ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers 🍔

Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict

OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14

Mare: E6M76HDMVU
. . .



vogon
@vogon
This post has content warnings for: mention of sexual assault, mention of nuclear war.


vogon
@vogon

(in re: eliezer yudkowsky's call that we globally track the supply chain for GPUs like they're, quite literally, enriched uranium)

the core enabling technology for large-scale machine learning systems as they're currently designed is computer processors which can do matrix multiplication quickly. that's it.

GPUs make a useful computational substrate for machine learning solely because, before machine learning, the closest thing we had to a task that needed to be accomplished at the same scale was the matrix transforms required to produce real-time 3D graphics. the combination of rising polygon counts and the desire for more sophisticated visual effects led engineers in the late '90s to redesign graphics cards from a so-called fixed-function architecture which just did computer graphics, to an architecture which could execute general matrix arithmetic at a staggering degree of parallelism; if you've heard of "shaders", those are small computer programs which execute on one of the up to sixteen thousand individual processor cores on a modern graphics card.1

however, they're quite expensive and power-inefficient -- machine learning applications don't need the high precision mathematics of 3D graphics, and the graphics-oriented feature set can be pared back substantially -- and all of the large cloud computing providers are already getting rid of GPUs in their AI data centers in favor of purpose-built AI coprocessors.

and again, this is all just matrix arithmetic. while there are implementation specifics that surely amount to a significant body of trade secrets, there are no secret theoretical techniques involved here; an effective containment regime would basically be tantamount to a general trade ban on computer processors, and if the US tried that, China would immediately institute a crash development program to make up the deficit. they've already released homemade GPUs which are in the same realm of performance, so this whole thing would win the US maybe 24 months of head start, much of which it would spend building up its industrial base to actually produce physical semiconductors in the country instead of other countries where labor is cheaper.

you would think people who work in practical computing for a living and have access to nearly limitless resources for research and devising industrial strategy would be aware of this, but apparently not.


  1. this is also why certain cryptocurrencies used GPUs: the core operation of cryptocurrencies is to run a random number generator seeded on a piece of garbage data and see if the number it spits out is below a threshold -- or, as theophite on twitter famously said, "idling your car 24/7 to produce solved sudokus you could trade for heroin". if you can get that random number generator to run on one core of a GPU, you can run 16,000 instances of it in parallel! but similarly, if the money is in it, and the cryptocurrency isn't explicitly designed to make this impractical, after GPUs stop being dirt cheap, people spin up production lines to make application-specific cryptocurrency mining chips, because GPUs are so power-inefficient.


Catfish-Man
@Catfish-Man

If you’re a) a weird computer nerd or adjacent in mindset (hi, there’s a lot of us on this website), and b) not already familiar, then you deserve a warning: LessWrong, Effective Altruism, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Urbit, AI Alignment (“AI Ethics” is separate and good, the alignment folks dislike the ethics folks, listen to Timnit Gebru and co), the online “Rationalism” movement (note: “rational” here is the antonym of “empirical” not “irrational”), and everything else in their orbit are dangerous to you.

I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: DO NOT approach learning about this with an open mind. If you must read their stuff, go in shields all the way up, assuming everything you read is propaganda aimed at you specifically. Yes, most of you would probably be fine, but I can’t predict who won’t be, and I’ve already had to spend an evening talking someone in my communities back from this crap this year.

“Neoreaction” (aka “the dark enlightenment” aka NRX), the far right political movement driving these topics, is a basically-fascist cult, but it’s a fascist cult that looks very different from the mainstream ones, and LessWrong and friends are the entry funnels for the cult. Cognitohazards are real and this is one of them.

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA


ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

This sounds like a silly warning but even as much as I spotted most of these assholes from a mile away, going as far back as Justine Tunney sliding into my DMs way back during Occupy, I still got taken in by SlateStarCodex/Scott Alexander for a good while before I spotted the grift.

Part of the game with these dudes is to bury their biases and fashy horseshit behind a mountain of academic prose that somehow manages to argue for fascism without ever actually saying anything straight even once, and dude was their favorite because he could play the game so well he had a lot of liberals and even leftists believing he was "one of the good ones", even as he very gently opened the door for more full-throated creeps.

It really is like a cognitohazard for nerd dudes, 'cause it very gently tells them everything they want to hear before it slips in a little "Bell Curve" or some good old "technocracy", and you gotta go real deep before you really find the meat of what they actually fucking believe.

Like a lot of cults, they work by concealing the batshit so that you don't realize until you're already in deep, and if you actually try to tell people about it, you sound like the crazy one. It's impossible to explain to people things like "they want to enshrine Peter Thiel as rationalist God-King of America so he can build the Super AI and free us all of our humanity by plugging our brains into the Machine God", but that's the rub ... and they'll deny it until they don't, just like every fash does.

It gets especially unsettling when you consider how many of their leading lights either are, or have the ear of, some of the richest people in the richest industry on the planet, and the only thing saving us from them warping politics worse than they have is they are all the most deeply uncharismatic people on earth. None of these fuckers can hold court outside the internet, and that, for now, keeps them contained ... or behind the scenes.