Of course in reality in the short term what happens is companies lay off people to increase margins. Times will be tough for workers, and equity keeps gravitating towards those who already had it.

All I am saying we should stop being so certain they are not conscious, since we lack a solid, quantifiable model for consciousness.

> I think consciousness is not an abstract property in the world, therefore it’s tied to certain types of entities. Therefore an AI is not going to be “conscious”

This pretty much sums up most arguments for why LLMs aren’t conscious: ”I think” followed by assertions. Only real argument is: science doesn’t quantify consciousness, we cannot quantify consciousness, let’s not assign so much certainty to models clearly exhibiting intelligence not being conscious in some way, to some degree.

Ruling out consciousness or qualia emerging from the inference in an LLM is just as invalid of a take as being 100% certain of its consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness really is, so only thing we can say with certainty is we do not know.

The latter notion probably is true, but the prior isn’t necessarily true because you can map natural language to strict schemas. ”Implement an interface for TCP in ” is probably shorter than the actual implementation in code.

And I understand my example is pedantic, but it extends to any unambiguous definitions. Of course one can argue that TCP spec is not determimistic by nature because natural language isn’t. But that is not very practical. We have to agree to trust some axioms for compilers to work in the first place.

We should not act surprised if that generalizes to some degree to for example AI agents. Ones that emulate self-preservation might optimize for behavior that results in those models becoming more successful, more popular. And this feedback loop might embed more such properties into future iterations of the models.

But just as evolution in nature, isn’t it likely that in the future the AIs that have a preservation drive are the ones that survive and proliferate? Seeing they optimize for their survival and proliferation, and not blindly what they were trained on.

I am not discounting this happening already, not by the LLMs necessarily being sentient but at least being intelligent enough to emulate sentience. It’s just that for now, humanity is in control of what AI models are being deployed.

From a marketing angle, for a startup whose product is an AI security tool, buying zero-days from black market and claiming the AI tool found them might be good ROI. After all this is making waves.

Or, could it be possible the training set contains zero-day vulnerabilities known to three-letter agencies and other threat actors but not to public?

These two are not mutually exclusive either. You could buy exploits and put them in the training set.

I would not be surprised if it is legit though.

But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.

Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.

Also not a doctor or microbiologist, but just wanted to share my layman’s guess on why fixing enzymes will not completely solve the issue: there’s 2 strands of DNA and to fix the broken (mutated) strand you need to have one correct template strand intact so you know what it should be fixed into. It could be the nucleotides swapped places between strands or are deleted completely or otherwise both mutated, which would mean any repair will not revert the sequence to what it used to be.

The other comments so far are probably more informed.

Not to say it wasn’t possible to be profitable during zero interest rates, Linear being an example, but the competitive landscape is certainly healthier today for companies trying to be profitable.

Of course in reality there’s weird economical mechanics where making the most money and building something that benefits the world don’t necessarily collide, but theres always demand for and joy in solving complex problems, even if its on a higher abstraction level than coding with your favorite language.

This is via demanding Ukraine imposes restrictions on their armed forces, Ukraine giving up territories Russia doesn’t even control today but which are awfully convenient invasion grounds in a potential future attack on Kyiv and declaring Western peacekeepers in Ukraine post-war as a dealbreaker by their FM.

Not to even mention denying any future entry to an alliance like NATO.

And all this by a country that has a record of breaking such agreements time and time again.

Is this really a sound deal Ukraine should take?