He/him. Board member at CoSocial.ca.
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npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Profile Code
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2024-06-03T15:12:40+02:00 Event JSON
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"content": "{\"name\":\"Evan Prodromou\",\"about\":\"He/him. Board member at CoSocial.ca.\\n\\nDirector of Open Technology at Open Earth Foundation (OEF).\\n\\nFounder of Wikitravel, StatusNet, identi.ca, Fuzzy.ai. CTO of Breather, TRU LUV and MTTR.\\n\\nCreator of pump.io. Co-creator of GNU social.\\n\\nCo-chair of the Social Web Working Group at W3C. Co-author of ActivityStreams 2.0. Co-author of ActivityPub. Co-author of OStatus.\\n\\nGrad student in CS at Georgia Tech.\\n\\nThis network has been my life's work. Thanks for making it.\",\"website\":\"https://cosocial.ca/@evan\",\"picture\":\"https://media.cosocial.ca/accounts/avatars/109/493/705/899/503/027/original/386b89b440d529fb.jpg\",\"banner\":\"https://media.cosocial.ca/accounts/headers/109/493/705/899/503/027/original/195ed3596ded512c.png\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \"}" ,
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Last Notes npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou why's that? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou it's perfectly ok with me if this back of the envelope calculation isn't convincing to you. I'm sharing my reasoning for coming to the answer I would give to this question, not trying to convince you. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I don't know if I can provide a citation that params play the same role in LLMs that synapses play in biological brains. I only used it by very bare analogy; they are the "connections" between parts of the network. And from the little I know, I think they're much less complex than biological synapses. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I'm sorry I had an angry response to this earlier. I shouldn't have flown off the handle. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou thanks for the thoughtful reply! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Ultimately, I think it kind of doesn't matter. If machine intelligence can communicate and behave as if it "really" understands its percepts, I don't know if I care whether it truly is thinking or not. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Other humans at least have the same kinds of bodies as I do, so by the principle of mediocrity (I'm probably not an exception), if I have a mind other humans probably do too. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou This is the Problem of Other Minds, but even worse that with other humans. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Oh, one other thing that has come up is whether artificial intelligence is "true" intelligence; can it "really" think. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou thanks, that's a really interesting hypothesis. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou why are you confident in that? LLMs are great at a lot of things that computers haven't done well previously. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou OK. I find the idea that we can't have a conversation without rigorous definitions for every term grating. We can talk about vague topics; one of the benefits of intelligence. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou All that said, my gut is still pretty good with that 2040 date. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Oh, and we're going into a dangerous century. We might not have the social cohesion, much less the resources, to maintain huge AI labs through another 15 levels of doubling complexity. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou There have been previous generations of AI technology that hit walls -- the planning systems of the 1950s, the expert systems of the 1980s. It's possible that LLMs will hit some kind of wall -- that it won't be possible to get to superintelligence with that method. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou All that said, AI is in a very different place than it was at the beginning of my working career, during the "AI Winter" of the early 90s. Deep learning really changed a lot. We use AI techniques now a lot more, for a lot more areas of applicability. And LLMs are really impressive. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I'm pretty dubious about claims that superintelligence is so immanent, and so dangerous, that LLM technology should be restricted to only a few trusted companies and the US government. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I don't think we know for sure a lot about intelligence. We don't know that it can be implemented on silicon chips, but we also don't know if it can't. We don't know if it has to work like brains do, or if it could work in entirely different ways. We don't even know exactly how our own minds arise from our brains. We don't know if we can replicate intelligence without understanding our own first. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou It's possible that it's never. We only have one example of known intelligence, and a lot of interesting close calls, including not only some pretty smart mammals, but also eusocial insects as collective intelligences. We just don't know enough about intelligence to say what kinds of systems it can arise in, and what kind of systems it can't. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou A lot of the replies say that it will never happen. My guess is that some significant portion of the majority of people who answered 2060 or later mean "never" or "in the far future". npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou So, that's about 15 years. Let's say give or take 5 years. And assuming that it's even possible with LLM technology. But, if I were going to put money on it, I'd say around 2040. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou it's a poll, not a questionnaire. I write polls daily; you can take a look at the #EvanPoll hashtag for others. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou One way to define "superintelligence" is about 100x greater than human intelligence. That would be another 7-8 years. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Models are growing at about 2-3x per year. If it's possible for them to keep growing at that rate, it will be about 8-9 years before they get to 100 trillion. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Currently the biggest LLMs have about 0.5 trillion parameters -- the weights between nodes in the neural network. They're simpler than synapses, but they serve about the same function. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Thanks everyone! I have to admit that I'm not sure. Here's my best guess. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I'm asking about super intelligence because it's been in the news lately. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou You're right! I try to get a lot out of the 4 choices Mastodon gives me. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou ha! I hope very much that my lifetime extends to the end of this poll. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou there's a really good book on that, actually! "The emperor's new mind". I'm not sure I agree with Penrose but it's a really great read. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou whichever God! I meant, do you think there's something special about organic life that makes it possible for us to have intelligence and impossible for mechanical devices to have it? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou do we have to understand them to replicate them? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou how are humans intelligent? Magic? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou why not? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou why not? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou can any software think? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou only God can make intelligence, I guess? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou you should check your math on that argument! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou and yet one of the things that intelligent entities do that makes us interesting is that we can reason about vague concepts. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou why not? Physically impossible? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou explain! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou because of all the water and the energy that AI uses? