imagine the scene when you go in for your scan and you hear some mumbling from the tech, strange beeping, and you realize your cover is blown. You are in fact NOT human. RUN!
I watched a snippet of him on Les Fridmans podcast. Now, granted Fridman has kind of outed himself as a complete hack more recently.
Watching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Anything inflating his ideas into personal space is just a land-grab now.
The latter two are opinion. The first two are factual but hard for anyone else to validate.
I tried looking into "misrepresents his affiliation with MIT" and I couldn't figure out what he's misrepresenting. He claims to be a researcher at MIT. The MIT Deep Learning page[0] is all videos from his YouTube channel, including Fridman lecturing at MIT.[1]
I can believe that, but I also have to take those claims with a grain of salt.
Aside from Taleb, I don't recognize any of the people who claim Fridman blocked them, so for all I know, they tweeted obnoxious stuff at him and then complained about being blocked. Taleb is extremely abrasive, so I can't fault anyone for blocking him.
If it was like Yann LeCun and Andrej Karpathy complaining that Lex blocked them, then I'd question how aggressively Fridman blocks people, but if it's random Twitter accounts that seem to just shitpost all day, why do they have a right to communicate with Fridman?
Sure, without making an entire Medium article for you, which I don't have the time to do, I can't prove they weren't all shitposters, although there are some notable names, but that would be a lot of them.
I'll also direct you to the moderator list of the /r/lexfridman sub. No real people, none of them ever comment, and his subreddit is one of the most [deleted] I have ever experienced. If you look at reveddit, also check the comments. Quite telling. https://www.reveddit.com/v/lexfridman/?localSort=num_comment...
If your response is "maybe he just likes a heavily curated subreddit" then all I can say is keep coming back.
For being so open minded, he sure does have an incredibly tight grip on information control. This is coming from someone that used to think Lex was the cream of the crop.
Just listen to his podcasts. I was podcast hunting the last couple months and came across a recommendation to his podcast. I have no idea about him as a person, his background or his critics; so I was in an unbiased state.
I listened to a few podcasts to realize the dude is toast. He does mumble a lot of "sophisticated" words to sound smart but after 4 or 5 episodes there is nothing of substance that you get from him or his guests. I wondered why he was recommended in the first place but then remember lots of the podcasts in America are JRE style.
I kept thinking what Java had to do with all this, but thanks to this comment it finally connected that it refers to Joe Rogan's podcast. I'm not very familiar with his podcast but there was some American podcaster who ended up being a covid denial fanatic. Might've been him.
The thing I dislike about Lex is that he doesn't really critically interview. If you interview someone, you put your credentials at stake to interview them, and it must be critical IMO. Instead, Lex is more of a marketeer, giving the interviewee room to spout their message via his platform.
I've listened to a lot of his podcasts, I do not recall him mentioning MIT once.
>- blocks anybody who looks into his past
What? You mean in youtube comments? Aren't they supposed to be talking about the video not about whatever his past is? (I have no idea about his past, I just know he did something related to self driving cars at some point)
>- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
He often describes himself as a terrible interviewer (which I disagree with), so I'm not sure how he's "styling himself" as anything
>- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
He's an audience stand in who asks questions to the subject matter expert that he has on his podcast. If he already knew everything it would break the format.
> I've listened to a lot of his podcasts, I do not recall him mentioning MIT once.
He actually used to host his pod at MIT before he moved to Texas to be closer to his true loves, Joe and Elon. Haven't watched him in years since he moved away from tech and more into (mostly right wing) political guests but even then you could count on one hand the interviews he didn't mention Rogan or Musk.
Presents himself as a “MIT guy” while he did his bachelors and masters at a no name university his dad works at. Always talks about programming, then when asked to elaborate about his experience with GPT and programming, starts to talk about memes. Blocks even prominent people who criticise his research, yet talks about how open minded he is. Only references the most mainstream material. The list goes on…
I find his style suffocating, he mostly likes to talk about himself, and hear himself say bullshit, and same with the interviewed person, some times even cutting 'em off
Uh yeah I mean I know what you’re talking about - he does defer to the interviewee (and they are often wrong as well, like in the Elon interview).
Moreso I’m referring to the LessWrong/Reddit/HN/Twitter internet-lore format which he borrows from and leans into. Many of his questions are deep on the surface but ultimately more about sensationalism (even if that means a bad faith read of the problem).
Also, at times I suspect interviewees pre-negotiate certain things for him to see in a positive manner. Like in this last episode, thanking Sam for open sourcing GPT eval - ignoring that GPT-4’s basic architecture description wasn’t even released; a big “fuck you” to researchers hoping to do any sort of replication or peer review.
