akhil

Working on a paradigmatically difficult problem. Getting to a new vantage point. Catching a glimpse of the next frontier. What a dream.

One takeaway from the recent Andreessen interview, and something I'm seeing more of lately, is that people _deep_ in AI have started using the LLM as a metaphor for reasoning about how brains and intelligence works. "You’re a 15 second sliding context window." Here we see it again, "Kepler was a high temperature LLM." I'm not sure what to take from this, other than many in this field/culture have crossed the line from projecting our theories about intelligence onto AI architecture designs, to projecting AI architecture designs on ourselves. Meanwhile, most people have no clue how an LLM even replies, let alone what a context window is.

How is making a reel not a humiliation ritual? I can’t stop myself from thinking about all the camera positioning and editing that goes into those videos and wondering how anyone works themselves up to making one.

LLM based AI is NOT conscious. I co-founded a company literally called Sentient, we're building reasoning systems for AGI, so believe me when I say this. I keep seeing smart people, people I genuinely respect, come out and say that AI has crossed into some kind of awareness. That it feels things, that we should worry about it going rogue. And i think this whole conversation tells us way more about ourselves than it does about AI. These models are wild, i won't pretend otherwise. But feeling human and actually having inner experience are completely different things and we're confusing the two because our brains literally can't help it. We evolved to see minds everywhere and now that wiring is misfiring on language models. I grew up in a philosophical tradition that has thought about consciousness longer than almost any other, and this is the part that really frustrates me about the current conversation. The entire framing of "does AI have consciousness?" assumes consciousness is something you build up to by adding more layers of complexity. In Vedantic philosophy it's the opposite. You don't build toward consciousness. Consciousness is already there, more fundamental than matter or energy. Everything else, including computation, is downstream of it. When someone tells me AI is "waking up" because it generated a paragraph that felt real, what they're telling me is how thin our understanding of consciousness has gotten. We've reduced a question humans have wrestled with for thousands of years to "did the output sound like it had feelings?" It's math that has gotten really good at predicting what a conscious being would say and do next. Calling that consciousness cheapens something that Vedantic, Buddhist, Greek and Sufi thinkers spent millennia actually sitting with. We didn't build something that thinks. We built a mirror and right now a lot of very smart people are mistaking the reflection for something looking back.

looksmaxxing is yet another sign of the societal shift from humanism to eugenics

People don't program AIs. They program the machine that grows the AI. AI behavior is an emergent consequence of complex internal machinery that literally nobody understands.

Almost all of DL + RL is not even wrong.

I have to learn a good chunk of algebraic topology in short order. God.