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Get an Electric Toothbrush. 2023-01-05T21:08:21.726Z

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Comment by Cervera on Inflection.ai is a major AGI lab · 2023-08-15T09:48:10.396Z · LW · GW

"We'll be building a cluster of around 22,000 H100s. This is approximately three times more compute than what was used to train all of GPT4. 

 

This bothers me. It's a naive way of seeing compute. It's like confusing Watts and Watt-hours 

22,000 H100s is three times the amount of FLOP/s than what was used to GPT-4, so you could train it in 3x less time, of with 1/3 of your cluster and the same time. 

I think this view of looking at compute helps making naive asumptions about what this compute can be used to. And FLOP/s are not a perfect unit for normal discourse when we're at x10¹⁵ scales. 

Comment by Cervera on Are the majority of your ancestors farmers or non-farmers? · 2023-06-20T09:06:08.378Z · LW · GW

If ancestor is parent/mother/grandparent etc but nothing else. Obviously non hunters.

If we count how many people dead or alive are you related to. Farmers.

Comment by Cervera on Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin · 2023-06-06T10:07:35.095Z · LW · GW

Better than 90% of amateur fiction posted. 

Comment by Cervera on The AGI Race Between the US and China Doesn’t Exist. · 2023-06-03T09:40:43.178Z · LW · GW

This gap will only widen over time; China is failing to develop a domestic semiconductor industry, despite massive efforts to do so, and is increasingly cut off from international semiconductor supply chains.

 

I would say this is a falsehood 

The US export ban on Controlled GPUs has really made china push for local semiconductor manufacturing way, and accelerate their projects, they dont have 5nm TSMC quality wafers, fine, but they're developing the full stack. 

tphuang on Twitter: "Semiconductor export from Korea down 41% in April Falling SSD price in China due to YMTC produced 2TB SSDs widely available < 1000K RMB https://t.co/Oh4alI8niC Samsung can't compete w/ YMTC production cost, now cutting production after resisting for months. as YMTC restart…" / Twitter

 

Yicai Global 第一财经 on Twitter: "China’s TanKeBlue to Supply SiC Wafers, Boules to German Chip Giant Infineon @Infineon https://t.co/GRgPjKsaCr" / Twitter

 

I mean if this was a "The AGi Race Between the US and Russia doesnt exist" okay fine, but Seeing how more than half the papers that land in ArXiv have chinese authors in them, plus the whole China does 90% of electronic manufacturing in the world. I dont understand how you come to the conclusion that china is hopelessly dead in the water. 


The day the US export ban on GPU happened, okay, most of us really wondered, but seeing how they're operating 6 months to a year afterwards, it just obvious that they will be able to make it happen. 

 

Comment by Cervera on I bet $500 on AI winning the IMO gold medal by 2026 · 2023-05-11T18:37:59.250Z · LW · GW

I dont think the difficulty of the task has much with the outcome. 

 

I mean, I take your comment at face value and update to "it's going to get powerful faster" and not the other way around.

Comment by Cervera on My Assessment of the Chinese AI Safety Community · 2023-04-25T07:01:18.188Z · LW · GW

A "moonshot idea" I saw brought up is getting Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfiction translated into Chinese (please never ever do this).

 

Can you expand on this? Why would it be a bad idea? I have interacted with mainland chinese people (outside of china) and I'm not really making the connection. 

Comment by Cervera on ask me about my battery · 2023-04-22T12:57:38.840Z · LW · GW

How do you think discharge rates would affect the battery? Would it behave like a LFP that basically outputs mostly the same rate of Amps in the full spectrum of charge (Voltage varies little with discharge %)  

Do you think an approach like this generates bateries with long lifetimes? 

Did you expect balancing of these particular batteries to be particularly complicated? 

Basically, tell us more! 

Comment by Cervera on Exposure to Lizardman is Lethal · 2023-04-03T06:25:40.973Z · LW · GW
Comment by Cervera on Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky · 2023-04-01T07:12:26.751Z · LW · GW

Well, Evals and that stuff OpenAI did with predicting loss could be a starting point to work in the tables. 

But we dont really know, I guess that's the point EY is trying to make. 

Comment by Cervera on Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky · 2023-03-31T22:00:20.288Z · LW · GW

Use tables for concrete loads and compare experimentally with the to be poured concrete, if a load its off, reject it.

