for further context, the thread was about AI coding (ill link in the replies) but seriously? is completely confident AI will kill us all, yet by his own admission is “out of date on modern programming” and implies he doesn’t even know Javascript
for further context, the thread was about AI coding (ill link in the replies) but seriously? is completely confident AI will kill us all, yet by his own admission is “out of date on modern programming” and implies he doesn’t even know Javascript
It’s amazing that so many engineers, comp-sci researchers and just general AI people consider a guy who barely understands basic programming (A very necessary thing for creating a supposed AGI or ASI) to be one of their heroes.
He didn't even go to high school. People seem to underestimate the degree to which he is literally just some guy.
He’s a middle school dropout?? Or he didn’t graduate high school
Middle school dropout, couldn't handle school and home-schooled. I have tremendous sympathy for kids in that situation, but almost all of them don't pull a Yudkowsky.
I know 0 people in the field that take him as anything more than a mega-clown.
The new batch of annoying nerds has fallen so far from grace. Say what you will about rms but at least he knows how to code
I don't know if you even have to know programming to know agi is bullshit. It's bullshit because the concept of general intellgience is bullshit. A cog sci guy could tell you that.
Yudkowsky is a clown but this isn't a super strong argument.
Many of the best theoretical CS people are like, mediocre programmers at best. It's far more math than programming.
Similarly, you can be a great Javascript programmer without knowing how to build or understand a CPU architecture.
My comment wasn’t meant to be an argument, it’s meant to be an insult and a general criticism. You’re right, many of the best CS people may not be great at programming, but the fact of the matter is that many people in these fields have cited Yudkowsky (A man who never went to high school or college and while being an “OG AI Researcher” has never studied basic programming) to be a major reason why they went into the tech field.
It would be like if I said I became a Chef because I was inspired by Joe Bastianich, one of the Judges on MasterChef. For context, Joe is not a Chef he is a restaurant owner who thinks that he has any actual ability to judge food in a truly Chef-critical way. He’s also a total narcissistic asshole, much like Yudkowsky.
At least he owns an actual restaurant as opposed to a restaurant themed cult that has vaguely cooking related discussion.
I'm sure there are many scientists out there who were inspired by Science Fiction.
literally 20 years ago i was treating those larpers as having some chance to make a positive difference in the world, they did get millionaires to give them the bag, but i remember telling yud he should get a degree in AI to really get in the conversation and make some important moves... that was in , like, 2002 i guess. he could have had a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence and/or phd in computer science for years by now. but nope, because procrastination. the world could get in the way of his fabulations and he don't want to lose that. he really want to be a christ like figure, not just a jobber that help the process.
It's so bizarre to me how these people are resistant to actually becoming experts in the fields they want to revolutionise - I feel this way about so many medical tech "entrepreneurs". Bryan Johnson you have the time and money, go to medical school!
I think it's a big part of their self-image to not, though - both to say "I'm so smart, I don't need any kind of education", and "I'm an outsider, so I can think outside the box and come up with ideas that actual experts never would because they're not actually possible, but don't worry about that part".
It takes a lot of humility these guys don’t have to put in the years of work it takes to get good at something. And by the time they actually start to develop real skills, their self-image as a genius will have been damaged. They really don’t want to see themselves as an ordinary talented person who works hard rather than a once-in-a-lifetime great mind.
