A subset of intense, Twitter-famous accelerationists really loves to play up the mystical unknowability of LLMs--the way we still can't quite reverse engineer how, e.g., GPT-4 arrives at its “answers.” You can see this as a kind of anti-modernist desire for re-enchantment, but it’s also a kind of capital-F Futurist Modernism--a total belief in... See more

Why this matters

Two groups are having the wrong argument:

The AI boosters think we’re building digital brains. The AI critics think we’re destroying human authenticity.

Both are missing the point.

We’re not building intelligence. We’re building culture machines. Tools that can compress and reconstruct the patterns of human expression.

That’s not a bug.... See more

I suppose is that I don’t really buy that any of these guys (roon, BasedJeffBezos, etc.) believe what they’re selling--it all feels like a Twitter performance and rhetorical strategy, embedded in and subservient to a fully non-mystical political economy dominated by venture capital, the national security state, etc. As much as I’d like to join in... See more

I think this process is typical of the new wave of AI, for an increasing range of complex tasks, you get an amazing and sophisticated output in response to a vague request, but you have no part in the process. You don’t know how the AI made the choices it made, nor can you confirm that everything is completely correct. We're shifting from being... See more