Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy 4th July in advanceā¦I guess.)
Actually burst a blood vessel last weekend raging. Gary Marcus was bragging about his prediction record in 2024 being flawless
Gary continuing to have the largest ego in the world. Stay tuned for his upcoming book āI am Godā when 2027 comes around and we are all still alive. Imo some of these are kind of vague and I wouldnāt argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance, but my God the LW crew fucking lost their minds. Habryka wrote a goddamn essay about how Gary was a fucking moron and is a threat to humanity for underplaying the awesome power of super-duper intelligence and a worse forecaster than the big brain rationalist. To be clear Habrykaās objections are overall- extremely fucking nitpicking totally missing the point dogshit in my pov (feel free to judge for yourself)
https://xcancel.com/ohabryka/status/1939017731799687518#m
But what really made me want to drive a drill to the brain was the LW brigade rallying around the claim that AI companies are profitable. Are these people straight up smoking crack? OAI and Anthropic do not make a profit full stop. In fact they are setting billions of VC money on fire?! (strangely, some LWers in the comments seemed genuinely surprised that this was the case when shown the data, just how unaware are these people?) Oliver tires and fails to do Olympic level mental gymnastics by saying TSMC and NVDIA are making money, so therefore AI is extremely profitable. In the same way I presume gambling is extremely profitable for degenerates like me because the casino letting me play is making money. I rank the people of LW as minimally truth seeking and big dumb out of 10. Also weird fun little fact, in Daniel Kās predictions from 2022, he said by 2023 AI companies would be so incredibly profitable that they would be easily recuperating their training cost. So I guess monopoly money that you canāt see in any earnings report is the official party line now?
Oh, I would.
Iāve seen people say stuff like āyou canāt disagree the models have rapidly advancedā and Iām just like yes I can, here: no they didnāt. If youāre claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which youāre judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didnāt have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff. Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is āit vibes betterā.
If theyāre an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point Iād be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They canāt even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.
I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing āquantumā but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you canāt describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.
To be clear, I strongly disagree with the claim. I havenāt seen any evidence that āreasoningā models actually address any of the core blocking issues- especially reliably working within a given set of constraints/being dependable enough to perform symbolic algorithms/or any serious solution to confabulations. Iām just not going to waste my time with curve pointers who want to die on the hill of NeW sCaLiNG pArAdIgM. They are just too deep in the kool-aid at this point.
The singularity is near worn-out at this point.
Gary Marcus has been a solid source of sneer material and debunking of LLM hype, but yeah, youāre right. Gary Marcus has been taking victory laps over a bar set so so low by promptfarmers and promptfondlers. Also, side note, his negativity towards LLM hype shouldnāt be misinterpreted as general skepticism towards all AIā¦ in particular Gary Marcus is pretty optimistic about neurosymbolic hybrid approaches, itās just his predictions and hypothesizing are pretty reasonable and grounded relative to the sheer insanity of LLM hypsters.
Also, new possible source of sneers in the near future: Gary Marcus has made a lesswrong account and started directly engaging with them: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q2PdrjowtXkYQ5whW/the-best-simple-argument-for-pausing-ai
Predicting in advance: Gary Marcus will be dragged down by lesswrong, not lesswrong dragged up towards sanity. Heāll start to use lesswrong lingo and terminology and using P(some event) based on numbers pulled out of his ass. Maybe heāll even start to be ācharitableā to meet their norms and avoid down votes (I hope not, his snark and contempt are both enjoyable and deserved, but Iām not optimistic based on how the skeptics and critics within lesswrong itself learn to temper and moderate their criticism within the site). Lesswrong will moderately upvote his posts when he is sufficiently deferential to their norms and window of acceptable ideas, but wonāt actually learn much from him.
gross. Youād think the guy running the site directly insulting him would make him realize maybe lw simply aint it
Optimistically, heās merely giving into the urge to try to argue with people: https://xkcd.com/386/
Pessimistically, he realized how much money is in the doomer and e/acc grifts and wants in on it.
I dunno, Diz and I both pissed them off a whole lot
Best case scenario is Gary Marcus hangs around lw just long enough to develop even more contempt for them and he starts sneering even harder in this blog.
Come to the sneer side. We have brownies.
Itās kind of a shame to have to downgrade Gary to ānot wrong, but kind of a dickā here. Especially because his sneer game as shown at the end there is actually not half bad.