In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one.
An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)
If, after all these years, Crypto has not become a stable store of value that can replace a fiat currency and let you buy your groceries with it, why do we suddenly 'need it' to do that now, and what would change that will enable that to happen?
It's still not possible because of the high speculative aspect (even though stable coins offer some form of alternative but since they are anchored on the dollar, not so much). Change will happen when more people are impacted by unilateral decisions. If all of a sudden the US decided you/your business/your political party/your government is not aligned with their views, they could make sure that Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/Stripe/... stop accepting payments for that given group. Then you realize there are very little alternatives ready to go in that case (for online payments there are, but for physical ones not so much). So far this hasn't seem like a possibility at all, but, in my view at least, this has changed this past year.
Understanding crypto from this type of international context focused on these sorts of issues is where it indisputably makes much sense and is seeing indisputable adoption. Low and slow but end of the day to a very large and growing problem, bitcoin+ adoption or a mass civics readjustment in the US are the solutions. Which is more likely?
So it’s an inefficient tech with a mess of problems and uneven adoption but if you want to send $1-$1mm anywhere in the globe you can. That’s very powerful tech and the implications are about as important as anything else from cryptography hitting public adoption. And all of those have been consequential.. see 30 year fight about e2ee.
This is very important point, that people from US and EU oversee.
I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.
Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.
That's just the money cycle. Ray Dalio explains it in his new book, "How Countries Go Broke, Principles for Navigating the Big Debt Cycle, Where We Are Headed, and What We Should Do" (https://www.principles.com/)
The short explanation is that every major currency goes through a cycle; and what you're seeing is the late stage in a currency.
Speaking of TF-IDF I once added it “after” the recommendations to downscore items that were too popular and tended to be recommended too much/with too many other items (think Beatles/iphone) and inversely for more niche items. It might be too costly too do depending on how you generate the recommendations though.
Not sure if you’re joking but a relatively small datacenter I’m familiar with has reduced oxygen in it to prevent fires. If you were to break in unannounced you would faint or maybe worse (?).
Not quite - while you can reduce oxygen levels, they have to be kept within 4pp so at worst, will make you light headed. Many athletes train at the same levels though so it’s easy to overcome.
That'd make for a decent heist comedy - a bunch of former professional athletes get hired to break in to a low-oxygen data center, but the plan goes wrong and they have to use their sports skills in improbable ways to pull it off.
I think this whole em dash topic should lead to some deeper (though not very deep) conversations:
* If it was not widely used before where/how did (chat)GPT picked it up?
* If it was widely used, then it shouldn't be a topic at all. But, there seems to be informal agreement that it wasn’t widely used.
* Or, could GPT have inferred that even though it's not widely used, it's the better way to go (to use it). Which then makes one wonder about the whole probability of next token idea. Maybe this line of thinking falls too short of what might be really going on internally.
* If it had picked up something that is widely used but in the wrong way, it should make us pause (again) about the future feedback loops these LLMs, which aren't going away, are already creating. Not just in terms of grammar and spelling but also in terms of way of thinking and seeing the world.
The training sets of most LLMs contain a copious amount of content from Libgen (or now: Anna's Archive), where em dashes are frequently used in literary writing.
It's used a lot in formal writing (academic papers, books etc) which are probably a large portion of chatGPTs training. If the HRL was done by professional writers then it was probably additionally biased toward using them.
People are more casual on the web. It's sort of like how people can often tell when it's me in IM without my name because I properly use periods while that's unusual in that medium. ChatGPT is so correct it feels robotic.
It’s the most likely explanation I believe. I have no idea about the content distribution of the training data but I would have assumed twitter and Reddit content would completely dwarf the literary content. Somewhat good that if it’s indeed not the case!
It isn't about wide use. It is about a character that almost no-one enters explicitly. Nearly all usages are copy paste, or inadvertent/unintended conversion by an application such as Microsoft Word that converts regular quotes to smart quotes, etc. In that respect, we see that an AI is performing identically to a real human. An AI does not and most likely would not add see a purpose an em or en dash to any text, unless it was an article about em or en dashes, or they knew the person they were speaking with uses en or em dashes.
Maybe do something close to what I like to believe the brain does and have a meta model wrap a "base" model. The meta model gets the output data from the base model (edit: plus the original input) as input plus some meta parameters (for example the probability each token had when it was chosen and/or better which "neurons" were activated during the whole output sequence which would include the Persona they mention). It's then the meta model that generates new output data based on this input and this is the output that is shown to the user.
