Highlights 4. AI Intelligence Plateau?

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)