thezvi

Some people (although very far from all people) are worried that AI will wipe out all value in the universe. Some people, including some of those same people, need practical advice. A Word On Thinking For Yourself There are good reasons to worry about AI. This includes good reasons to worry about AI wiping out all value in the universe, or AI killing everyone, or other similar very bad outcomes.

Table of Contents I had reports last week that the table of content links were failing for some users, I believe those on Safari. Right now I don’t know of a sufficiently quick alternative that fixes this issue, but am open to suggestions. Executive Summary

Lemon, it’s Tuesday Somehow, this was last week: (Not included: Ongoing banking crisis threatening global financial system.) Oh, also I suppose there was Visual ChatGPT, which will feed ChatGPT’s prompts into Stable Diffusion, DALL-E or MidJourney. Current mood, perhaps.

Welcome to week three of the AI era. Another long week, another set of lots of things, another giant post. I intend to take a nice four-day vacation in Mexico starting today, during which I won’t do any writing. I’m sure the pace of things will slow down real soon now. I mean, they have to. Don’t they?

GPT-4 Right Out of the Box In some ways, the best and worst thing about GPT-4 was its cutoff date of September 2021. After that date it had no access to new information, and it had no ability to interact with the world beyond its chat window. As a practical matter, that meant that a wide range of use cases didn’t work. GPT-4 would lack the proper context. In terms of much of mundane utility, this would often destroy

Before I begin, I have an announcement to make: My game, the Emergents Trading Card Game, has launched! You can download the game here for free for Windows, Mac and Android. On Android, you’ll have to side load it for now. While I am obviously biased: I highly encourage you to download the game, play a bit, give it a shot, decide if it is for you.

Microsoft Research (conflict of interest? what’s that?) has issued a 154-page report entitled Sparks of Artificial Intelligence: Early Experiments With GPT-4, essentially saying that GPT-4 could reasonably be viewed as a kind of early stage proto-AGI.

It has been a subject of much recent internet discourse that the kids are not okay. By all reports, the kids very much seem to be not all right. Suicide attempts are up. Depressive episodes are way up. The general vibes and zeitgeist one gets (or at least that I get) from young people are super negative. From what I can tell, they see a world continuously getting worse along numerous fronts, without an ability to imagine a positive future for the world, and without much hope for a positive future for themselves.

Many have already written about the events of the past week’s crisis. If you want the basics of what happened, you have many options. Your best bet, if available to you, is that this is Matt Levine’s wheelhouse. He did not disappoint, offering at least