It's not a tech podcast, but I enjoy Hermitix. They are mostly interviews with authors of philosophy/literary studies books. Probably the only "podcaster" that I will listen to on a regular basis.
not really, Joe Rogan pre pandamic was still the best interviewer in my openion of smart people.
the problem with smart people is that they know that they're smart and so they won't stop talking or driving the conversation.
Joe Rogan, pre pandamic / spotify deal was humble enough and would just invite people and let them talk, it was way more informative and less echo champery style of conversation ... I can't stand listening to this guy.
Ignoring the arrogance that, the network effects of his podcast is incredible. I don't know of another podcast that gets the kind of guest list lex does. But you're right, his questions are often quite (pseudo-intellectual?) he's got a thing for "are we living in a simulation"
Bostrom's trilemma argues that one of three unlikely-seeming propositions is almost certainly true:
1. "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or
2. "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or
3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one."
The trilemma points out that a technologically mature "posthuman" civilization would have enormous computing power; if even a tiny percentage of them were to run "ancestor simulations" (that is, "high-fidelity" simulations of ancestral life that would be indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor), the total number of simulated ancestors, or "Sims", in the universe (or multiverse, if it exists) would greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors.
Bostrom goes on to use a type of anthropic reasoning to claim that, if the third proposition is the one of those three that is true, and almost all people live in simulations, then humans are almost certainly living in a simulation.
[End quote.]
* Note I don't care at all about Friedman and have listened to exactly one of his podcasts (Carmack).
I think I misrepresented the point there a little. It's not the fundamental question per se but something he asks every one of his guests, and comes off alil 3am teenage philosopher.
I don't mean to bash him too much though, I think it's hard interviewing experts in areas they have spent their whole lives in and not to feel less informed in comparison.
I watched his interview with John Carmack and I couldn't stand him. Carmack was super knowledgeable and professional, Friedman looked almost bored and not really interested - also wasn't able to follow up on some of the things Carmack was saying. Just struck me as not the best interviewer for that interview - I'm impressed Carmack decided to sit through the whole thing.
I only watched snippets of that, but I thought Altman was saying reasonable things. I'd expected worse based on the general AI wackiness and the vague knowledge that he had some eyeball/crypto thing going on too.
This thing with white Gentiles and Jews reminds of tennis pros from Scotland. They're described in the English press as Scottish when they lose and British when they win. Likewise, if a member of the tribe does something bad in America it's on whiteness and white supremacy, but if they do something great we suddenly remember that they're Jewish. A conspicuous pattern, and not one that I think is good for relations in the long run.
> Watching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Lets just say that both of them are AI bros, and are hype men for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com and Worldcoin and will do anything to push their new AI grift (Worldcoin) into the public via plain scaremongering nonsense such as GPT being 'conscious'.
> Worldcoin’s parent company, Tools for Humanity, insists that the process will someday be fully open-source and run by the nonprofit Worldcoin Foundation.
Where have I heard that before... I think it was another Sam Altman venture. Deja vu here, someone help me out.
The idea of a global id system that pays everyone some basic income is actually pretty decent and admirable but this entire thing is wild.
"This here is our orb which scans your eyeball for biometric data so our AI company can pay you in something called Worldcoin" isn't tech, that's a whole ass Deus Ex plotline. Only thing missing is Bob Page popping out of nowhere. You better hire the best PR team on available for that one.
> a global id system that pays everyone some basic income
I didn't know Altman's pockets were so deep he could feed and house the whole planet. That's going to be a problem. Apart from all the other problems with UBI, of course.
Maybe all those suggesting and promoting these things should hand over all their assets for equal distribution. But as always, this tribe of people who think this way are always keen on redistributing other people’s things and wealth.
Maybe when an LLM finally automates my career out of existence, I can make a comfortable living as a kind of ocular bandit, harvesting people's eyeballs for sweet, sweet, Worldcoin™
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."
If you could collect biometric data from every person on the planet and then deploy a simple authentication tool that uses it, you can collect a slice of every financial and commercial transaction that takes place anywhere. Every bank, every credit card company, every payment processor, every retailer both online and brick and mortar, every B2C company in existence would have to pay you around the clock. Conversely, cross them in any way, and your ability to buy or sell anything would be eliminated instantly.
