault against them. They’re so captured by copyright that they assume any infringement on their copyright is inherently fascist. It’s ridiculous. Copyright is a corporations number 1 weapon when it comes to creating a moat and keeping the masses out.
The original intent of copyright, in fact, was an incentive to return an idea to the commons. Experts used to hide their discoveries in order to keep them for themselves. Copyright provided an opportunity to release this knowledge and still profit. There were even several cases where it was established that those who claimed copyright could retain copyright even if the idea had been previously discovered. This created a huge incentive: release the knowledge or risk having your process copyrighted by the opposition. But that system worked because copyright could only exist for so long (14 years, doubled if they filed again.)
Now copyright is a lifelong sentence at almost 100 years. The entire purpose of it has been undermined. Corporations own all your childhood and by the time you can profit off of it, it’s outdated.
A world where the mainstream is primarily a commons seems to me like an egalitarian world. I’d like to live in that world.
The original bargain you describe, limited term in exchange for public disclosure, is exactly what makes the current situation strange. If AI-generated output falls into the public domain immediately, that is actually closer to the original intent of copyright than 95-year terms. The legal question is whether that outcome happens by design or by accident, and what it means for the people building products on top of AI-generated codebases right now.
I use local send when KDE connect isn’t working for me. The big problem with these is that you basically have to spend a minute or two setting up both devices to send.
