TechTakes

Well, after 2.5 years and hundreds of billions of dollars burned, we finally have GPT-5. Kind of feels like a make or break moment for the good folks at OAI~~! With the eyes of the world on their lil presentation this morning, everyone could feel the stakes: they needed something that would blow our minds. We finally get to see what a super intelligence looks like! Show us your best cherry picked benchmark Sloppenheimer!

Graphic design is my PASSION. Good thing the entirety of the world's economy is not being held up by cranking out a few more points on SWE bench right????

Ok. what about ARC? Surely ya'll got a new high to prove the AGI mission was progressing right??

Oh my fucking God. They actually have lost the lead to fucking Grok. For my sanity I didn't watch the live stream, but curiously, they left the ARC results out of their presentation. Even though they gave Francois access early to test. Kind of like they knew this looks really bad and underwhelming.

I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he's rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research

So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here's what Yud has to say

Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. [...] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which I'd consider a sign of preference and planning.

OR it's just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like "is it ok to murder someone") There's no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager's mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren't soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against "dangerous" questions) just won't go down that path.

Yud continues:

But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesn't try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.

Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it's actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?

Occam's razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud's hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.

4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication [...]

NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There's no inner agency! It doesn't know what "psychosis" is, it cannot "see" that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!

Add to the weird jargon ("homeostatically", "crazymaking") and it's a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.

New article from Matthew Hughes, about the sheer stupidity of everyone propping up the AI bubble.

Orange site is whining about it, to Matthew's delight:

Someone posted my newsletter to Hacker News and the comments are hilarious, insofar as they're upset with the tone of the piece.

Which is hilarious, because it precisely explains why those dweebs love generative AI. They're absolutely terrified of human emotion, or passion, or naughty words.

In other news, the mainstream press has caught on to "clanker" (originally coined for use in the Star Wars franchise) getting heavy use, with Rolling Stone, Gizmondo and Axios putting out articles on it, and NPR featuring it in Word of the Week.

You want my take, I expect it will retain heavy usage going forward - as I've stated before (multiple times at least), AI is no longer viewed as a "value-neutral" tool/tech, but as an enemy of humanity, whose use expresses a contempt for humanity.

New case popped up in medical literature: A Case of Bromism Influenced by Use of Artificial Intelligence, about a near-fatal case of bromine poisoning caused by someone using AI for medical advice.

Simple way of messing with the dumbest robot ignoring scrapers. Html bomb.

ZITRON DROPPED

Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Discovered new manmade horrors beyond my comprehension today (recommend reading the whole thread, it goes into a lot of depth on this shit):

Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):

Needless to say, he's getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.

(EDIT: Originally found this through Bluesky)

ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you've probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don't want any part in this shit anymore.

Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let's all let that sink in for a minute.

Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing people's data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.

Personally, I'm expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflare's just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.

Recently, I've been seeing a lot of adverts from Google about their AI services. What really tickles me is how defeatist the campaign seems. Every ad is basically like "AI can't do X, but it can do Y!", where X is a job or other task that AI bros are certain that AI will eventually replace, and Y is a smaller, related thing that AI gets wrong anyway. For an ad agency, I'd expect more than this.