> A.I.-powered system for evenly distributing money to the world’s population, a form of universal basic income. (...) When a person is scanned, verified, and onboarded to Worldcoin, they are given 25 proprietary crypto tokens, which are also called Worldcoins. The tokens may carry the promise of future riches, but they’re worthless unless the project launches at scale.
This AI stuff and crypto are a natural match. Anyone paying attention to crypto in the last few years has seen the identity experiments happening, and we're in for a ride if OpenAI taps into this.
No. Pyramid scheme requires people to bring in new money to pay the earlier people.
This is giving “monopoly” money in exchange for eye scans (under the pretense of preventing bots), and hoping for said monopoly money be become valuable
If you're including the VCs that have already invested in Worldcoin(s) and have lots of pre-allocated tokens between them, hoping that new VC money + retail money with an eventual ICO happening, then yes it is indeed a pyramid scheme.
Worldcoin is another 'Scam Altman' pyramid scheme, waiting to pump and dump on retail using AI scaremongering tactics.
> The tokens may carry the promise of future riches
ahem Howey test
Any local financial services or data protection agency should present these guys with a list of very awkward questions like "what are you going to do with this data" and "under what circumstances will these 'coins' have value".
Terrible idea. Any form of biometrics are effectively passwords that can not be changed/rotated. If the data is compromised/leaked even once, it's useless.
Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...
Ok so I got my balls scanned and I'm ready to sell them out to the highest bidding AI that wants to post on my behalf. Where do I sign up? Is there an app, api or a crypto for that?
What's wrong with these people? Hubris? They all seem keen on joining the ranks of Elon Musk and Lord Buckethead (whose policy to fight traffic jams, obesity and bike theft was providing free bicycles for all).
We do need a base layer of human verification for several reasons that will make themselves clear in the coming years. Can we maybe try that with a system of IRL humans and inherently pro-privacy tech like ZK proofs, instead of a system of proprietary soul-sucking nightmare orbs? Be creative, think outside the orb.
Also, such a system doesn't need any kind of currency attached to it.
> One early adopter, a 30-year-old online entrepreneur living in Portugal, told me over Discord that he hopes his tokens will be worth millions, although he’s been disappointed that Worldcoin keeps delaying the release.
Why would something that they’re giving away, to presumably everyone on Earth, become worth millions?
These are the type of scams that give crypto a bad name and tarnish projects like ethereum. Silicon valley VC grifters just trying to steal everyone's data with the promise of having their basic needs met. Wtf is wrong with these people.
There is a growing class of tech orgs running operations that governments cant legally or openly run themselves. If I had to guess, that's partly "whats wrong with these people".
What shocked me was that 2 months ago during an interview he said that he does not understand why we would need decentralized services (web3, defi). Then 1 month later, when SVB collapsed, he literally started crying on Twitter. I would be interested what he says now. I think it's clear that how the blockchain community represents itself via social networks is not great, but I don't trust anyone who doesn't understand why it's absolutely necessary to have decentralized finance. Not sure if Sam doesn't understand it or has political/other motivations for his public opinion about this.
It's in the same vein of using blockchain to track real world objects or use CAPTCHA to fight bots. It all fail on the human-machine interface because the definitions on what is real, where something starts and ends falls apart on edge cases and computers are all about edge cases. Consider a fail-proof CAPTCHA, me personally or through hired humans solving it doesn't prove that the rest of the operations are not conducted by a bot. Consider genuine item tracking with blockchain, it still depends on me digitising the real life item and the blockchain can guarantee only whan happens after that.
So this is a weak attempt to solve the human-machine interface problem. Put all the other creepy stuff aside, scanning a retina would not prove that I'm an individual who is entitled to the 25 tokens. The first thing people would do is to exploit as many people as possible to take their tokens.
The whole exercise of machine scanning a real life object to verify authenticity is useless.
So Sam Altman's OpenAI tech is partly responsible for unleashing a deluge of bots and generated content onto the internet and then he tries to sell you proof that you exist?
I think the plan sucks but it does try to solve a fundamental problem. The internet is rapidly becoming a boring dystopia sewer partly because the cost of unleashing bots and generated content continues to decrease. Proving that people on the internet are real and who they say they are is tough. Part of what makes this effortless IRL is the threat of jail (fake ID? you'd have to lie to the government) and that a human IRL doesn't scale (you can only be in one place and doing one thing at a time).
You cannot have a town square where it is possible to be anonymous.
>You cannot have a town square where it is possible to be anonymous.
In the town square, technically everyone is anonymous until you ask them their name, and even then, no one has to give you the real one. The cops are the only real exception.
