200fifty
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”
Clicking through to one of the source articles
Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?”
Okay, I’m not a big-brain edtech integration admin, but I seem to recall that like fifteen years ago we had a website that my parents could check to see my grade in math. I feel like this was already a solved problem honestly.
Oh my god, I can’t stop laughing out loud at “women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks,” based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What’s his explanation for why men didn’t do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much
ngl his stuff always felt a bit cynical to me, in that it seemed to exist more to say “look, video games can have a deep message!” than it did to just have such a message in the first place. Like it existed more to gesture at the concept of meaningfulness rather than to be meaningful itself.
If you think of LLMs as being akin to lossy text compression of a set of text, where the compression artifacts happen to also result in grammatical-looking sentences, the question you eventually end up asking is “why is the compression lossy? What if we had the same thing but it returned text from its database without chewing it up first?” and then you realize that you’ve come full circle and reinvented search engines
unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice
also
God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better
idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical