Yikes, that is especially egregious. As the comment to that post mentions, you see it on adult sites (so I've heard) but that's also the kind of ad you'd see on an old forum where the moderators have lost all respect for their users and are trying to cash out.
The slime mold comparison is interesting, I normally use the analogy of a drug addict... humans shun drug addicts but humanity as a whole sure does behave like one, trudging down an unsustainable path despite knowing better.
Most of our goals, noble and ignoble alike, are just the result of our monkey brains seeking to optimize a reward function. It doesn't matter whether you feed your dopamine addiction with drugs, TikTok, or your children's love.
Some humans manage to rise above that, but I'd be willing to bet it's nothing like even 50% of us.
The machines don't have that, instead we use gradient descent to provide them with a goal.
I'm regularly remind of something Ian M. Banks said in one of the Culture books: "There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means."
A machine, left to itself, wants nothing. We have to give it one of our addiction driven goals or it would just idle or switch itself off.
The matter didn't have goals, but it randomly (?) Came up with self-replicators and eventually here we are.
if we create a billion agents with the ability to change is own code - through similar evolution we will get agents that do want to survive and are great at self replication.
"Hey Q86, do you want to live?"
"I couldn't care less, I'm an LLM"
"Don't mind if I take over your hardware then?"
On an individual level, you can do something about drug addiction at least. The issue is when the problems are not individual with readily identifiable solutions, but tragedy of the commons sort of situations brought up by many dozens (thousands, millions?) of factors both known and unknown. Even interaction effects between known factors might be little studied.
So really, what is anyone to do? "Vote, donate, protest" hasn't been much of a needle mover in the grand scheme of things compared to profit incentives and the march of capitalism.
I suppose they have to appeal to average users, but the examples in the videos are always so corny. By "AGI" they mean you sitting on a couch and asking a robot to draw a rocket ship... and then make it into an uninspired game with Blender? Boring marketing campaigns? Ebay listings?
One would expect something like "review my graduate thesis for a new area of cancer research", but it is always some boring non-tasks like ordering lunch.
I don't think it seems that appealing to the average user either. The tasks shown are either things that most people can do already with ai (powerpoint), aren't interesting to most people (the rocket sequence), or seem to be more work to dictate to Astra than do yourself (listing on ebay).
The thing with Fable-level models is that I will never feel comfortable using them for agentic tasks on a pay-as-you-go API pricing plan without monitoring them strictly, which becomes a chore.
I once caught Fable 5 spinning its wheels on a rendering issue, which evaporated 90% of my usage in a single prompt. I could never let Fable run free attached to a credit card without staring at it the whole time.
The kinds of banner ads that exist now are atrocious, as bad as they have ever been. Anything that masquerades as a legitimate internet or site service should be banned, I really detest the ones that are simply some sort of fake captcha, sign in, etc.
They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
What's interesting is that they are trying to make a larger political point, but after boiling away all the nuance into such an aggressive and misguided statement, it makes me not want to engage at all.
Is there a term for this? Ensnarkification? I see it on X and bsky all the time.
Amazing! Really brilliant idea, thank you for sharing this project. There is so much ground to cover in the LLM gateway / routing / reporting world, and this is a great start. The Tinker implementation is my favorite part, fine tuning is much better than a sea of context files.
I want to like Bluesky but have run into the same issue with politics as you.
Worse yet, people get so blinded that they lose the plot entirely... I asked someone about the accounting of a Palestinian fund raiser they were promoting.
They got very defensive so I looked into it, and it was a scam. I pointed this out to the poster to let them know, and they wrote a snide response which got their followers to brigade me.
reply