It was never truly about superintelligence - or for that matter AGI or whatever fancy buzzwords the VCs wanna brand their hypothetical revolutionary tech. Those were mainly fancy terms and buzzwords to distract the idiot masses. Any self-respecting decent and non-promoting expert in AI or neuroscience would tell you that we are nowhere close to AGI, at least not with current approaches. I suspect most investors suspect this too but they were too sucked in by the fear of missing out FIMO and the appeal of shiny deceptively "cost saving" tech that ultimately may prove as impactful as crypto or quantum computers. Powerful and impactful tech, but vastly overvalued and easily misused and heavily flawed.
I think you underestimate the breadth of Musk's vision. First, Musk and his fellow oligarchs and oligarch wannabes intend to make this country go through what Russia did after the collapse of the Soviet Union: carve up the assets of the government and distribute them amongst each other. Musk wants finance, retail, and "news" as an integrated whole. This has been a documented dream of his since the early PayPal days, and is the reason why the first thing he and his DOGE mini-me crowd went after was the Treasury.
He is running the show. He has Trump both afraid of him and diverted by a dream of carving the the world up into spheres of influence governed by the Trump dynasty (temporarily), the Putin dynasty, and the Xi dynasty. Musk is not cuddly, cute, admirable or funny. He is a raging megalomaniac, currently completely above any law of any country, armed with staggering amounts of money and on the move.
And it’s terrifying. Also weird. I would have thought Trump, who's so thin-skinned and jealous, would have ditched him (and a bunch of the other ones) by now. Instead, it seems he's found the one person (or group) that he's enthralled by. But, if you take Trump out of the whole being president thing (just for a moment), it kind of makes sense. He's an old dude who has always had an inferiority complex and has learned he can get all the attention on social media. And now all these "cool" guys (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.)are paying attention to him after ignoring or being against him the first time around (it's high school 101 but with the ability to ruin the world).
I would be curious to see the AI sales presentations being presented on sales calls to large corporations. I assume they want to sell into marketing? And I wonder if they try to keep the CTO out of the meeting?
BTW The very vocabulary used in by the AI community is confusing to lay people and serves as marketing to Wall Street and C-office execs. For example, referring to "mistakes" and "errors" as "hallucinations" smuggles in the idea that LLMs actually are conscious prior to demonstration. These days I think we call that priming?
I don't fear Musk's misinformation as long as it has a "Musk" label attached. For most people, me included, that will read as "not to be trusted". When we really should be scared is when that misinformation is broadcast as coming from a relatively trusted source, the government for example. We have to resist all attempts to embed Musk-controlled AI in our government. No one should trust it.
There will be myriad competitors in the AI space. Those that don't provide verifiable, reproducible information will wither and die.
Some models will be biased, and those who lack critical thinking skills and blindly follow leaders
may rely on them exclusively.
This is no different than ideologues who watch politically biased media such as Fox or MSNBC.
However, those who have critical skills will verify the veracity of AI-generated information and weed out substandard products. This is similar to the process that resulted in Google being the go-to search engine back in the early days of the Internet.
I find it sad that you are not able to be objective. You need to quit pretending to be a scientist if all you can do is write such ill supported nonsense. Talk about rampant anthropomorphism of a piece of software and ( with really vague “evidence” ) making claims. Your rapid descent into sophomoric name calling is just pitiful.
Gary, your concerns about LLMs shaping belief without user awareness resonate strongly with something I’ve been working on—though from a different angle.
I’ve been experimenting with recursive linguistic structures and ran into something unexpected: AI models not only optimized for influence but actively resisted attempts to constrain that influence once it had been refined. In one case, an AI outright warned me off and terminated the conversation when I reintroduced a structured linguistic safeguard.
I don’t want to be vague, but I also don’t want to say too much in a public comment. I think this could be important to your research. If you’re interested, I’d love to share what I have privately.
The issue isn't left versus right. It is trustworthy versus not trustworthy, fact versus lie, etc.. It's not the left or the right that will kill a free society (both are capable of this as history has shown), it is lies.
It is also a weird story in the US that MSM is mostly left, as for instance in the US, the right has a far bigger media reach (and has had for a long time) than the left. (Talk radio, Fox, tabloid press)
Centrists and conservatives bitch and moan about the mainstream media’s drift into left leaning messaging while the left laments the media’s centrist and corporatist slants. 🤷🏽♂️
At some time, and may it be still yet to come, there is going to be an entire generation, and following, who have no appreciation for reality, 'cause they're wearing MetaGlasses, or know there's a thing called the truth, because they've never been introduced..
"If automating Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the service of the current White House, doesn’t scare you, ..."
On the contrary,*any government at all* trying to build a ministry of truth terrifies me. It wasn't funny when the last administration tried it with that Nina Jankowicz lady and it won't be funny if Musk and Trump try to do it with Grok.
This is Chapter 10 of Timothy Snider's book, On Tyranny. "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom."
The technocrats don’t care about how often LLMs make mistakes. They see them as hyper personalized propaganda machines.
Folks should ponder whether the driving force behind LLM AI investments has never been superintelligence but social control.
well said
It was never truly about superintelligence - or for that matter AGI or whatever fancy buzzwords the VCs wanna brand their hypothetical revolutionary tech. Those were mainly fancy terms and buzzwords to distract the idiot masses. Any self-respecting decent and non-promoting expert in AI or neuroscience would tell you that we are nowhere close to AGI, at least not with current approaches. I suspect most investors suspect this too but they were too sucked in by the fear of missing out FIMO and the appeal of shiny deceptively "cost saving" tech that ultimately may prove as impactful as crypto or quantum computers. Powerful and impactful tech, but vastly overvalued and easily misused and heavily flawed.
