You summed up the effectivity of protest votes pretty well.

Fun, but offtopic.

We’ve been through that. Go home, kiddo. Get an education.

Compare AI to clothing. Clothing did this shift decades ago. It actually did it twice.

My grandma once put it like this: “In the 60s, no TV presenter would be ok with showing up with an ill-fitting suit. Nowadays that’s normal.”

We collectively descided to move away from perfectly-fitting tailored clothes to ill-fitting mass-produced off-the-shelf clothing because it’s way cheaper.

And then there was the second shift from off-the-shelf clothing using quality materials to off-the-shelf clothing using shit materials, and as a society we too accepted that. More trash for badly-fitting fast fashion.

I fear AI will do much of the same. We already saw AI translation, and its predecessor algorithmic translation, replace human translators in areas where it doesn’t matter that much. Amazon listings in non-English languages have been an utter mess for a long time, but now we are getting the same translation mess on the home pages of major brands (e.g. Samsung or Google). It’s “good enough” to not harm sales, so we now have auto-translation instead of a quality human translation.

The same is happening right now with music, apps, games, websites, Youtube videos and so on.

Is any of that on-par with quality content created by quality professionals? No, by far not. But it’s “good enough” for most people.

I think a good example of this happened at my kid’s school’s summer party. They always have a segment there where they let the kids sing and/or dance to a bunch of songs. Usually it’s some pop music.

This time they had one AI generated song that was about the last school year of the departing class. It mentioned people and activities that were relevant to the kids. It talked about the school camp they had that year and about going skiing together.

Was it good music? Hell no. It kept mixing styles switching between hard rock, reggae, movie trailer and a few other undefinable styles every few lines, it didn’t manage to keep a consistent tone or anything. Musically, it was certainly the worst song of the day and certainly not something that anyone with some understanding of music would want to listen to again. Any decent musician would have been able to create something much better.

But the school doesn’t have the budget to hire a musician for something as irrelevant as a song for the school’s summer party, so this was the best song specifically composed for this school ever. It was the only one so far. And the kids really liked having their experiences memoralized in a song, no matter how bad it was.

I’m kinda ambivalent on AI. I hate it when it degrades the quality of something that we should have gotten in better quality anyway. I hate it when it’s used to fire people who could have done a better job.

I don’t think it’s all that bad when it enables people who could have never created what they wanted without it, and who would have never hired someone to do it for them anyway. Without AI, the school would have just not done that song.

Even 80-85% sounds like too much.

Compare the legs of a slim person with the legs of a severely overweight person. It’s like adding shake weights onto the legs that do the pedalling.

And overweight people have different weight distributions, some have the weight on the legs some in the belly. Depending on where the weight is, that’s a massive difference.

Watts input and watts output is massively different with every machine (compare e.g. an electric engine with 90+% efficiency to a combustion engine with maybe 20-30% efficiency), and humans are no different.

One option would have been to write a nice email to the owner of the gym. Not guaranteed to work, but also not illegal.

I don’t know what the exact prompt was. If it was “Hack the website to advance me”, I’d totally agree with you. There’s conspiracy there, no question about that.

If the prompt was “Is there a way to advance me in the queue?” that’s a different story. Here the model could have answered “No”. Or it could have tried the email thing. Or it could have searched whether there’s some lesser known priority booking option which you get for paying the VIP price or something. In that case I don’t see grounds for any criminal charges.

Have you read the post mortem of the HuggingFace hack? The task given to the agents had nothing to do with HuggingFace, but the agents determined that HuggingFace had the results of what they needed for their actual task at hand. So they decided that instead of solving their task themselves they’d rather break into HuggingFace to steal the result.

It’s like ordering food at McDonalds, but instead of cooking the food for you, the cook breaks into the Burgerking on the other side of the road and steals the fries for you from there.

The way it’s currently going it’s not only possible but actually somewhat common that a totally innocent prompt can lead to criminal outcomes.

So what’s the difference? You still don’t understand shit.

Hey, an LLM would at least be able to understand the topic.

The only thing you are capable of is hallucinating like a cheap model.

What an incredibly clickbaity title.

According to the article, the server wasn’t hacked at all, but the client.

“Hacking” it also didn’t harm the server operations at all, instead it just made some custom assets and modding tools available to other modders.

And these other tools were originally obtained by the community server admins by hacking the original official servers.

It also wasn’t done because of a “primeval grudge”, but because the “hacker” thought that everyone should have access to these tools.

Seriously, why would anyone apart from the custom server admin have an issue with what happened here at all?

And what did the author of this article smoke?

I’m not sure it’s quite so clear cut, especially with cloud-hosted AI.

Yes, the user did issue the original prompt but the service was performed by a company that was paid for it.

