It’s entirely possible he does get that it’s a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.

I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scoot’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so it’s obviously extra valid.

Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacher’s casual authority.

He isn’t even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do “high-D toroidal attractor manifolds” and “6D helical manifolds” have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the “(???, nothing)” business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.

It’s from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didn’t include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didn’t care to, but here is the analogy in full:

re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.

I live in the Balkans, I have br-word privilege.

I like how even by ACX standards scoot’s posts on AI are pure brain damage

One level lower down, your brain was shaped by next-sense-datum prediction - partly you learned how to do addition because only the mechanism of addition correctly predicted the next word out of your teacher’s mouth when she said “three plus three is . . . “ (it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true). But you don’t feel like you’re predicting anything when you’re doing a math problem. You’re just doing good, normal mathematical steps, like reciting “P.E.M.D.A.S.” to yourself and carrying the one.

The most compelling analogy: this is like expecting humans to be “just survival-and-reproduction machines” because survival and reproduction were the optimization criteria in our evolutionary history. […] This simple analogy is slightly off, because it’s confusing two optimization levels: the outer optimization level (in humans, evolution optimizing for reproduction; in AIs, companies optimizing for profit) with the inner optimization level (in humans, next-sense-datum prediction; in AIs, next-token prediction). But the stochastic parrot people probably haven’t gotten to the point where they learn that humans are next sense-datum predictors, so the evolution/reproduction one above might make a better didactic tool.

He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.

Here’s hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics. Or who uses the threat of evil AI to make eugenics great again if they are feeling less charitable.

Also being in a strategic partnership with fucking Palantir does tend to make one’s stand against mass surveillance seem less than genuine.

I mean, sure, but it’s still the CEO of XBOX on her second day on the job throwing her hat in the legendarily sus declining birthrates discourse in service of AI solutionism, it’s not nothing.

MicroSlop’s new xbox CEO has a background in AI and is worried about birthrates.

Can’t wait for her lesswrong handle to leak.

Using talking points meant for c-suites to a general audience and outing yourself as a complete psychopath, the San Fran CEO Story.

I the post he keeps referring to Ollama as an LLM (it’s a desktop app that runs a local server that lets you download and interface with a local LLM via CLI or http API) so it’s possible he’s just that far behind in his technical understanding of LLMs that he’s fallen to taking the wrong people’s word for it.

The post certainly reads like he doesn’t even know which local LLM he’s using, let alone what it takes to make one.

That he went from that all the way to it’s mostly ok when sam altman steals all your data, misrepresents it and then steals all your traffic is… bad.

At any rate it’s definitely good to know that that war crime forensics data project isn’t quite the unintentional shambles corey makes it out to be.

That was a good read.

Corey doc wrote:

It’s not “unethical” to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That’s just “a search engine”

Equivocating what LLMs do and what goes into LLM web scraping with “a search engine” is messed up. His article that he links about scraping is mostly about how badly copyright works and how analysing trade-secret-walled data can be beneficial both to consumers and science but occasionally bad for citizen privacy, which you’ll recognize as mostly irrelevant to the concerns people tend to have against LLM training data providers ddosing the fuck out of everything, and all the rest of the stuff tante does a good job of explaining.

Corey also provides this anecdote:

As a group of human-rights defending forensic statisticians, HRDAG has always relied on cutting edge mathematics in its analysis. With its Colombia project, HRDAG used a large language model to assign probabilities for responsibility for each killing documented in the databases it analyzed.

That is, HRDAG was able to rigorously and legibly say, “This killing has an X% probability of having been carried out by a right-wing militia, a Y% probability of having been carried out by the FARC, and a Z% probability of being unrelated to the civil war.”

The use of large language models — produced from vast corpuses of scraped data — to produce accurate, thorough and comprehensible accounts of the hidden crimes that accompany war and conflict is still in its infancy. But already, these techniques are changing the way we hold criminals to account and bring justice to their victims.

Scraping to make large language models is good, actually.

what the actual shit

edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?

Also the web scraping article is from 2023 but CD linked it in the recent pluralistic post so I assume his views haven’t changed.

Timnit briefly weighs in about being included in the doc, apparently she regrets it and says the filmmakers “sprinkle some [AI skeptics] in like chocolate chips to perform ethics”.

She also calls Yud a eugenicist cult leader with nothing to show for.

Also code helper tools don’t even work like that, there’s an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what it’s supposed to be doing at any given time.

Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isn’t really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.

I mean, they mostly don’t have a problem with AI instances inheriting the earth as long as they’re sufficiently rationalist.

Eh, one might say that going by the broad strokes version while letting the expert do their thing is basically what management is all about, especially if they ignore the part where he wants his version to be light and entertaining.

This isn’t about managing subordinates though, this is about devising ways to be complacent about not double checking what the LLM generates in your name.

Goertzel discusses with Epstein future scenario for “an AGI economy”:

“for the AGI parasite to overcome to regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host”

The Rationalists!

OpenClaw guy got hired by OpenAI

My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use.

Maybe he’ll get to stick it in whatever John Ives designs, eventually.

I mean the vibe is pretty spot on, I’ll give them that, and the premise of someone making fashy noises in an anarchist squat and getting summarily thrown out on his ass is perfectly believable, but the protagonist seems like an obvious a parody character and I think his belief that everyone he meets should adhere to the NAP is meant as a running gag.

Also, I’d take issue with the unspoken premise that this would be an Exarcheia thing, getting your ass beat by anarchists who clocked you as a fascist (and vice versa) is a panhellenic phenomenon. Fascist here meaning less someone who likes Tucker Carlson and toothbrush mustaches, and more someone who is an organized member of a heavily nationalist sportball fan club and/or whatever is currently filling the void that Golden Dawn left but isn’t making the news.

Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.

I guess since more down-to-earth stories like “chatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for me” really aren’t happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.