I mean around year 2000 when he had the original "coding the AI Singularity" website up (which I would quote from but apparently archive.org is doing some major infrastructure updates, dying or both) before it turned out
he didn't know where to even startactually creating AI would be a super bad idea that would kill us all and that's why he didn't do it, swear to God. So in his timeline estimates he claimed he could work several times as fast as an "average" programmer despite not having had any experience at the time (or since). I doubt he has become any more humble in the meantime.I envy the innocence of not knowing js
The fact that Eliezer is just now noticing this… AI coding is a key point of a lot of doomer timelines (Eliezer actually has avoided putting out a timeline himself, but I know he’s a lot closer to AI 2027 than OpenPhil’s 2050 guess, he’s complained about them), and AI coding is the most potentially commercially valuable application (seemingly) within reach and has thus had huge amounts of effort thrown at making LLMs better at it. So if autonomous AI coding actually isn’t happening Eliezer should really update his doom odds. Also he should have noticed it wasn’t happening a year or two ago,
Eliezer’s reason for not doing timelines is also pretty sneerworthy:
“I consider naming particular years to be a cognitively harmful sort of activity; I have refrained from trying to translate my brain's native intuitions about this into probabilities, for fear that my verbalized probabilities will be stupider than my intuitions if I try to put weight on them. What feelings I do have, I worry may be unwise to voice; AGI timelines, in my own experience, are not great for one's mental health, and I worry that other people seem to have weaker immune systems than even my own. But I suppose I cannot but acknowledge that my outward behavior seems to reveal a distribution whose median seems to fall well before 2050.” (source)
Same guy who posted “Death with Dignity” as an April Fools “joke” and had no problem going onto Lex Fridman’s podcast to say young people had no future, so safe to say “im worried about mental health” is bogus and the real reason is probably closer to “if i make a wrong time prediction people will stop taking me seriously”
I agree with him about this, but I can generalize to see this is one of the reasons why the entire rationalist "Bayesian" probability obsession is stupid and counterproductive.
oh my god, he didn't even try to use the programming language real big brain people use, and elected to learn JavaScript?
at least Haskell, or Julia, or something else.
this is like being a Big Software Engineering Guru™ and copping to the fact that he hasn't kept up to date with PHP.
JavaScript, that famously up to date language written in the mid-90s
Have you ever written JavaScript? Modern JS and 90s JS have very little in common.
I'm a web developer in my day job, yes. ECMA6 has lots and lots of improvements over the original 90s JS but part of the issue with the language is that it's supposed to be backwards-compatible (I'm not 100% sure if it actually is anymore but that's the idea) and there are lots and lots of design decisions that were I'm sure fine circa 1997 that are not fine anymore.
Lots of languages are chained to weird decisions from the past. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s exactly accurate to say that JS isn’t up to date because it was written in the 90s.
That said, as it pertains to Yud’s comment he can’t really use that as an excuse if he never learned it at all.
ES6 itself is 10 years old at this point. The standards have been updated every year since then.
Quite famously, Big Yud had never had a programming project finished, even back in the time when he attempted to do so...
full thread here
I looked at the full thread and had some additional sneers
To say it in rationalist speech: maybe if your priors better accounted for the fact that 99% of LLM news is empty hype you could have predicted this!
Kinda. The issue is you need to already be a programmer that already knows how to solve the problem to get LLM coding agents to get close to appearing (keyword, appearing) useful, and as you’ve revealed you apparently are not such a skilled programmer.
There actually are a lot of reports like that, they just tend to be in places you don’t read, and those places tend to be skeptical of the doomerism.
And we got some anthropomorphism to round out the twitter post.
This is like me saying Jiu Jitsu is a form of martial art I'm not a black belt in or F1 is a kind of race car I haven't raced. I'm just not super involved with the martial arts or racing scenes these days...
Cultural translation for the like 5% of people here who aren't professional software developers: "Hiring a local guide in Italy took less time than it would have taken me to learn Italian -- I don't travel much, these days -- but the guide sure took more time than it would have taken me to do the task myself if I lived here"
It only looks a little arrogant at first glance, but the confusion creeps up on you. Nobody "learns Italian" to do one task - the absolute best-case scenario is that you blunder around with a phrasebook for a few days - so why was that comparison chosen? Why is "I don't travel much" relevant, when languages are usually learned by investing many months of time and finding good mentors? How is it that a guest in a foreign land can dumbly watch his guide navigating a language and culture he doesn't understand at all, and yet settle on the opinion "I could do better"? Why is the tone so authoritative, when the story itself reports a position of weakness and helplessness?
Unfortunately, the explanation is "fucking hell, this guy thinks that it would only take him a week or two to 'learn Italian', job done"
Autodidact "genius" larping as an expert in action. His only expertise is in graft and procrastination.