We dont even have the tables about ML. Start making tables, dont build big bridges until you got the fucking tables right.

Enforce bridge making no larger than the Yudkowski Airstrike Threshold.

Comment by Cervera on The 0.2 OOMs/year target · 2023-03-30T22:49:57.656Z · LW · GW

I appreciate the concept. 

I wonder about how the hardware overhangs would look like after the moratorium ends or somebody bypasses it.

On first thought it doesnt look like a robuts solution, I assume a 15-20% improvement on Compute access per year. Would need to plot it against the moratorium treshold and see if over time one gets closer to the Yudkowski Airstrike treshold  but I assume no, 20% vs 54%,,

I dont know! maybe this is a good idea. 

Comment by Cervera on Will people be motivated to learn difficult disciplines and skills without economic incentive? · 2023-03-20T12:22:18.694Z · LW · GW

I dont think I never learned something because it would make me a better worker / provide me with more economical resources when I was a child and was in need of tutoring, I got lucky to have a somewhat curious mind and I tried to saciate it. 

 

Of course as an adult I choose to do things that are useful, overall, and that normally repercutes on being a human with skills that other people pay for. But the explicit bayesian calculation about knowledge and money is not one I tend to do, what interest me interest me. Of course when trying to learn something as an adult the friction of the subject is a marker that determines how likely I'm going to try to acquire the information, for example, I have read about Laser gyros, but the mountain of knowledge was too unsumournable to actually learn how laser gyros work, really. 

If the LLMs can lower the friction I guess everybody will be more likely to learn things. Also, there is no "big mistery" in most fields, you just need a structured idea of a certain amount of concepts. Some of them more palatable than others. (I know what a sigmoid activation is, but I dont have the high school knowledge about the funcion very fresh on my mind) These tools could help with it. 

 

(I tried to parse this comment on Bing writing tool to get a better output and it just came as more corporate) English is not my first language but this just feels worse. 

 I have always been curious about learning new things, regardless of their economic value or usefulness for my career. When I was a child and needed tutoring, I did not choose subjects based on how they would make me a better worker or provide me with more resources. Instead, I followed my interests and tried to satisfy them. Of course, as an adult, I also consider the practical aspects of learning something new, such as how it can benefit me professionally or personally. 

But I do not usually make explicit Bayesian calculations about knowledge and money; rather, I learn what interests me. However, sometimes the difficulty of learning something can discourage me from pursuing it further. For example, I have read about laser gyros, but the amount of knowledge required to understand how they work was too overwhelming for me. 

If there were tools that could lower the friction of learning new things, such as language models that could explain concepts in simple terms or provide structured overviews of different fields, I think everyone would be more likely to learn more things. 

After all, most fields do not have "big mysteries" that are impossible to grasp; they just require familiarity with certain concepts and their relationships. Some of these concepts may be more intuitive than others (for instance, I know what a sigmoid activation is in neural networks, but I do not remember much about the function itself from high school math). These tools could help bridge these gaps and make learning easier and more enjoyable.
 

Comment by Cervera on GPT-4 · 2023-03-14T18:34:44.319Z · LW · GW

So first thoughts while reading the research/Gpt-4 page

- ChatGPT System Prompt open soon to users, not API holders, that's going to be interesting. 

-Only trained adversarialy with 50 experts? One would think you would spend a bit more and do it with 100x more people? Or if hard to coordinate, at least 500. 

Closing in on human performance, but I would love to see numbers on the compute needed to train. They can predict loss accurately, but what that loss means seems to be mostly an open problem. 

Will need a couple days and rereads to digest this. 

Comment by Cervera on How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI · 2023-01-12T12:14:29.581Z · LW · GW

I did finish it, and was going to edit the original comment, I get the purpose of what you did here, thanks for the post, it's an interesting read. 

Comment by Cervera on How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI · 2023-01-12T10:44:23.654Z · LW · GW

I plan on reading the whole post, but a thing struck with me on the first paragraph. 

 

it's not a "her", it's a "it"

Happened yesterday too in Spanish in another forum, using feminine pronouns to refer to ChatGPT (Terrible name) I guess it's more "normal" in my native language because Intelligence has a feminine gender on my language. But seeing it in English really makes me notice. 

