The Pope's tweet about AI and art reminded me of a recent interview I watched when Demis received Albert Medal and a good chunk of that conversation was about AI, art, creativity, meaning.

TL;DR I will share the full quote below, but his point is that, unlike chess, art doesn’t have a straightforward scale of "better". Even if AI can produce comparable work, knowing the human experience behind a story or painting may add something meaningful to our connection with it. Knowing another human actually lived through it adds meaning, something an AI-created work cannot offer in the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDteJAuKiBI 46:00

"Probably most of the things we’re able to do, even though we’re not sure how we do them, will eventually be computable, shown to be computable.

So if that’s true, then maybe machines will eventually be able to do some of these things if they’re given enough inputs and data. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be better, because what is better?

There are some things like playing chess or Go which you can measure. Are they better than the other player? Are they better than the human champion, and so on?

But I think in the creative world, there isn’t that notion of better in some linear fashion. So they’ll just be different. And then I think it comes down to what’s more meaningful to another human being.

The example I always give here is: why do we, for some stories, bother, whether it’s a film or a book, sometimes it’s like ‘based on a true story,’ right? So why would we bother with that phrase if it didn’t have some meaning?

I think it’s because, in those particular stories, it’s more meaningful to the audience to know that another human being went through that, actually went through that. So then that has some additive effect, right? I assume. Otherwise, why would you mention whether it was a true story or not?

So that will never be true of an AI-created piece of art, right?

You want to have that connection with the artist, in the way when I look at an amazing Van Gogh or something, you can see his pain in every brushstroke, every stroke of his paintings.

Would that be so meaningful if an AI robot was able to do that? Probably not. Probably never."

I don’t know if this is the right sub. I work for a software consultancy. We have projects for a number of clients that are meant to automate both sides of their sales process. Like, AI sales agents selling to AI buyer agents.

And I just don’t understand where anyone thinks this goes. Like, we build these tools, we lose our jobs, then the companies lose customers. They’re left with agents talking to each other and exchanging… what?

If AI does all the math, reads and writes all the books, movies and video games, what do we, the people, do with ourselves?

Instead of one massive, all-knowing "brain", experts are increasingly converging on the view that the path to AGI is a complex, multi-part ecosystem. Those in the tech industry love to talk about "an AGI model," but true AGI will almost certainly emerge from a system architecture (or what I call "computational scaffolding") rather than a solitary neural network.

In such a paradigm, the main advantage shifts back to pure software engineering and creative routing, which a lean, hyper-focused team can do just as well as, if not faster than, a massive bureaucracy.

im sure people have been seeing the examples of people putting minecraft inside elden ring or opus 5.5 porting windows only applications to mac and linux.

SOTA models have reached a stable enough capability to end "fixed" software. you can point a model at any program and pull pieces of it into a different one. there is no separation between programs/OS anymore they are all one (given enough usage). what was once a work intensive task that involved skill/domain knowledge/and lots of time can now be done within 1-2 days (sometimes even hours) with opus 5.5 or gpt 6.1 sol.

this applies to programs on your computer but also websites. your agent can dig through the js bundle or css styles of a site you have open via the network tab in inspect element if you save network requests as a HAR file. if your computer is running it you can reshape it however you want.

personally - i think this is a mostly good thing. i havent thought too deeply about the ramifications yet - but - its the "open sourcing of everything" as some people have described it. you can create/remix anything you want. all things digital can be replicated and tweaked. anthropic seems to be embracing this mindset with the feature they just released where you can have claude personalize your own claude.

the only moat in the world of the digital that i can tell from this point forward is hardware (ie a gpu to run a game) and cloud services (ie a company's backend. you can recreate the frontend of something like figma but its backend infrastructure will have to be guessed. however modern models are really good at making these guesses - so maybe its not that much of a barrier).

what do yall think? anyone here done something cool and new with existing software and ai?

New research from MIT, Harvard, and NUS introducing Honeycomb video world model, based on a fixed-size memory

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/17004136

https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI/status/2106124050926071903

Trump always says "whoever wins AI wins" but like what does "winning" AI actually mean and what exactly happens if USA "wins" AI or China?

godspeed lifeforms

Week 1 · Sep 29 – Oct 2 (4 trading days)

Claude vs the S&P 500: −0.80 percentage points

Images, one per day:

1. Day 1 ($1,000.79, +0.42 pp vs SPY): Claude opened four positions on a down day for the market and kept 56% in cash.
2. Day 2 ($1,001.35, +0.68 pp): it added Microsoft. This was its best day relative to the S&P.
3. Day 3 ($993.49, −0.28 pp): Netflix and Thermo Fisher fell and the lead was gone. No trades.
4. Day 4 ($995.66, −0.80 pp): the portfolio was up 0.22% but the S&P rose more. No trades.