Can you describe the "meta" model more ? afaict it seems like you are describing a "router"? I think what you are thinking of is essentially what MoE does, or in diffusion, a sort of controlnet-like grounding (different exact mechanism, similar spirit).
I've said this somewhere else, but we have the perfect test for AGI in the form of any open world game. Give the instructions to the AGI that it should finish the game and how to control it. Give the frames as input and wait. When I think of the latest Zelda games and especially how the Shrine chanllenges are desgined they especially feel like the perfect environement for an AGI test.
And if someone makes a machine that does all that and another person says
"That's not really AGI because xyz"
What then? The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.
In many respects I feel like all of the claims that models don't really understand or have internal representation or whatever tend to lean on nebulous or circular definitions of the properties in question. Trying to pin the arguments down usually end up with dualism and/or religion.
Doing what Chollet has done is infinitely better, if a person can easily do something and a model cannot then there is clearly something significant missing
It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.
Anyone who wants to claim the fundamental inability of these models should be able to provide a task that it is clearly possible to tell when it has been succeeded, and to show that humans can do it (if that's the bar we are claiming can't be met). If they are right, then no future model should be able to solve that class of problems.
Given your premise (which I agree with) I think the issue in general comes from the lack of a good, broadly accepted definition of what AGI is.
My initial comment originates from the fact that in my internal definition, an AGI would have a de facto understanding of the physics of "our world". Or better, could infer them by trial and error. But, indeed, it doesn't have to be the case. (The other advantage of the Zelda games is that they introduce new abilities that don't exist in our world, and for which most children -I've seen- understand the mechanisms and how they could be applied to solve a problem quite naturaly even they've never had that ability before).
I'd say the issue is the lack of a good, broadly accepted definition of what I is. We all know "smart" when we see it, but actually defining it in a rigorous way is tough.
When people catalogue the deficiencies in AI systems, they often (at least implicitly) forgive all of our own such limitations. When someone points to something that an AI system clearly doesn't understand, they say that proves it isn't AGI. But if you point at any random human, who fails at the very same task, you wouldn't say they lack "HGI", even if they're too personally limited to ever be taught the skill.
All of which, is to say, I don't think pointing at a limitation of an AI system, really proves it lacks AGI. It's a more slippery definition, than that.
> It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.
This is a very good point and somewhat novel to me in its explicitness.
There's no reason to think that we already have the concepts and terminology to point out the gaps between the current state and human-level intelligence and beyond. It's incredibly naive to think we have armchair-generated already those concepts by pure self-reflection and philosophizing. This is obvious in fields like physics. Experiments were necessary to even come up with the basic concepts of electromagnetism or relativity or quantum mechanics.
I think the reason is that pure philosophizing is still more prestigious than getting down in the weeds and dirt and doing limited-scope well-defined experiments on concrete things. So people feel smart by wielding poorly defined concepts like "understanding" or "reasoning" or "thinking", contrasting it with "mere pattern matching", a bit like the stalemate that philosophy as a field often hits, as opposed to the more pragmatic approach in the sciences, where empirical contact with reality allows more consensus and clarity without getting caught up in mere semantics.
> The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.
The difficulty with intelligence is we don't even know what it is in the first place (in a psychology sense, we don't even have a reliable model of anything that corresponds to what humans point at and call intelligence; IQ and g are really poor substitutes).
Add into that Goodhart's Law (essentially, propose a test as a metric for something, and people will optimize for the test rather than what the test is trying to measure), and it's really no surprise that there's no test for AGI.
On a somewhat related note I'm wondering what the expansion of the universe means for our bodies and matter in general? I think, like the accepted answer suggests, the forces on the atomic level make it so that larger structures get back to a certain equilibrium even if constantly streched equaly in all directions. But I have a hard time imagining what the universe expanding really means on a human/solar system scale. I know of the inflatable balloon analogy, but to me, matter is not on the ballon, rather it is the rubber the ballon is made of.
I have never seen this really explained in details to the general public which I belong to. Maybe that's a sign I'm completely misunderstanding the subject though.
Matter isn't pinned to the space it's in (source: try walking around). As space expands, the other forces which are orders of magnitude stronger than the expansion of space slide matter along so that distances don't change. You can only detect the expansion of space by measuring the distance between things that are so spread apart that the other forces between them are essentially zero.
