Tyler Cowen on ChatGPT’s o3 model being Artificial General Intelligence:
I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.
Jacob Silverman on internet slop:
The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.
Cowen is interested in peak performance, and good for him. He showed the same trait in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt, where all he cared about was that the really smart young people can do wonders with social media, externalities be damned.
Meanwhile, the median Internet user is exposed to reams of crap made by humans and AIs alike (Silverman’s article goes into more detail on the burgeoning field of paranoid schizophrenics boosting their own X posts for no particular purpose and the paragraph describing it is the closest I have seen real life come to an M. John Harrison novel which, if you know his prose, is somewhat concerning… and this is not the first time Harrison came to mind).
Note that for all the stories of the Internet’s demise it is still fairly easy to find good things. Look at micro.blog. Look at indieblog.page. Heck, look at reddit. You may have a website or two you visit out of habit — one you likely acquired before 2016 — which have since become chumbox-laden garbage. Delete those bookmarks: people who thought having clickbait adds was a good idea will have other ideas just as good.