The thing that truly bugs me about tech/the Internet is that at some point it was decided that everyone is entitled to intimate information on everyone else for even the most transient silly thing.
Good point. I agree. Although you might not know everyone in the town square, you know for sure they are a real human, putting themselves out there, and interacting with you. That counts for something.
97 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadWatching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Anything inflating his ideas into personal space is just a land-grab now.
What do you mean? I'm out of the loop, not arguing with you.
- blocks anybody who looks into his past
- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
The latter two are opinion. The first two are factual but hard for anyone else to validate.
I tried looking into "misrepresents his affiliation with MIT" and I couldn't figure out what he's misrepresenting. He claims to be a researcher at MIT. The MIT Deep Learning page[0] is all videos from his YouTube channel, including Fridman lecturing at MIT.[1]
What's the misrepresentation?
[0] https://deeplearning.mit.edu/
[1] https://youtu.be/O5xeyoRL95U
https://old.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/zaeztd/_/...
If you see his Youtube profile picture it’s pretty obvious he wants to present himself as a lecturer or professor staff, which he is not.
For the latter 2 I’m sure the other comments on this thread are helpful.
I personally didn't find the claims in that reddit thread persuasive, but I understand how others might interpret them differently.
Aside from Taleb, I don't recognize any of the people who claim Fridman blocked them, so for all I know, they tweeted obnoxious stuff at him and then complained about being blocked. Taleb is extremely abrasive, so I can't fault anyone for blocking him.
If it was like Yann LeCun and Andrej Karpathy complaining that Lex blocked them, then I'd question how aggressively Fridman blocks people, but if it's random Twitter accounts that seem to just shitpost all day, why do they have a right to communicate with Fridman?
I'll also direct you to the moderator list of the /r/lexfridman sub. No real people, none of them ever comment, and his subreddit is one of the most [deleted] I have ever experienced. If you look at reveddit, also check the comments. Quite telling. https://www.reveddit.com/v/lexfridman/?localSort=num_comment...
If your response is "maybe he just likes a heavily curated subreddit" then all I can say is keep coming back.
For being so open minded, he sure does have an incredibly tight grip on information control. This is coming from someone that used to think Lex was the cream of the crop.
Just listen to his podcasts. I was podcast hunting the last couple months and came across a recommendation to his podcast. I have no idea about him as a person, his background or his critics; so I was in an unbiased state.
I listened to a few podcasts to realize the dude is toast. He does mumble a lot of "sophisticated" words to sound smart but after 4 or 5 episodes there is nothing of substance that you get from him or his guests. I wondered why he was recommended in the first place but then remember lots of the podcasts in America are JRE style.
The thing I dislike about Lex is that he doesn't really critically interview. If you interview someone, you put your credentials at stake to interview them, and it must be critical IMO. Instead, Lex is more of a marketeer, giving the interviewee room to spout their message via his platform.
I've listened to a lot of his podcasts, I do not recall him mentioning MIT once.
>- blocks anybody who looks into his past
What? You mean in youtube comments? Aren't they supposed to be talking about the video not about whatever his past is? (I have no idea about his past, I just know he did something related to self driving cars at some point)
>- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
He often describes himself as a terrible interviewer (which I disagree with), so I'm not sure how he's "styling himself" as anything
>- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
He's an audience stand in who asks questions to the subject matter expert that he has on his podcast. If he already knew everything it would break the format.
He actually used to host his pod at MIT before he moved to Texas to be closer to his true loves, Joe and Elon. Haven't watched him in years since he moved away from tech and more into (mostly right wing) political guests but even then you could count on one hand the interviews he didn't mention Rogan or Musk.
I feel like there must be some other reason you don't like him, because none of your reasons are consistent with reality.
And if you’re using the word pathological please use it right :)
Moreso I’m referring to the LessWrong/Reddit/HN/Twitter internet-lore format which he borrows from and leans into. Many of his questions are deep on the surface but ultimately more about sensationalism (even if that means a bad faith read of the problem).
Also, at times I suspect interviewees pre-negotiate certain things for him to see in a positive manner. Like in this last episode, thanking Sam for open sourcing GPT eval - ignoring that GPT-4’s basic architecture description wasn’t even released; a big “fuck you” to researchers hoping to do any sort of replication or peer review.
Isn't the whole point of an interview to let the interviewee get their point across and clear up any misinformation?
https://www.youtube.com/@hermitixpodcast
Not sure exactly how that maps to IQ ranges, but worth checking out anyway.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMR...
the problem with smart people is that they know that they're smart and so they won't stop talking or driving the conversation.