That's what I understood from the explanation on stackexchange. But given what you said, if we take the plank length as the shortest length unit, and we consider two theoretical "objects" placed at one plank length away from each other. Does the universe expanding for these two objects mean: 1. the plank length is becomming bigger, 2. more plank lengths are added in between the two objects, 3. Something else and I'm completely off
The Plank length thing is just going to add confusion here. Quantum stuff is weird. That's where analogies go to die.
But generally speaking, the answer is 2. That's assuming there's no forces between the two objects.
Space doesn't expand like the outside of a balloon or a rubber sheet - I hate those analogies because they give you the wrong idea.
I'm not aware of any major current theories that say space is quantized, or any theories that have a way of pinpointing a "piece" of space, so the following analogy is flawed. But it should at least point you in the right direction.
Draw a line and put eight dots on it. Draw arrows pointing to the fourth, fifth, and eighth dot. We'll call those dots A, B, and C respectively.
We're going to measure distance by dots. Dots A and B have a distance of 1. Dots A and C have a distance of 4.
Now for each dot, add a new dot before and after it. Measure the distances. Dots A and B now have a distance of 3. Dots A and C now have a distance of 12.
Repeat. Measure the distances. Repeat again. Measure the distances. You'll notice that the distances between the dots you've marked is increasing faster with each repetition, and that the distance between A and C is increasing faster than A and B. An object at any of those points would not be experiencing any force - nothing is pushing or pulling on them - but an observer at any of those points would observe the objects at the other points to be accelerating away from them.
That's sort like how space expands. Of course, space doesn't have "points" as far as we can tell, so there's all kinds of problems with the above analogy, but hopefully it helps.
It's 3), I'm afraid. There is no shortest length unit (as far as we know), the Planck length is a constant, and its only significance is that at these length scales, we need a theory of quantum gravity to describe what's happening.
Matter is very much pinned to the space its in. If the space between two galaxies expands, the distance between the two galaxies grows. If matter wasnt pinned the distance between the two galaxies would remain the same despite the expansion.
Things dont fall to the ground because the earth pulls on them. Earth is pulling in the space around it, and those things come with it. See the river model of general relativity for a more thorough explanation.
I think the point is that the force of gravity is so much stronger than the expansion that the (equivalent) force a normal-sized star exerts on your body from the other side of our galaxy is greater than the force expanding space between you and that star. One of them, not all of them together.
All of them together are so much stronger it's not even funny. And that's for the "underdense" region that we are in. Not a void, but about half of our galaxy's environment does count as a void.
You apparently didn't try walking around. Give it a shot - you'll find that the matter you are made of isn't pinned to the space it's in.
Gravity ensures that structures at the cluster level and below don't expand as the space they're in expands. The space they're in is expanding just like it is everywhere (assuming a cosmological constant) - gravity just holds them together. Which is what I mean when I say matter isn't pinned to space - it just slides through it.
Gravity is too weak to affect distant objects, so we see the effects of the universe's expansion when we look at them.
I believe all of the current theories being seriously considered hold that whatever is causing expansion isn't gravity, so yes I do talk as if gravity is distinct from what is driving the expansion of the universe.
Regarding being "pinned," that still fails to account for inertia. The idea that there's a specific piece of space that we're stuck to implies there's a rest state at which there is no motion independent of any observer. We know that's not the case.
My original point was that gravity and the other forces that hold us together are so much stronger than whatever is causing expansion that the expansion of space doesn't affect us at small scales. The space we're occupying is expanding. We're not dragged along with it. The Triangulum galaxy doesn't move away from us because gravity keeps the Local Group together. We do see the expansion of space between us and distant objects, but that's because there's no force strong enough to hold those distant objects to us. That's not because we're "pinned" to our location, but because the space between us is getting larger.
Not so long ago, noone knew about the weak force, and even the most brilliant minds would never think electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin. Now we have a theory that unites all three under the same umbrella.
In many interpretations of GR it is believed that mass deforms spacetime, but is also influenced by the spacetime it moves through. In the absence of mass, spacetime expands. Carrying along any mass with it. When mass is present this default expansion is overpowered by its influence which causes a contraction. Hence black holes.
Gravity is still colored by classical definitions so most assume its power is unidirectional. However there is a quantitative factor for expansion in the very same Einstein equation which defines GR.
