nymnympseudonym

Well, maybe you aren't aware of how it's being used to design proteins to create therapies for pretty much... everything, from cancer to Crohn's. Another 2-3 years before you see products in human trials.

Or how it's revolutionized climate science and weather forecasting.

If all you see is the hype Grok images and SEO slop, it's reasonable to reject the technology. But that would be deeply misguided.

I am optimistic. I will get downvoted to oblivion, but I want to share what I honestly observe:

1. AI demand is driving huge investment in production of carbon-free energy at scale.

Yes, AI is sucking up all the immediate term cheap fossil-fuel energy while it can. But it needs more, so it's driving carbon-free investment.

Immediate term with Small Modular fission Reactors (SMRs)

... and immediate term, multiple commercial fusion energy plants are being built.

2. Commercially viable carbon-free energy at scale is coming online in < 10 years

SMR is real, exists today, and just needs economies of scale ... and stable regulation. AI datacenters are driving the orders now and even if MAGA cultists keep USA out a few more years, science-accepting countries will be investing in clusters of those, rather than coal plants, when they see working examples and so less risk.

The Fusion plants this decade will not be just prototypes, but plants that produce more energy as a whole than they take in, multiple times over, and ofc don't produce nuclear waste. This is largely made possible by high temperature superconductors (which didn't exist commercially when ITER was built) and a demo plant fully online in 2027

EDIT: ofc we should reduce excess CO2 emissions immediate term, don't misconstrue long term optimism for polyannish denial of imemdiate term emergency

I am not a linguist but the deafening silence from Chomsky and his defenders really does demand being called out.

Syntactical models of language have been completely crushed by statistics-at-scale via neural nets. But linguists have not rejected the broken model.

The same thing happened with protein folding -- researchers who spent the last 25 years building complex quantum mechanical/electrostatic models of protein structure suddenly saw AlphaFold completely crush prior methods. The difference is, bioinformatics researchers have already done a complete about-face and are taking the new AI tools and running with them.

believing that a large language model has any kind of awareness or actual intelligence is absurd

I (as a person who works professionally in the area and tries to keep up with the current academic publications) happen to agree with you. But my credences are somewhat reduced after considering the points Hinton raises.

I think it is worth considering that there are a handful of academically active models of consciousness; some well-respected ones like the CTM are not at all inconsistent with Hinton's statements

IMO PeerTube would be much larger but grifter sites like Rumble and Odyssee/LBRY are sucking a lot of the wind from the YT-alternative ecosystem

Long term IMO PeerTube is the only sensible architecture. federated.

Some of us adults are tired of other adults having imaginary friends and expecting to be treated like adults

I'll make a plug for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, they have also been bringing suits against Trump's administration

https://ffrf.org/

PeerTube

Most porn is much much more wholesome and tame than the pestilence, genocide, fratricide, infanticide, racism, sexism, and slavery that is recommended by that disgusting ignorant book

My wife assumes Trump became President second time around purely to keep a lid on the Epstein thing

I think that's conspiracy theory territory but... 🤷

Good point. If Trump wants to emulate Daddy Putin... he's gonna make a Prigogzhn out of someone