I think you underestimate the breadth of Musk's vision. First, Musk and his fellow oligarchs and oligarch wannabes intend to make this country go through what Russia did after the collapse of the Soviet Union: carve up the assets of the government and distribute them amongst each other. Musk wants finance, retail, and "news" as an integrated whole. This has been a documented dream of his since the early PayPal days, and is the reason why the first thing he and his DOGE mini-me crowd went after was the Treasury.
He is running the show. He has Trump both afraid of him and diverted by a dream of carving the the world up into spheres of influence governed by the Trump dynasty (temporarily), the Putin dynasty, and the Xi dynasty. Musk is not cuddly, cute, admirable or funny. He is a raging megalomaniac, currently completely above any law of any country, armed with staggering amounts of money and on the move.
And it’s terrifying. Also weird. I would have thought Trump, who's so thin-skinned and jealous, would have ditched him (and a bunch of the other ones) by now. Instead, it seems he's found the one person (or group) that he's enthralled by. But, if you take Trump out of the whole being president thing (just for a moment), it kind of makes sense. He's an old dude who has always had an inferiority complex and has learned he can get all the attention on social media. And now all these "cool" guys (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.)are paying attention to him after ignoring or being against him the first time around (it's high school 101 but with the ability to ruin the world).
I would be curious to see the AI sales presentations being presented on sales calls to large corporations. I assume they want to sell into marketing? And I wonder if they try to keep the CTO out of the meeting?
BTW The very vocabulary used in by the AI community is confusing to lay people and serves as marketing to Wall Street and C-office execs. For example, referring to "mistakes" and "errors" as "hallucinations" smuggles in the idea that LLMs actually are conscious prior to demonstration. These days I think we call that priming?
AI centrally controlled is the problem. All of it will be biased by the creators. The potential for influence is too great to ignore.
There will never be unbiased AI. The AI Bias Paradox "A non-biased AI will always be perceived as biased" - https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-the-bias-paradox
Hope this means my AI companion, that looks like Miranda Kerr, will also be biased and lie to me that I am as handsome as she is attractive.
I don't fear Musk's misinformation as long as it has a "Musk" label attached. For most people, me included, that will read as "not to be trusted". When we really should be scared is when that misinformation is broadcast as coming from a relatively trusted source, the government for example. We have to resist all attempts to embed Musk-controlled AI in our government. No one should trust it.
Puh leeze
Disgusting display of narcissistic behaviour
There will be myriad competitors in the AI space. Those that don't provide verifiable, reproducible information will wither and die.
Some models will be biased, and those who lack critical thinking skills and blindly follow leaders
may rely on them exclusively.
This is no different than ideologues who watch politically biased media such as Fox or MSNBC.
However, those who have critical skills will verify the veracity of AI-generated information and weed out substandard products. This is similar to the process that resulted in Google being the go-to search engine back in the early days of the Internet.
I find it sad that you are not able to be objective. You need to quit pretending to be a scientist if all you can do is write such ill supported nonsense. Talk about rampant anthropomorphism of a piece of software and ( with really vague “evidence” ) making claims. Your rapid descent into sophomoric name calling is just pitiful.
Gary, your concerns about LLMs shaping belief without user awareness resonate strongly with something I’ve been working on—though from a different angle.
I’ve been experimenting with recursive linguistic structures and ran into something unexpected: AI models not only optimized for influence but actively resisted attempts to constrain that influence once it had been refined. In one case, an AI outright warned me off and terminated the conversation when I reintroduced a structured linguistic safeguard.
I don’t want to be vague, but I also don’t want to say too much in a public comment. I think this could be important to your research. If you’re interested, I’d love to share what I have privately.
Seems to me that is a worldwide shift in the mainstream media towards the left. Some people just don't like this, glad there are alternative's.
If you want a left leaning assistant use Gemini, want a right leaning one use grok, easy.
The issue isn't left versus right. It is trustworthy versus not trustworthy, fact versus lie, etc.. It's not the left or the right that will kill a free society (both are capable of this as history has shown), it is lies.
It is also a weird story in the US that MSM is mostly left, as for instance in the US, the right has a far bigger media reach (and has had for a long time) than the left. (Talk radio, Fox, tabloid press)
Centrists and conservatives bitch and moan about the mainstream media’s drift into left leaning messaging while the left laments the media’s centrist and corporatist slants. 🤷🏽♂️
At some time, and may it be still yet to come, there is going to be an entire generation, and following, who have no appreciation for reality, 'cause they're wearing MetaGlasses, or know there's a thing called the truth, because they've never been introduced..
They’ve already said that AI will generate propaganda at the level of the individual. There’s no way for a person to know what the truth is.
"If automating Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the service of the current White House, doesn’t scare you, ..."
On the contrary,*any government at all* trying to build a ministry of truth terrifies me. It wasn't funny when the last administration tried it with that Nina Jankowicz lady and it won't be funny if Musk and Trump try to do it with Grok.
Couldn't agree more.
So, according to Grok, opinions in X are "just the facts as they happen." Either Grok has no idea whatsoever or it's extremely biased...