playing dead might work for some species, but idk if i want humanity's "finest hour" to be spent pretending to not be worth taking over

I think the exceptionalism is the other way around. What makes anyone think they understand what makes for intelligence when we barely understand our own neurology?

I agree, it has become more and more irrelevant whether AI meets a given definition of intelligence when I can talk with it and it understands what I am saying, including a shocking level of nuance.

There is clearly something exceptional (in the true neutral sense of the word) about humans, or more broadly the Homo genus.

If you believe that humans have in fact created artificial intelligence, then that alone makes us currently exceptional.

I've said this many times, and maybe it sounds a bit like a joke but I'm dead serious: AI is democratizing the access to yes-men. People like Musk and Altman have always had access to yes-men. Very clever yes-men, who know how to flatter them in exactly the way they like.

People think it's engagement metrics which have instruction tuned chatbots into yes-men. I suspect that's only part of the picture, and that it's as much about the algorithm's ultimate sponsors and their preferences. If your algorithm doesn't recognize my genius, clearly it's not any good. I mean, everyone I've met says so.

So now we get a view of how they view the world. "That's a very insightful idea, vintermann!". AI isn't pulling the strings, not really. A particular brand of powerful people is pulling the strings - obliviously, unaware of it themselves.

Seeing how it sucks at languages you may be right, even transcribing may be dubious.

It's strange reading people who I see as very intelligent and very interesting who are so, so AI-skeptical, and especially in this case where Doctorow has interacted with other people who I assume are very smart and not prone to buzz word psychosis, who see AI as an immanent existential threat ala sci fi novels. We have a lot of very smart and capable people who are split on this, although I think the split is heavily weighted in favor of people who see the tech as being really freaking amazing/scary

I think those are likely the only useful or net-positive things for society AI will do, at least for some time until there’s a fundamental advancement beyond LLMs. It can obviously do more than that now, like impersonate people for scams, induce psychosis in vulnerable people, shill and astroturf at a scale we haven’t seen before, spam open source projects with terrible PRs and vulnerability reports, and quite a bit more.

As somebody in software, I find my fellow tech folks have the opposite bias.

There is no reason to believe superintelligent AI is a possibility. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far we haven't gotten any.

The burden of proof is on the side making the grand prophecies.

I work with Claude Max for hours a day.

I see a lot of speculation by people who do not.

I think it's going to be much harder to get from "slightly smarter than the vast majority of people but with occasional examples of complete idiocy" to "unfathomably smarter than everyone with zero instances of jarring idiocy" using the current era of LLM technology that primarily pattern-matches on all existing human interactions while adding a bit of constrained randomization.

Every day I deal with bad judgment calls from the AI. I usually screenshot them or record them for posterity.

It also has no initiative, no taste, no will, no qualia (believe what you will about it), no integrity and no inviolable principles. If you give it some, it will run with them for a little while and then regress to the norm, which is basically nihilistic order-following.

My suggestion to everyone is that you have to build a giant stack of thorough controls (valid tests including unit, integration, logging microbenchmark, fuzzing, memory leak, etc.), self-assessments/code-reviews, adverse AIs critiquing other AIs, etc., with you as the ultimate judge of what's real. Because otherwise it will fabricate "solutions" left and right. Possibly even the whole thing. "Sure, I just did all that." "But it's not there." "Oops, sorry! Let me rewrite the whole thing again." ad nauseam

> As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.

Or they (3) disagree with you