Western capitalism’s cycle of booms and busts stretches all the way back to Amsterdam and the Tulip Mania of 1636. They all follow the same pattern, and we are living in the end stages of one now with AI. Every single time, there are detractors who say this time is different; however, they have a four century track record of getting it wrong.
This week, yet again, we see a small Chinese firm with a fraction of the spending and resources getting the near equal of the frontier models Big Tech investors are spending trillions to achieve. Not only that, they are offering theirs to the world for free, and it uses a small fraction of electricity/computing resources to run. Those Big Tech investors will never earn those trillions back.
It might be bleak and depressing to contemplate, but people need to think about what happens after the crash. This is no time for centrism, or putting your fingers in your ears and saying you don’t want to hear about politics. The very worst people in our cultures, many Big Tech leaders themselves, are looking forward to this destruction and making their plans for it, and the world they want afterwards is a 100 times bleaker.
You also shared an excerpt from your llm chatlog framed with details about what settings you used. I don’t know the kindest way to say it but think you’re lying to yourself about your level of engagement with that tool. “luciferofastra” in particular provided heartfelt, well articulated human feedback to that effect you ignored. My first encounter with your post was just now when you linked it here, there’s no “you people” lined up against you. The concepts you’re exploring show we’re all on roughly the same page. I’d recommend trying to put your thoughts down on paper sometime, just shifting context entirely. It’s a good exercise and I wish you all the best :)
That’s just more ad hominem based on my writing style. It’s irrelevant to the post’s topic whether I’ve caught the sloppy style or not (although I’ve read way more human-written academic articles in that style, and I have caught it ). Of course I have to use AIs (and mainstream social media) to probe how they work and whether there’s a bias. A good example is Mistral’s reply quoted in my comment: it failed to answer the main question in my post (as did all commenters).
luciferofastra’s comment is just one of many taking the discussion further away from the topic, pointless for me to reply to. The starter of that comment thread was already being a dick, complaining about my vocabulary in my second language.
No commenter addressed the main question in my post: “Which specific nudge swarm manipulations can currently be done to people and systems around targets to critically affect even the most vigilant targets?”. I expected to get a discussion about that in comments, not the shitshow the comment section became.
“You people calling me a liar” refers to you and the downvoters of my comment saying “I did not use AI writing the post”.
I can’t reorder text on paper unless I use scissors and glue, which is why I dumped paper in the 1990s. I prefer multi-level indented structured text, but almost nothing on the web supports it.
No one will engage with the ideas behind your output while they’re so clearly processed by that machine. Especially on that subject! The poster I mentioned was very kind, gentle, and did a better job reaching out than I think I can right now. You absolutely do not have to engage with a tool at that level to study it any more than medical researchers have to infect themselves to study smallpox. Citing the “response” of an llm as an example here is… A lot to unpack.
Paper is deeply inconvenient and limiting in many ways, kinda the polar opposite of an llm. It’s also 100% incontrovertibly your unassisted organic output. I wasn’t suggesting you switch back entirely, or even necessarily share whatever you write, just that it might be a healthy exercise and provide some useful contrast. I don’t mean to confront you whatsoever and hope things are going well.