Comment by Cervera on Why don't Rationalists use bidets? · 2023-01-03T13:23:57.850Z · LW · GW

I was trying to imply that the flow of water goes in a single direction. And that it's a quite irrational fear to be sprayed by others fecal matter in this case. 

 

I dont like the japanese style ones, at my home we have a hand mini showerhead that we direct ourselves. We clean it periodically and it rarely touch anybody's skin. All the muslim world has that. 

Comment by Cervera on Why don't Rationalists use bidets? · 2023-01-02T19:36:20.991Z · LW · GW

Would you drink water from a kitchen sink? 

 

In my country we have traditional bidets, they're another porcelain furniture that sits near the toilet, so you suffle to it to clean yourself. Usually with warm water and soap. 

Not all homes have it but just using paper feels like savagery, also, access to a full sized bidet like the one I describe allows you to clean yourself without showering, like, all the important parts. 

Comment by Cervera on AGI Impossible due to Energy Constrains · 2022-12-01T13:27:52.182Z · LW · GW

I dont think I wrote that statement with that particular intention in mind. 

I'm not trying to imply he is wrong because he doenst know our "groupthink" I was just generally annoyed at how he started the post, so i wanted to be reasonably civil, but a bit mean. 

Thanks for noticing, I'm not convinced I should have refrained from that particular comment tho.

What would you have said? 

Comment by Cervera on AGI Impossible due to Energy Constrains · 2022-11-30T19:17:37.435Z · LW · GW

Hey, Interesting post. 

Artificial General Inteligence has nothing to do with simulating brains. 

The approaches are different, the math formulares are different, We're slowly moving to sparcity for some things (wich is similar to how a brain works) but still. 

I dont think you are calibrated properly about the ideas that are most commonly shared in the LW community. 

Nobody is saying "we will get a so good brain simulator that will kill us" That's not the point. 

The point is that we can create agents in other ways, and those Agents can still kills us, no brain simulation included. 

Comment by Cervera on Actually, All Nuclear Famine Papers are Bunk · 2022-10-12T12:09:49.639Z · LW · GW

Thanks for the content. 

I woke up today wondering about fallout. Wich modern, mostly fusion weapons, it surely cannot be that bad. 

The amount of grams of plutonium used before detonating the fusion reaction should be too little to generate the mass histery about fall out, this is not the sixties. 

 

Epistemic status: I only have hunches and have to confirm what I just wrote with facts. 

Comment by Cervera on A Few Terrifying Facts About The Russo-Ukrainian War · 2022-10-01T20:45:18.816Z · LW · GW

I think there is a discussion to be had about if a country that has countless military bases of another country in their land is occupied of just an "ally" It's not clear to me there is a big difference in practical terms. 

Comment by Cervera on Jetlag, Nausea, and Diarrhea are Largely Optional · 2022-03-28T17:55:55.600Z · LW · GW

How could one end up taking the correct medication without knowing first that they're lactose intolerant? 

I don't see how that could happen. To end up taking lactose pills you need to know there is something wrong with your lactase tolerance in particular. 

Comment by Cervera on It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World · 2022-03-15T20:01:25.076Z · LW · GW

I don't see how Claiming hate speech changes anything about the underlying ideas. 

Comment by Cervera on Vavilov Day Discussion Post · 2022-01-31T11:32:53.417Z · LW · GW

I have done fasts before, but I did not partake in this year Vavilov Day, because, well, my birthday happens to fall in one of those days. 

Thinking about it afterwards, I should have. And I think this could be a positive thing to do for most people. Let me expand on that thought. 

  • First, Most people have never been in a state where their body does not have food in their stomach, and the sets of feelings that come with it are interesting and thought provoking at the least, and can be life changing at best. most humans historically have fasted, voluntarily and involuntarily, and I don't think removing these set of experiences fully from our life it's a good thing, so any effort on bringing it back is a net positive in my eyes, but again, I do fasts from time to time. 
  • Second, Done with a bit of care, meaning, taking enough electrolytes, the Keto Flu feeling disappears, and you are left with the feeling of constant energy that Ketosis gives you, which can be an interesting feeling, plus, Giving a break to our digestive system is actually valuable. 

The reason to celebrate Vavilov with a fast makes sense to me. Specially when doing a fast can increase focus, and celebrates a historical event that really changed the world. 

I hope to get in the bandwagon next year.