I think the watershed moment was when it was proven that it can solve highschoolers maths olympiad problems at competitive level. These problems require complexity of thinking that is beyond what most humans have to deal with in their entire lifetime. When AI took that in stride it was obvious that sky is the limit and entirety of current human achivement is a milestone but in a sense of the one that the car passes while doing 60.
The right way to look at it is that LLMs help us to maximize the utility of the entirety of current human achievement/knowledge by discovering obscure connections in it.
The qualitative difference is that it searches semantically across unstructured data and is able to cleverly combine related searches into an answer.
Imagine SQL but the queries mostly write themselves and database is just entirety of human knowledge with no formalization. If you were to create such thing 7 years ago you'd say somebody expects a miracle out of you. I don't get why so many people have trouble recognizing it now as such.
Comming back to SQL analogy... When you make a view over existing data tables that calculates something novel did you extend the amount of existing data?
Because AIs are sort of like that. Creating views of existing data no human has ever came up with. Views that might unlock new even more surprising and useful views. They are sort of materialized views because we are writing down what LLMs came up with. So they are new data tables. Derived, true. But possibly novel and unlocking something else.
I see a lot of Self-driving cars hitting people vs. reckless drivers hitting people.
What I want is simple: accountability. If a human hits a human, we throw the book at them in the case of a modality of negligence. If a robot screws up, how do we remedy and discourage?
It should be 100% liability on the self-driving car. Only by doing that will there be enough incentive for the manufacturers to drive the accident rate down to zero (or in practice a low enough number that the cost to manufacturer of the remaining accidents is negligible). Less than 100% liability provides wiggle room, which car manufacturers will exploit to maximise profits over lives. With 100% liability manufacturers can still make a pile of money, but only if they have a low accident rate.
The shenanigans AI companies have been up to recently (including boasting about criminal behaviour hacking other companies) without repercussions is pretty good proof that it isn't "easy".
The rights holders that got a settlement out of Anthropic spent two years and probably a fortune fighting in court. If that’s “easy”, then sure, this is a solved problem and there’s no point discussing it.
> An example where no one attemped to hold anyone liable isn't a counterexample to what happens when we do.
Yes it is (specifically, a counter example to it being easy, not that it’s possible). The whole world saw HuggingFaces get hacked and the collective legal response was crickets. The same world that’s had its legal system throw the DMCA and unauthorised access to computers legal book at researchers, games preservationists and random people trying to access media that they can’t licence in their region.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the popular use of the phrase relating to people who exhibited actual psychosis-like symptoms where the AI fed into a lowlevel but undeveloped delusion? Later people would appear to be experiencing a full blown episode which was fed and maintained by their interaction with AI?
- religious or mystical experiences, often paired with the belief that the AI model is a manifestation of a divine being and/or has become sentient
- belief that the person has made a great scientific breakthrough using AI, typically in someone with no real knowledge of the field (which was usually theoretical physics)
- paranoid fantasies, e.g. belief that one is being followed or surveilled, that one's computers or other electronic devices have been compromised, etc.
I'm the author of the blog. I don't know. Internally, we were half joking that we were going to get ransom notice, but we never did.
The only thing that sort of correlates with this attack is that before it started, we began rolling out some slightly more aggressive rate limits one by one. This was mostly because anytime any new "company" thinks they're going to catchup with Claude/OpenAI, they scrape us very aggressively (and they're not respectful about it). My guess is that the attackers behind this attack were already probing us (they were) and they thought the window of opportunity might be closing.
I definitely fall into that, on linux it's just a lot of extensions, scripts etc. Thing is, it's also brittle and not really useful for anybody to talk about it? Not sure I get what you mean with the third sentence.
Just curious, if you're tolerant of scraping, do you make an archive of all your content available so that scraping is unnecessary, and if so do the scrapers prefer that?
For somebody who knows a bit how things are set up, or is willing to spend 10 minutes researching, it's a no-brainer that you can just "git clone" entire linux kernel development history, or download entire wikipedia [0].
Alas, large number of scrapers are not willing to spend those 10 minutes, it would appear. So, here we are.
It's terabytes of content and other than we're the host not really related to each other. However, for most projects, it's possible to download a zip file of all the HTML docs for that project. We have a lower rate limit to pull these, but a scraper can pull thousands of docs at once. We only host a few hundred thousand projects so pulling a zip of the latest docs for all of them could be done in a day or two at a very reasonable rate.
It's also possible to request the docs already processed into markdown[1]. Lastly, basically all of the docs come from Git. A smart scraper could just clone a project's repo.
I run a similar service, and we get almost daily attacks like this. Sometimes it's a specific high-profile customer, other times it's broader.
I can't speak for RTD, but I think it's less "documentation site" and more just that we sit on the domains of high-profile products and the tools are just looking for any hole they can find?
Often it's even the company themselves, for whatever reason (security research, etc).
> We prefer Luanti over Minecraft due to its open-source design and expressive Lua API, which facilitates data collection and experimentation. - Says notoriously opaque corporation when it comes to anything closed source.
It's disappointing to see the way the developers are pushing this pre-alpha quality work. I don't know (nor care) about the personalities attached, but the pitch is neat. The way it is being handled with almost daily reports of RCE/Escalation is jaw dropping though. They need to spend some of those bux on auditing and less on whatever vibe-based engineering they're doing.
For haters: ignore them and recommend your favourite.
For lovers: lobby the developers to raise their standards.
Not yet, but I assume they will. They said they only ever show the official names designated by the country in question. Probably because a lot of countries disagree on borders as well as names and get really upset with people who get it wrong.
I believe AI is quite capable in the right circumstances, but I'm not convinced "this" is the watershed moment.
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