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence?wprov=sfla1 npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou https://evanp.me/pollfaq#define npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Explain! What part is impossible? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou https://evanp.me/pollfaq#never npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou When will there be AI superintelligence? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Forbidden almond math npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I am a federation moderate -- I think if we can have 3, 5, or 10 different search engines, it's enough decentralisation. Solving distributed search problems is probably too much work for us. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou another is to have dedicated servers just for user/content search. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou The idea crosses over with the Fediverse in two ways: user search (finding accounts containing keywords) and content search (finding posts containing keywords). npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Yes, there are a few projects that do that. Wikipedia differentiates between "federated search" (one central endpoint): npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou This was a fun bit of research to do! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou it is good! I am almost finished; two more semesters worth of classes. It's been really rewarding. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou 😡 npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou isn't that what a "worst case scenario" is? The worst possible outcome? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Every person deserves human rights. Every nation deserves national rights. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Hey, Fediverse friends. I see you here and I'm glad we're together. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou LOL npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou why? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Apparently Russian state media refers to the Iraq War all the time. That the rule of law is over, that it's only rule by power now. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou "Body counts counted at least 110,600 violent deaths as of April 2009 (Associated Press). The Iraq Body Count project documents 186,901–210,296 violent civilian deaths in their table. All estimates of Iraq War casualties are disputed.[4][5]" npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou "Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 1,033,000 excess deaths (per the 2007 Opinion Research Business (ORB) survey). Other survey-based studies covering different time-spans find 461,000 total deaths (over 60% of them violent) as of June 2011 (per PLOS Medicine 2013), and 655,000 total deaths (over 90% of them violent) as of June 2006 (per the 2006 Lancet study). npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou "We hope these operations will be as rapid and least-deadly as possible, and that they don't lead to a humanitarian catastrophe." Damn. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I was listening to a podcast about this last night; that the Iraq War, started without the UN Security Council's approval, was the start of our current cycle of aggressive wars. The Iraq War broke the international legal regime; it started 20 years ago. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou that's good data, thanks! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou there are 12 of them at various entrances to the park. They were installed as part of the 375th anniversary of the city in 2017. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou there are a few of them, at different entrances to the park. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou they say a legend was born this day npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou and thanks for bringing attention to the use of AI in climate change mitigation. As someone who worked in climate data for four years, I can say that LLMs provide a lot of help in identifying and comparing projects for reducing emissions and adapting to a changing world. ClimateGPT looks like a great project to share. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou thanks for being here and sharing these stories. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou oh. Sure. Knock yourself out; the data is public. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou in the US there's about a 10% increase in software developer jobs from 2022 to 2025, the last year for which data is available. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou what disappearing jobs are you talking about? npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou none of those were relevant to the poll question, though. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I am happy to entertain other analyses though! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Regardless, I think this is the best data I'm going to get. I think a 10% rise in jobs is much more, so that's my answer. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Also, this is the Trump-era BLS, and it's unfortunately become politicized. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou and then you won't get points! npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou But the BLS also predicts another 10% rise over the next 10 years. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Its also been 15 months since May 2025, and maybe things have changed a lot since then. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I think there are a lot of ways this data could be misleading. First, a lot of developer jobs have different codes. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou That's almost exactly a 10% rise. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Here's the data for May 2025, the last year reported: npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Here's the Bureau of Labour Statistics data for May 2022. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Thanks all. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Whether that makes you "a racist" or just "a person living in a society that has been racist for centuries" is kind of moot. I think the important thing is correcting these mistakes when you can. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I don't think you have to espouse a racist ideology to say racist things. You can repeat sayings from the era of slavery, or catchphrases from minstrel shows, or ideas about crime or the economy that you just don't know are racist. You can support policies, like legacy admissions standards at universities, that have racist consequences even though they're not obviously related to racism. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou these are great questions! I will add them to the README. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou so, I think the center of gravity for open weights models has shifted to China, which makes it a problem for US policy makers. Can't let those red-star AIs install backdoors in our red-white-and-blue software, etc. Europe, Canada, rest of world is less squeamish I think. I think as long as Meta and Open AI keep releasing open weights models, it'll stay relevant. Amodei, Hinton, and others have already argued against open weights, though. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I agree. I think that's going to happen outside the US, though. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou I don't think I answered this one. Going down the list, I see a few I expect, like Buttigieg and Harris. We'll probably have some surprises. I'll go with 6-11. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou regardless, pick somewhat more or somewhat less. It's obviously not exactly the same. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou is that true? I don't have data on salaries. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Hey, all. Thanks for the response. I am yes. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou it's a trick that llms use to get around simple sandboxes. They can't run some program, but they can launch Bash and get it to run the program -- with the user's shell environment set up. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou RuPaul's Mr. Ag Race was my father. npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/pj-vogt-pkwcrKkk npub176495h5jd2deymed6taalm3mwgcg9k9qf6z03vac2wp84htwvzvs66nuj0 Evan Prodromou Oof.