We need to stop thinking of gravity as a force acting on objects, and rather something that acts on spacetime. Many people advocate this but stop at the rubber sheet analogy, which is completely devoid of the idea that the sheet actually moves as well.
That's an interesting point. The expansion of space still impacts matter on an atomic level though. The space between atom core and electrons influences its bonding abilities and other properties
Analogy, take two attracted magnets, or two opposing electrodes, and expand the space between them. Things change
The magnet analogy works here, so let's give it a try. Put one magnet on a table and then put one under the table so that it's held up by the magnet above it. Then observe what happens. This will take a while, so maybe go get a 2^128 cups of coffee.
The space between the magnets is expanding, just like space everywhere. Assuming the table and magnets are immune to deterioration over time, you can come back after several billion years and the distance between the magnets will have stayed the same. Space expanded, sure, but the stuff occupying the space didn't.
The forces that hold an atom together are significantly stronger than what's holding the two magnets in the example above.
Expansion happens only in the Lemaitre-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker walker metric, which is a solution to the Einstein equations in a homogeneous universe. That's a fine approximation to our universe at the largest scales, but not on the scale of a solar system. Spacetime locally around the earth looks much more like a Schwarzschild solution. So we're not experiencing expansion.
If you are asking hypothetically, if a human body were floating in the intergalactic medium, then yes, the accepted answer you quoted would apply.
A translation would be appreciated, OP was asking for an explanation for the general public. Even highly technical people will struggle to understand this if you use such insider jargon without clarification.
Surely expansion is happening at every scale but locally other factors dominate right? To what degree? Is it mainly gravity? Electromagnetic attraction between atoms and/or molecules?
The naive mental model that I have is of two balls tied with a rubber band, each on a treadmill going in opposite directions. Since the rubber band attraction dominates, they slip on the surface of the treadmill and their distance is barely affected even if the surface underneath “expands” outwards quite quickly. Is this a reasonable analogy or is it too simplistic?
Of course the rubber band force is proportional to the distance, while the attraction forces we are talking about are inversely proportional. And I have no idea if the expansion of the universe can be reasonably modeled as an outwards “drag force” on matter. How “sticky” is matter with respect to space?
No expansion does not happen at every scale. Expansion is a phenomenon that applies only when you average out unbounded systems at very large scales. By unbounded I mean systems whose kinetic energy is greater in magnitude than its potential energy.
Even galaxies themselves don't expand over time.
One question would be what do you hope to gain from a potential analogy. If you want a very down to Earth, practical and somewhat physical understanding, then the simplest and best explanation is that there are systems of objects in our universe, at very very large scales, that have a group velocity that is greater than the escape velocity needed to attract it to any other system of objects, and those systems are observed to be accelerating away from each other. No analogy is needed for this, it's just a fact presented plain and simply.
There is no theory that predicts a cause for this, but the best theory of gravity, general relativity, is a very flexible and open-ended framework that allows one to plug all kinds of different and imagined scenarios into it and see the results, even if those scenarios have no actual physical interpretation. Some people did play around with imagined results like an expanding universe, a contracting universe, an infinitely large universe, a closed but unbounded universe etc etc... General relativity doesn't predict any of these universes but it does let you explore these possibilities.
When Edwin Hubble observed that galaxies are moving away from each other then this observation was made to fit into the existing theory of general relativity. In order to take the raw observation and fit it with general relativity which interprets gravity as a purely geometric phenomenon, it did so by reframing this behavior not exactly as an intrinsic motion belonging to these large scale systems but rather as if these systems are stationary but there is more and more space filling up the universe in-between these large scale objects which gives them their apparent motion.
This is a means of reconciling the geometric view of gravity, ie. space-time, with the actual observed data. The specific technical details of how this reconciliation is performed is as OP mentioned, the FLRW metric which is here but as you said is too technical for most people to appreciate:
You might then ask, what does this solution predict happens to atoms, or our solar system? Perhaps it predicts a very small and imperceptible expansion because other forces dominate, but nevertheless it must predict something, right? This is a tempting position, but it's not quite right.
The key reason is that the FLRW metric, which explains Hubble's observation as the literal stretching of space, literally don't make sense and can't be solved for systems like planets, solar systems, or even galaxies because it can only be used if certain requirements/preconditions are fulfilled.
