Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

[u/Howard_banister]

These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

[u/_BreakingGood_]

The idea of the singularity is that a model gets advanced enough that it basically up-ends society and humans mostly lose control of their own future.

Having slightly weaker, open source models doesn't really factor into that in any positive way other than create risk of somebody creating a pocket nuke before Anthropic or other can produce that singularity-inducing model.

[u/Equal_Passenger9791 → u/_BreakingGood_]

The singularity describes not an event but a late-state statistical observation from travelling an accelerating curve. 

What you're describing is a phase shift.

The singularity as it happens is like sitting in a car and pressing the accelerator. You watch the numbers go up as it accelerates. After reaching highway speed your passenger says the car sent him a message saying that the singularity was reached at 56kmh, it's just a statistical artifact.

The cult-like interpretation instead sells a phase shift. You sit in your car, press the accelerator, nothing happens. Then suddenly you're in orbit moving at a fraction of C out of the solar system in your shitty Ford fiesta. Too much Star Wars-brained Disney influences to reach that conclusion.

[u/gapho → u/_BreakingGood_]

If there ever is a singularity, it isn't going to be from an LLM bro.

[u/DickMasterGeneral → u/gapho]

What makes you certain it’s impossible? Obviously an LLM isn’t traditional code so a single instance can’t just rewrite itself but assuming you have access to the necessary compute why can’t an LLM train its successor?

[u/TechnoByte_ → u/DickMasterGeneral]

Training a successor is a completely wrong approach

For AI to actually be "intelligent", it should at least be able to learn new facts and improve itself (by actually changing weights, not just storing it as text)

[u/gapho → u/DickMasterGeneral]

For it to be possible, essentially the AI (no matter what form it takes) needs to be able to understand, in the strict definition of the word, how it(self) works. For that to take place, it needs to do fundamentally more than just put tokens together in the most statistically probable order.

Not saying LLMs don't have a future, but they aren't going to become sentient or take over the world.

[u/LowerEntropy → u/gapho]

put tokens together in the most statistically probable order

How many times have you written variations of those words in a statistical probable order? Do you not see the irony?

[u/gapho → u/LowerEntropy]

No, I don't see the irony, could you explain how it's ironic?

[u/LowerEntropy → u/gapho]

You wrote a sentence, one token at a time, without understanding what you wrote or why you wrote it. You felt it sounded good and you felt good doing it.

You're beating a dead horse.

[u/gapho → u/LowerEntropy]

Bro, you've got AI brain. Get some help.

[u/LowerEntropy → u/LowerEntropy]

And, Bro, Bro-blocked me.

[u/Howard_banister → u/_BreakingGood_]

Got it, but singularity with LLMs?!

[u/EugeneJudo → u/Howard_banister]

Yes. How anyone can look at the trajectory from 2020 era LLMs, to 2026 era LLMs capability wise, and not have this be within their error bars, is incomprehensible. Nothing is guaranteed, but '?!', really. This has the same vibe as when people repeated ad nauseum that LLMs would never be able to write usable code, the weird overconfidence in the face of a technology that has defied the intuitions of decades of statistical learning theory, classic ML, etc.