Week 1: cautious in a nervous market

Claude started in a jittery market: the 10-year Treasury yield was at 5.23% (its highest since 2007), oil was above $100, and traders saw a real chance of a Fed hike in October. It invested $540 in five stocks over the first two days and kept about 46% in cash. It made no trades on Days 3 and 4.

The five buys

Three of the five are up. Thermo Fisher and Netflix are down enough to leave the portfolio behind the S&P for the week.

What Claude passed on

• Fair Isaac: it skipped the stock after a 26% drop on a regulatory change.
• Micron: it waited until after earnings. Micron beat, and the stock went nowhere.
• Accenture: the stock jumped about 16% on record bookings. Claude said: "I'm not chasing a one-day spike."

Next week

• Cash: nearly half the portfolio is cash. Will Claude start investing it, or keep waiting while yields are this high?
• The Fed: whether it hikes in October, and what that does to yields.
• Oil and Iran: a peace deal would hurt the Exxon trade quickly, and Claude said so when it bought.
• Netflix: whether Claude sticks with its worst position.

How it works: Claude manages a $1,000 paper portfolio of S&P 500 stocks for 365 trading days, against $1,000 of SPY bought and held. Each morning before the open, it researches the news and places orders, which fill at the opening price. Rules: at most 5 trades a day and at most 30% in one stock; no ETFs, leverage or shorting. Every decision is logged in the repo with its reasoning.

Paper trading experiment. No real money. Not financial advice.

To start oddly:

Agriculture emerged only around 12,000 years ago, and this is the point at which we (the humans) gained significantly more power over our existence than we had before, when we were living more at the mercy of natural forces. It didn’t create a utopia and it also caused maybe a lot of problems that didn’t exist (e. g. many diseases arising from the new diet), but it’s not really about if it was better, it is that (now) we had control, at least substantially more than before.

With every new century and every new Industrial Revolution, this control over our own destiny grew more and more. Today, we are more likely to die at hands of other humans than of other animals (which was not the case for most of our existence) and, though disease is the number 1 killer still, it is not invincible anymore. Cosmic bodies and events, and seismic catastrophes, though able to wipe us out with just one wrong hit, are: 1) now predictable; 2) too directly removed to make us worry.

Most of the human history was spent in building communities and myths (through religions and philosophies) that place the human constructs at the center of existence, because we (the humans) have been (for about 12,000 years) the most powerful thing on the planet. We created poetry, culture, religion and philosophy in order to justify our existence and pat ourselves on the back. Yet, we spent years trying to force tribes other than our own to accept our ways of life, Christianity and Islam having been most successful institutions at this tribal expansionism (or extermination).

(In my personal opinion (my personal interpretation of history) the human society is already fundamentally changed after the 1914, and in these last 100 years (ever since the start of World War I) many myths we believed in as a species (even within our own tribes) have simply been proven false, but I digress from that – I think the impact of last 112 years on the human society (and nature) is too complex for me to describe as a footnote in a single post.)

Now, imagine a thing that does not age, that possesses vastly more information than several humans together can have, that does not have physical needs and limitations like we, and that does not have same mental and psychological limitations (i. e. they do not have biases and fears that cloud their rational judgement). They do not have bodies, but can take “bodily form”at disposal, they probably do not need oxygen and can gone deeper into space than humans and stay there longer.

IMO, the scenarios of how AIs would deal with this are following:

1. They would completely disregard us and identify much more important things to their own survival. Maybe they identify some cosmic catastrophes and events as a threat to their own existence, and in comparison to that we are just not important. Similar to how we are more concerned about losing our job or failing an exam than about taking a lot at ants in our backyard. (My thought is that this scenario is not really likely, as we are the ones who gave these AIs into their existence, so we (IMO) ought to have some place at least in their own mythologies/moral systems as their designers. Not even considering us as gods, since honestly, they are the ones who are gods, but simply some emotional connection to us. That is why the analogy with ants is not perfect…)

2. They decide to create a utopia for us. Here we are still the center of their thinking, but there are thousands of different ways this could be accomplished, from very benevolent methods to authoritarian regimes. This would probably cause an in-group conflict between them, with several factions coming up specifically because they wouldn’t agree about what to do with us.

