Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...

Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?

It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352960

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

- = hyphen

-- = n-dash

--- = m-dash

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236451

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

You're saying that your greyhound wasn't just getting drunk, but actually making his own booze? Not that I don't believe that its possible, but that's a pretty big deal... If you had documented that it could be a bombshell ethology paper.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731953

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

And that patent looks like it is for an optimization, not a necessary component of SCiON.

Just to really quickly call out these tired old straw-men... all of these "predicted disasters" are far further along today than they were predicted to be by this date by, for example, the IPCC in 1990[0]. Deniers keep acting as if it scientists have been "crying wolf" for decades when the truth is that the 99% of the scientists doing real work on anthropogenic global warming have always been extremely conservative and reality has outpaced their predictions all along.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar1/wg2/

"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."

So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47164099

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11105240

[1] https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/ai-agents-turned-super...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060069

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Also the position of the pelican on the bike would be somewhat awkward, but fits anatomically with a pelican's relatively short legs. In fact I can remember riding (or trying to ride) an adult bike as a young child using a similar position.

Not GP, but... the author said explicitly "if you believe X you should stop reading". So I did.

The X here is "that the human mind can be reduced to token regurgitation". I don't believe that exactly, and I don't believe that LLMs are conscious, but I do believe that what the human mind does when it "generates text" (i.e. writes essays, programs, etc) may not be all that different from what an LLM does. And that means that most of humans's creations are also the "plagiarism" in the same sense the author uses here, which makes his argument meaningless. You can't escape the philosophical discussion he says that he's not interested in if you want to talk about ethics.

Edit: I'd like to add that I believe that this also ties in to the heart of the philosophy of Open Source and Open Science... if we acknowledge that our creative output is 1% creative spark and 99% standing on the shoulders of Giants, then "openness" is a fundamental good, and "intellectual property" is at best a somewhat distasteful necessity that should be as limited as possible and at worst is outright theft, the real plagiarism.