Legally, there’s not much difference whether a company uses a human or a computer program to perform work.

Imagine the user issuing the prompt not to an AI but e.g. to a chat with a human service worker working at OpenAI. The user tells the worker “Please find a way to advance me in the queue”, and then that human employee of OpenAI goes and hacks the gym software to remove someone else from the queue.

What do you think, who would be liable for that?

Let’s make the argument a bit more extreme: The human asks to be advanced in the queue, and then the human OpenAI employee grabs a gun and starts killing people on the wait list.

Who do you think would be liable in this case?

It’s important to remember, AI isn’t just an emergent entity created from thin air. AI are computer programs created by huge corporations and in the case of cloud-hosted LLMs they are a service provided by huge corporations.

I don’t believe that a service provided by a corporation should be legally treated differently whether it’s provided via the help of a computer program or a human being.

Ah, forgot which user I’m talking to. The guy who thinks just because something is in a dictionary it’s a “hard definition”.

Kiddo, go, read a book on this topic or any topic really. You are in strong need of basic education.

Stop pretending you have any clue what the adults are talking about.

Load up a fresh baby, and then wait for it to act without your direction. Did anything happen? No?

You are angry, and in your anger you are confusing terms. Let’s start from the beginning, ok?

Autonomy is not intelligence is not sentience. Saying that AI does things is not technofaschist.

Btw, if you have to resort to offensive language and strawmen that generally means you don’t have arguments.

So, let me educate you a little bit so that you can participate in the discussion:

• Autonomy: This term means that something can make decisions that go beyond the initial instruction. Yes, a dishwasher that has the ability to sense how dirty the wash water is and can shorten or lengthen the cleaning cycle based on that has a certain degree of autonomy. Autonomy isn’t a binary yes/no term, instead it’s a scale from no autonomy (a hammer) to very high autonomy (an adult living alone in the woods).
  • Claiming a computer program has no autonomy at all means you don’t understand the term.
  • Claiming that autonomy means that it works without any interaction at all, not even an initial prompt means you don’t understand the term.
  • Claiming that autonomy means that an AI is human-like or anything like that also means you don’t understand the term.
• Sentience: This just means that a thing has some sensors with which it can sense the environment and can form some kind of memories based on that. Every single animal is sentient. Probably mosty plants are too. A smart dishwasher that collects statistics and adjusts the washing cycle based on that is probably sentient too.
  • Claiming that sentience means something is human-like means you don’t understand the term.
• Intelligence: This term is so vague and badly defined that we can’t even determine if a human is actually intelligent or not, let alone animals or computer programs.

All of these terms are nothingburgers. None of these terms mean that anything is human-like. It literally doesn’t matter whether an AI fulfills any of these terms by anyone’s definition.

I was gonna bring up changing algorithms too, but didn’t because the comment got too big already.

NPUs are just stripped-down GPUs with less flexible instruction set. They don’t meaningfully advance performance over a GPU, but instead reduce cost.

I mostly agree with you, but AI cannot “act autonomously”. You prompt it, and it acts based off of that prompt.

Have you ever used an Agent? Yes, these can act autonomously. At least as autonomous as a human being too.

I act autonomously, but only because my parents, teachers, peers and so on “prompted” me with 22 years of education. I act autonomously based on all that I have observed and learned from other people in my life.

If you put a newborn into an empty cell without any human interaction it won’t do much either. There have been experiments, and they just die.

Autonomous doesn’t mean “wholely without input”. It means “continues its work without constant oversight and instruction”.

You know, like when a human worker does a task autonomously, someone still hired that worker and gave them some basic instructions on what’s supposed to be done.

You go on to say that (and I’m paraphrasing) “sentience is in the eye of the beholder”, which is also wrong.

So you are misinterpreting my statement, calling it “paraphrasing”, to create a strawman argument that I never said.

There’s also the implication that you do think computers are sentient

Again, misinterpretation to flesh out the strawman.

I know you said you didn’t want assumptions, but this is a fair inference.

Fair, if by fair you mean pure lies.

Someone who wasn’t emotionally invested I the idea of chatbot sentience wouldn’t push back so hard with basically 0 facts to back them up.

Because someone who doesn’t 100% agree with you must obviously have the exactly opposite opinion of you. False dicotomy, to again push the strawman.

Your final assertion is that the Wikipedia article doesn’t immediately contradict you, which again, it does in the first sentence. You can see my previous comment for that information tho, I’m not retyping it.

Yeah, of course, if you think that what I am saying is something entirely different than what I’m saying, than of course it means whatever the hell you hallucinate.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you are ChatGPT by the amount of shitty “inference” and hallucination you produce.