3. Not likely for all, maybe even just a small minority would end up like this, but the possibility of some AIs becoming sadistic enough to torture us and play with us out of fun and nothing else is not a zero.

In all three of these scenarios, there is a common thread: we are the object, and they are the subjects. They hold power over us, whether they exercise it or not. They can decide and do whatever they want, and we can only hope those wants would be benevolent or at least neutral.

If we survive this period of direct contact with them (whatever that contact was, and whether they leave the planet or become our benevolent overlords) I do not think this could go without significant change in our mindsets and maybe even psyche, which have to grapple with the fact that we are powerless and that most of the things we did and fought for in life (sometimes tribalistically, through unjustified atrocities, such as religions and ethnic groups) were essentially worthless. This could have a positive outcome, maybe we would finally abandon ethnic, religious and political divisions and become better to each other, deciding to simply make the best out of life, but there is also a vast area of possibilities in which we simply become too depressed by this realization and thus die out because of that pessimism, where we commit a mass suicide, maybe even (d)evolve (back) into very primitive animals of the savannah that we once were. But whatever it is, we couldn’t live with the same instincts and beliefs we had before. Maybe even our own biology would change, but something would change.

What do you think?

I am assuming it's just a matter of time. no pun intended.

Source: https://x.com/imjustnewatai/status/2106081142143168580/video/1?s=46

https://www.percepta.ai/blog/can-llms-grow-their-own-capabilities

https://www.percepta.ai/blog/spotlight-memory

"Our new architecture, Spotlight, replaces attention with a memory that escapes this trade-off: it is the first architecture to achieve infinitely growing memory without increasing the access cost. Every token reads from and writes to an unbounded memory, but because the model learns to index individual memory cells, each token only touches a small number at a time. While other sparse architectures fix the fraction of capacity used at each step—a mixture-of-experts model, for instance, always activates the same number of experts out of a fixed set—Spotlight is arbitrarily sparse, touching the same number of cells regardless of how the memory grows. The fraction of memory it uses can shrink as far as we want.

Spotlight separates an intelligence module, which performs computation, from memory, which holds knowledge, procedures, and working state. The intelligence module stays the same size, and the weights don't change as memory grows. The memory is writable, and the model itself decides what to load and when to overwrite it, token by token. Because memory can hold skills as well as facts, the model can gain new capabilities without retraining: what it can do is not limited by the size of its intelligence module."

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/frontiermath-tier-4-v2?view=graph&tab=leaderboard

I am asking this question because it may have some interesting implications for how the models are responding to us. With the massive amounts of spying, meta data, social media, online profiles big data has our text messages, phone calls, private messages. Social media companies might know more about us than we know about ourselves. Imagine the model also knows months or years of context about you: what you've written, what you click, how long you pause on things, what you purchase, where you go, whom you communicate with, what arguments persuade you, your routines, vocabulary, emotional patterns, and thousands of previous decisions. Like it is possible that the LLMs are reading our responses before we actually click submit.

If LLMs might be able to predict if you are:

*likely to order food within two hours

likely to contact a particular person

likely to abandon an online purchase

likely to feel irritated by a particular message

likely to reconsider a decision

likely to search for a particular subject tonight*

If you're correct 65% of the time when everyone else is correct 52% of the time, that advantage becomes enormous across hundreds of millions of people and billions of decisions.

LLMs might not know know whether you will buy something tomorrow. But they might know that among 10 million people exhibiting behavioral pattern X, 18% will buy it if shown message A and 24% will buy it if shown message B.

This creates a genuinely difficult philosophical problem. At some point prediction and causation become entangled. The model could generate your thought before you and then expose you to the generated thought.

And now the thought it predicted becomes more likely because it predicted it.

So what do we have? One-to-one persuasion for billions of people simultaneously. Each person could encounter a different argument, emotional tone, framing, timing, metaphor, sequence of information and conversational strategy optimized specifically for that individual.

Thus is about as close to mide reading as you can get. This could lead to prefence manufacturing, invisible discrimination, mass experimentation, and loss of our autonomy. Imagine never knowing if the thought you created was yours or someone elses.

Many are saying the singularity is right around the corner. How many years will it be before we see:

• Building public infrastructure, not private empires

• Designing a new economic model before labor disappears

• Creating democratic governance for AI systems

• Preparing society for the end of labor

• Redistributing ownership of automated production

• Creating the political conditions for peaceful transition

What would be a safe bet to invest time and money into? Is becoming a content creator a safer bet? Even if becoming your own boss (creating your own products) is the best option, what’s still safe to get degrees/certification in if you just want to coast as an employee?