Does anybody take that seriously after they used negotiations with Iran as a distraction while preparing the strike?

The Chinese room thought experiment is deeply idiotic, it’s frankly incredible to me that people discuss it seriously. Hofstadter does a great tear down of it in I Am a Strange Loop.

That’s like asking what’s the difference between a chef who has memorized every recipe in the world and a chef who can actually cook. One is a database and the other has understanding.

The LLM you’re describing is just a highly sophisticated autocomplete. It has read every book, so it can perfectly mimic the syntax of human thought including the words, the emotional descriptions, and the moral arguments. It can put on a flawless textual facade. But it has no internal experience. It has never burned its hand on a stove, felt betrayal, or tried to build a chair and had it collapse underneath it.

AGI implies a world model which is an internal, causal understanding of how reality works, which we build through continous interaction with it. If we get AGI, then it’s likely going to come from robotics. A robot learns that gravity is a real, it learns that “heavy” isn’t an abstract concept but a physical property that changes how you move. It has to interact with its environment, and develop a predictive model that allows it to accomplish its tasks effectively.

This embodiment creates a feedback loop LLMs completely lack: action -> consequence -> learning -> updated model. An LLM can infer from the past, but an AGI would reason about the future because it operates with the same fundamental rules we do. Your super-LLM is just a library of human ghosts. A real AGI would be another entity in the world.

It’s powered by a miniature nuclear reactor meaning that it can stay airborne long enough to fly around the world and approach targets from any direction.

You gotta love it when people start commenting on a topic they have no clue about. There is no reentry, this is a low flying missile. The whole point of it is that it’s a loitering missile that can fly around for months on end. That’s the whole reason for the panic in NATO, it’s not possible to track it at all. Time for you to stop embarrassing yourself in public.

What actually turned out to have the capabilities of wet farts were all the fabled NATO weapons that were sent to Ukraine. Every single wunderwaffe that was supposed to turn the war right around turned out to be a dud in the end.

AI is being developed in China in a very different way from the west because the material conditions in China are different. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine

The reason Chinese companies release LLMs as open source isn’t actually confusing either. It’s not being treated as a product, but rather as foundational technology that things will be built upon. Think of it the same way as the current open source infrastructure that underpins the internet. Most companies aren’t trying to monetize Linux directly, rather they use it to build actual products on top of.

However, dragging the US into a tech race it can’t win is also a factor whether it’s done intentionally by China or not. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-ai-race-isnt-about-chips-its

somebody fainted while Trump was doing a presser

Right CBC, a famous Chinese nationalist source. 🤡

It looks the Ukraine served as a wake up call for Taiwan, shifting public opinion towards reunification and leaving the ruling DPP increasingly unpopular. CBC was moaning just recently that many young Taiwanese have little appetite for a military confrontation with the mainland. The most probable outcome now seems to be that the US-puppet administration will get thrown out, paving the way for the KMT’s return to power and the resumption of a direct dialogue on reunification.

A historical point that people tend to forget about is that the KMT was already advancing on a path toward peaceful reunification back in 2014. The proposed framework involved maintaining Taiwan’s autonomy, its own military, and having a representative within the mainland’s political structure. It was precisely at this juncture that the US backed the sunflower movement successfully derailed the process and brought the DPP to power. Now, with shifting public sentiment, it looks like that particular American political operation has finally run its course.

not a chance in hell

That is one of very clear legitimate uses for LLMs, similarly they work great for making decompiled code human readable now.

the really scary part is that this doesn’t even surprise me

I remember a long time ago, I worked at a java shop and we were cursed to use Eclipse. One coworker was saying his IDE was really slow, and almost unusable. So I come over to look, and the whole freaking codebase was just one giant Java file. It was basically at the limit of what the compiler will allow.

😱

I want to believe!

It’s so lovely to see how the mask has finally fallen off and we get to see the EU as the totalitarian regime that it really is.

You know the war is lost when the UK decides they want to talk to Russia.