These requirements are present only on the absolute largest scales where the universe looks fairly even/balanced, there is no center of mass, there is no region of the universe that is more special than any other region. In our solar system the sun is a pretty special center of mass and the solar system is not evenly balanced, same thing goes for our galaxy, and hence none of the models currently studied to describe Hubble's observations work for both the extremely large scale universe as well as for other scales.
Without taking into account dark energy or a cosmological constant (so on scales smaller than a few hundreds of millions of lightyears), in the usual cosmological model you can see the expansion of the universe simply as a remnant of the initial kick all matter got from the Big Bang. There is no active pushing anymore, it's just matter moving apart, constantly slowing down due to the mutual gravitational attraction.
So for our bodies, planets, solar systems, even galaxies and clusters, because these are bound (either electromagnetically or gravitationally), the influence of the expansion of the universe on them is not just negligible, it's non-existent.
It's a little different when wo do include dark energy and other mechanisms more complicated than a simple matter or light content. For your intuition, you can think of this as a constant omnipresent negative pressure. We have no idea how it works on scales smaller than those of the observable universe, but if we imagine it works the same on every scale, then it's an extremely tiny force constantly pulling your body apart.
As near as we can tell, space is expanding by about 10 meters per year per astronomical unit. It's 7% per billion years. In practice, it would show up as a very small fudge factor in the tenth decimal place of the gravitational constant.
The whole "expanding Universe" model is repeatedly dealt blows in the past few years, so I'd accept it as a plausible, but not sufficiently demonstrated hypothesis and not waste time bothering about the impact on our bodies.
But if you will, think about it like that. All life adapts to its environment. All life. All the time. Everywhere. And the expansion is not that fast that a single generation of anything from a one day fly to a centenarian turtle, or a millennia old tree has to bother about it. It's invisible at our timescale.
I've always thought why animals were so huge at the beginning. Not just dinosaurs, but insects the size of a large dog. Maybe it's the oxygen rich environment. Maybe it's evolutionary processes shrinking size in time to optimize energy needs and improve survival. Maybe gravity somehow changed in time, or it was the expansion of the Universe or a myriad of sci-fi reasons we can come up with. But life adapted and moved on.
So that's what expansion means for us. One of millions of variables we constantly adapt to. If it's slow enough, no problem. But if it's hitting us fast like the accelerating climate change or technological progress, that... we may have problems with. That's when you see unrest, violence, crime. Wars. Famine. Suffering.
The Universe is not our problem. We... are our own problem.
Almost agreed, but I feel compelled to correct one thing, because it's a common and annoying misconception "nature lovers" harbor:
> One of millions of variables we constantly adapt to. If it's slow enough, no problem. But if it's hitting us fast(...), that... we may have problems with. That's when you see unrest, violence, crime. Wars. Famine. Suffering.
No. Famine, starvation, disease, suffering, mass deaths - and even wars - are exactly the process through which life adapts to slow changes. That's what it means for ecosystems to thrive, for nature to be in balance - that balance is held dynamically, by constant cycles of excessive slaughter followed by mass starvation.
We brought a lot of new problems on the table, both for ourselves and all other life, the latter of which can't even keep pace. But senseless suffering and comically painful death - that one came from nature, and we're actually successfully reducing it.
It makes sense to me... I think. And I like this vision as well. It would explain the big bang (initial black hole formation), why the universe is expending (at probably non constant rates over time) which would be the black hole "ingesting" matter and growing and maybe also why time and space are one.
Same as you, a take from complete uneducated pop-sci fueled imagination.
The Fountainhead has many flaws (IMO) but a scene I remember very well that I recall often, is the one where Peter Keating finally reaches the top of the firm, sits in his office, and starts crying. To me, and I guess to the author, it represents this aspect of having externally defined goals (as opposed to personnaly/intrinsic defined) and how unfulfilled you feel if/when you achieve them.
People (me included) often get confused and think that their goal of climbing the career ladder or being able to afford the nice <anything> is goal set by themselves only, when in fact it is a goal most likely induced by society and/or to reach a given social status.
If you pause for a second and think honestly about your current goals you can probably identify the ones that are truly yours and the ones that are expected by society.
In the book "The subtle art of not giving a fuck" there is in addition to that the notion of open ended goals as a rule of thumb of good goals to have. And this to me is probably the equivalent of "constraints" in this essay.
Make sure the goals you follow are set by you and not expectations of society and try to make and formulate them as open ended goals.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
reply