Joe Rogan, pre pandamic / spotify deal was humble enough and would just invite people and let them talk, it was way more informative and less echo champery style of conversation ... I can't stand listening to this guy.
The 'simulation' argument is actually very persuasive if you look into it. Quoted below from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis:
[Begin quote.]
Bostrom's trilemma argues that one of three unlikely-seeming propositions is almost certainly true:
1. "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or
2. "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or
3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one."
The trilemma points out that a technologically mature "posthuman" civilization would have enormous computing power; if even a tiny percentage of them were to run "ancestor simulations" (that is, "high-fidelity" simulations of ancestral life that would be indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor), the total number of simulated ancestors, or "Sims", in the universe (or multiverse, if it exists) would greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors.
Bostrom goes on to use a type of anthropic reasoning to claim that, if the third proposition is the one of those three that is true, and almost all people live in simulations, then humans are almost certainly living in a simulation.
[End quote.]
* Note I don't care at all about Friedman and have listened to exactly one of his podcasts (Carmack).
I don't mean to bash him too much though, I think it's hard interviewing experts in areas they have spent their whole lives in and not to feel less informed in comparison.
Maybe I need to watch the full thing.
>Sam Altman and Lex Fridman
This thing with white Gentiles and Jews reminds of tennis pros from Scotland. They're described in the English press as Scottish when they lose and British when they win. Likewise, if a member of the tribe does something bad in America it's on whiteness and white supremacy, but if they do something great we suddenly remember that they're Jewish. A conspicuous pattern, and not one that I think is good for relations in the long run.
Lets just say that both of them are AI bros, and are hype men for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com and Worldcoin and will do anything to push their new AI grift (Worldcoin) into the public via plain scaremongering nonsense such as GPT being 'conscious'.
Where have I heard that before... I think it was another Sam Altman venture. Deja vu here, someone help me out.
"This here is our orb which scans your eyeball for biometric data so our AI company can pay you in something called Worldcoin" isn't tech, that's a whole ass Deus Ex plotline. Only thing missing is Bob Page popping out of nowhere. You better hire the best PR team on available for that one.
I didn't know Altman's pockets were so deep he could feed and house the whole planet. That's going to be a problem. Apart from all the other problems with UBI, of course.
Wait, what?
It is something much more bizarre than a pyramid scheme.
This is giving “monopoly” money in exchange for eye scans (under the pretense of preventing bots), and hoping for said monopoly money be become valuable
Worldcoin is another 'Scam Altman' pyramid scheme, waiting to pump and dump on retail using AI scaremongering tactics.
ahem Howey test
Any local financial services or data protection agency should present these guys with a list of very awkward questions like "what are you going to do with this data" and "under what circumstances will these 'coins' have value".
Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...
Eyeballs are just eyeballs and just like any biometric horrible idea for anything beyond local-access verification.
They're just going to sell this data for identification purposes.
Also, such a system doesn't need any kind of currency attached to it.
Why would something that they’re giving away, to presumably everyone on Earth, become worth millions?
If you assume the USD will have an 'emperor wears no clothes' moment at some point, that value would be shifted to another asset.
Seems like that's a key part of the scammy pitch. "Look at how well bitcoin did, now hand over your PII for this shitcoin".
I remember seeing the CCC breaking "facial" recognition to unlock a phone by just taking a picture of the owner on a park bench.
He placed a large AI bet and in parallel a Crypto bet… nice strategy.
Here's the timestamp of the interview I'm referring to. https://youtu.be/57OU18cogJI?t=1010
So this is a weak attempt to solve the human-machine interface problem. Put all the other creepy stuff aside, scanning a retina would not prove that I'm an individual who is entitled to the 25 tokens. The first thing people would do is to exploit as many people as possible to take their tokens.
The whole exercise of machine scanning a real life object to verify authenticity is useless.
I think the plan sucks but it does try to solve a fundamental problem. The internet is rapidly becoming a boring dystopia sewer partly because the cost of unleashing bots and generated content continues to decrease. Proving that people on the internet are real and who they say they are is tough. Part of what makes this effortless IRL is the threat of jail (fake ID? you'd have to lie to the government) and that a human IRL doesn't scale (you can only be in one place and doing one thing at a time).
You cannot have a town square where it is possible to be anonymous.
In the town square, technically everyone is anonymous until you ask them their name, and even then, no one has to give you the real one. The cops are the only real exception.
The thing that truly bugs me about tech/the Internet is that at some point it was decided that everyone is entitled to intimate information on everyone else for even the most transient silly thing.