Post by @freakazoid@retro.social

The ChatGPT Navier-Stokes thing seems like a clear-cut case of an LLM "front-running" human beings.

The obvious, inevitable result of that is that eventually there will be no human work to front-run, because nobody's going to do work just to have credit stolen by software.

And front-running humans is all LLMs can do and all they will ever do. Because we will get to the point where humans aren't even qualified to evaluate what LLMs are putting out, at which point advancement stops entirely, because hallucination machines cannot evaluate their own output.

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Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hr. ago

I think this is the thing people really don't get: there is no basis other than religion on which to base the theory that self-improving software is possible. None.

One doesn't even really need to understand technology to be able to figure this out. You just need to understand human nature. The most prevalent feature of humans, especially technically inclined humans, is

HUBRIS.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hr. ago

"Evolution did it. Existence proof."

That took 3.5 billion years and a quantum computer the size of a planet. In a universe that's suspiciously well-suited to the task. You have no clue what you're talking about.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hr. ago

"Oh but that involved a ton of stuff that has nothing to do with evolving intelligence."

Maybe. But you have no idea what evolutionary pressure caused intelligence to come about in the first place. At the very least, there were millions of minds interacting in an extremely rich environment. Which means you have to simulate that. And if you ONLY have millions of minds going ONLY at the speed of human minds, expect to run that simulation for hundreds of thousands of years just to get moderate improvements in intelligence.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hr. ago

Of course, that assumes you've ALREADY produced minds at the level of humans. But I don't think LLMs are anywhere close to that. So we're talking probably a hundred million years just to get to human level.

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