Hackworth

The past and future. The present is hit and miss.

HaPPY

Also check out Patrick Dunn’s Postmodern Magic: The Art of Magic in the Information Age and the follow-up, Magic, Power, Language, Symbol: A Magician’s Exploration of Linguistics for an exploration of the information paradigm of magic(k). An interesting question to ponder: What is an LLM from this perspective?

Like a reverse selkie. Speaking of Fae, the werewolves of Ossory are neat.

The bar is so low. Anthropic is only trying to raise it ever so slightly.

e: Also, the US military reportedly used Claude in Iran strikes despite Trump’s ban.

Aye, Anthropic is head and shoulders above everyone else on guidance, largely because they focus entirely on text/code. They’re not simultaneously developing image, video, and audio generators. Even Claude’s voice is just an 11Labs model. Plus I get the impression they’re just smarter about what they choose to research and how they use that info to improve the model.

I did find an update on that funding, btw. Anthropic already took money from Qatar (the QIA), but the amount isn’t known - likely around $100M. The UAE has yet to happen, but if does, it would be “hundreds of millions”.

I mean, I’m not gonna defend him. But fucking up a discord that you’re a mod of isn’t really in the same ballpark as taking money from dictators or directing fully autonomous strikes. Also, from the read, it really sounds like that Deputy CISO was a prime example of cyber-psychosis, or AI mania, or whatever we’ve decided to call it. And I assume he is part of the same vulnerable minority?

Oh, that guy! To be fair, that’s one employee, not Anthropic’s actions or position. You mentioned forcing their software on minorities while insisting it was better than it was, and I was getting OLPC flashbacks. But Anthropic looking for funding in the UAE and Qatar is shitty. I can’t seem to find anything about whether or not they went through with those contracts.

They insisted Claude was human?

Amodei said in an interview that the DoW altered their contract to appear to compromise, so that it looked like they were agreeing to those use limits. But that legalese accompanying the updates rendered that text pointless. Basically, “We won’t use Claude for mass domestic surveillance and full automated killing, unless we really want to.” My guess is OpenAI signed the exact same contract and just pretended not to understand the toothlessness of the guardrails.

It’s more about post/message size for me. If ya post a few sentences that clearly and concisely communicate a point, I don’t really care if they’re crafted or generated. If ya post a wall of text, I wanna know ya put the kind of effort in that made its length necessary if I’m gonna put in the effort to read it.

Here’s Anthropic’s post about the supply chain risk designation.

Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

Anthropic yesterday:

Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required. -Dario’s Post

Here ya go.

Really ties the room together.

Fun fact: Artax can speak in the novel.

e: Also, cause it usually comes up, the Auryn is what prevents Atreyu from sinking.

We have precedent for dealing with things within our own imaginations that seem to have autonomy. Authors commonly talk about their characters seeming to take on a life of their own over time. Dream characters can honestly surprise the dreamer. The esoteric traditions of invocation/evocation can be viewed as an intentional applications of this feature in semantic/latent space.

But if the idea is that LLMs are a kind of external imagination, the question isn’t really whether or not the characters roleplayed during inference are conscious. They’re no more aware than the people in our dreams. The question is, as you say, what is it like to be those layers of software neurons in between the word generations. Can you have an imagination without an imaginer? In other words, is there a dreamer?

If the answer is no, case closed, relatively tidy. If the answer is yes, it’s a truly alien kind of consciousness. Embodiment comes with a bunch of stuff that an LLM has absolutely no access to. Generally speaking, we find it difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of other humans, much less animals, plants/fungii. And they’re embodied! LLMs are nothing like us, and they’re certainly not gendered.

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