Rhaedas

"We're sorry (we got caught). Here's a free identity production scam to make you feel safe again.

I begin to wonder if identity theft protection was the next big thing to get into after self storage. A bit of investment and then there's very little upkeep, and the companies keep that demand rolling in.

I read "free credit monitoring" as allowing your name to get on another list to be sold.

LLMs alone won't. Experts in the field seem to have different opinions on if they will help get us there. What is concerning to me is that the issues and dangers of AGI also exist with advanced LLM models, and that research is being shelved because it gets in the way of profit. Maybe we'll never be able to get to AGI, but we sure better hope if we do we get it right the first time. How's that been going with the more primitive LLMs?

Do we even know what the "right" AGI would be? We're treading in dangerous waters.

So any entity that does something stupid that makes companies not want to associate with them anymore can sue for damages caused by their own mistake?

This is either very stupid or some 6-D chess move to make millions. Hmm...

Also, free market as long as it's profitable for you, right?

Humans don't live that long. That's only about 1.5 million 30 min videos, which isn't a huge amount for a whole day's worth of scraping.

Kiosks of any sort can vary, from fast food to grocery to other types. There are some that work well and make self service far faster and easier, and others that routinely have issues. I've never used McD's, but I have used Sheetz a lot before and it flows very well both in displaying the options as well as suggestive selling that isn't in your face and disruptive. As for groceries, Publix has always been perfect for me, while some others not as much. Walmart's is 50/50 on if it will work okay or have some issue.

I wonder if there's a list of what manufacturer supplies what kiosks and a correlation can be made.

Outside of the ordering, McDs has never been the best, but as they've dropped in quality to drive profits and still meet the demand that persists regardless, so have others. My favorite used to be Burger King in the 90s, but I will go to McD instead of stepping foot in a BK at this point, that's how bad they are.

And the stupid thing is, none of them are doing anything much different. The quality doesn't have to be this low in food and service. I can only assume the bottom line is greater if they sacrifice everything needed to keep standards up and maintain just enough to keep a minimum demand flowing.

Good questions.

What sorts of scenarios involving the emergence of AGI do you think regulating the availability of LLM weights and training data (or of more closely regulating AI training, research, and development within the “closed source” shops like OpenAI) would help us avoid?

Honestly, we might be too late anyway for avoidance, but it's specifically research of the alignment problem that I think regulation could help with, and since they're still self regulation and free to do what OpenAI did with their department for that...it's akin to someone manufacturing a new chemical and not bothering any research on side effects, only what they can gain from it. Oh shit, never mind, that's standard operating procedure isn't it, at least as long as the government isn't around to stop it.

And how does that threat compare to impending damage from climate change if we don’t reduce energy consumption + reliance on fossil fuels?

Another topic that I personally think we're doomed to ignore until things get so bad they affect more than poor people and countries. How does it compare? Climate change and the probable directions it takes the planet are much more of a certainty than the unknown of if AGI is possible and what effects AGI could have. Interesting that we're taking the same approaches though, even if it's more obvious a problem. Plus profiting via greenwashing rather than a concentrated effort to do effective things to mitigate what we could.

No surprise, since there's not a lot of pressure to do any other regulation on the closed source versions. Self monitoring of a profit company always works out well...

And for any of the "AGI won't happen, there's no danger"...what if on the slightest chance you're wrong? Is the maddening rush to get the next product out without any research on what we're doing worth a mistake? Scifi is fiction, but there's lessons there too, and we're ignoring them all because "that can't happen" is stronger than "let's be sure".

Besides, even with no AGI, humans alone can do huge damage with "bad" AI tools, that we're not looking into either.

Dunno. That's why they pay you the big bucks.

Wait, that IS why they pay you that much, right?

They actually took it from Reagan. But you could still maintain the same arguments, even though the times were a bit different. The "Again" is always a bit of a questionable part. "Make America Better" isn't as aggressive in the goal, but it's more honest and broad in who and what it's referring to. I'd rather have some solid ideas than a slogan, any day.

I don't think it's that uncommon an opinion. An even simpler version is the constant repeats over years now of information breaches, often because of inferior protect. As a amateur website creator decades ago I learned that plain text passwords was a big no-no, so how are corporation ITs still doing it? Even the non-tech person on the street rolls their eyes at such news, and yet it continues. CrowdStrike is just a more complicated version of the same thing.

Yes, there is a low unemployment number. As with the rest, you haven't validated that it's a good measure of the current state of things. It's arguably never been.