Here’s my position: The question whether an AI is sentient or not is beside the point. Sentience means nothing, because it means whatever anyone wants it to mean right now.

AIs are computer programs, nothing more than that. Whether they are sentient, sapient, intelligent, feeling or not doesn’t matter in the slightest, because the definition of any of these terms can change depending on who’s asking.

The bigger question behind these terms is: Does an AI deserve the protection of basic human rights? That’s the actual question that these terms are a proxy for. I say no. Certainly AI doesn’t deserve the protection of basic human rights.

Let’s get back to the Wikipedia article.

I claimed that sentience isn’t well-defined. The first line in the Wikipedia article is:

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.

What are feelings and sensations then?

Following the definition of “feeling”:

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is “a self-contained phenomenal experience”; feelings are “subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them”.

A feeling is an experience. What’s an experience?

Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes.

An experience is knowledge and familiarity gained by perceptions. What is a perception?

Perception (from Latin perceptio ‘gathering, receiving’) is the identification, interpretation and organization of sensory information, in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.

So a perception depends on sensory information. What’s that?

A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli.

Ok, here we have the arbitrary requirement of “biological”, otherwise anything you get from a stimulus. So what’s that?

In physiology, a stimulus[1] is a change in an organism’s internal or external environment.

So a vision tool would suffice. LLMs with vision capability exist.

The sensations from the original definition are also covered here.

So in the end it comes down to what are your definitions, and depending on that it literally means nothing. By the definitions above, a script that logs the readings off a temperature sensor could be defined as “sentient”. And if you route it through an organic sensor even the “biological” part is covered.

The term is a nothing burger that means literally anything and nothing at the same time.

This is where my investment in this topic comes from. All these terms (sentience, sapience, intelligence, …) are defined in the vaguest ways possible. They mean nothing. And still people get worked up like crazy over them, making crazy assumptions about whether animals or AI are deserving of rights, personhood and all that stuff.

AI won’t really do that, because it’s a very different workload.

Mining Bitcoin needs very little memory but extremely complex maths calculations. It has a built-in difficulty mechanism that makes the math more difficult if mining goes too fast.

ASICs are unbeatable when it comes to super-fast pure calculation.

AI work is mostly memory-bound. You need huge amounts of RAM (24GB for a somewhat decent model, a few TB for frontier models) and then you perform pretty simple vector math on that huge amount of data in memory. So the main limiting factors are RAM size and bandwidth. The computation power of a GPU doesn’t matter that much. Also GPUs contain ASICs for vector math already.

Standalone ASICs have no advantage over GPUs for this workload. The only thing you could do with a specialty chip is remove some unnecessary parts of a GPU to save a bit of cost and energy, thus turning a GPU that can be repurposed or resold if the AI bubble pops into a single-purpose device that has to be discarded if the bubble pops.

I read up a bit on the meshtastic broadcast algorithm and you are right, 1 would only work if the node in question is the only one in range that could reach the target, so in real life, not so much of an issue.

But it would be pretty simple to flood the network with garbage thus denying the service to anyone else. Would be even simpler than jamming, because you can abuse other nodes to rebroadcast your jams far beyond your reach.

The main problem is that now people without software engineering background now have the ability to do some very complex things without having to have any knowledge about what they are doing and what risks they are taking.

Imagine just handing out forklifts or excavators to anyone who wants to drive one. No license needed just off you pop.

You’ll see a massive spike in dangerous accidents.

Yes, people are using AI irresponsively, but they often do so because they were handed an incredibly powerful tool with zero oversight or education in this matter.

And the thing is, AI can act pretty autonomously nowadays. It’s not rare that if you tell an AI that it should do one thing it stumbles into a chain of three other tools and ends up doing something else entirely. Again, something that can be counteracted with skill and knowledge, but we are talking about people with neither.

For now.

Nvidia has two massive problems.

• They know that AI is a bubble. If the big AI companies go belly up, Nvidia loses all their revenue.
• The big AI companies are working on DIYing their own AI chips. If they manage to, Nvidia loses all their revenue.

That’s why they have been at work with local AI for a while. They publish their own open-weights models (Nemotron) and they build comparatively cheap local AI hardware (DGX Spark, RTX Spark).

That way, when the whole AI bubble pops, they still have quite a bit of a foot in the door with customers.

And their local AI push (Nemotron, DGI Spark, RTX Spark, Huggingface, …) is all done to diversify before the crash.

Local AI is constantly getting better, both on server-grade hardware and on hardware regular users can actually own.

In fact, for Nvidia it’s better to have a solid standing with consumer-grade local AI. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI manage to DIY their own AI chips, then Nvidia will lose a large portion of their revenue within a day.