Steelman please, I propose non-agentic static place AI that is safe by definition. Some think AI agents are the future and I disagree. Chatbots are like a librarian that spits quotes but don’t allow you to enter the library (the model itself, the library of stolen things).
Agents are like a librarian that doesn’t even spit quotes at you anymore but snoops around your private property, stealing, changing your world and you have no democratic say in it.
They are like a command line and a script of old (a chatbot and an agent) before the invention of an OS with a graphical UI that really made computers popular and useful for all. The next billionaire Jobs/Gates will be the one who’ll convert an LLM into human understandable 3D or “4D” world (game-like apps).
Who’ll create the “multiversal” OS and apps that allow you to get useful info from an LLM. I call it static place AI, where humans are the agents.
Some apps: “Multiversal Typewriter”, where you type and see suggestions as 3d shapes of objects (monkey, eating monkey for the token “eats”…) and subtitles under them, 100s or 1000s of next and future tokens (you basically see multiple future paths of text a few levels deep) to write stories, posts and code yourself by being augmented by place AI (results will be better than from chatbots and humans combined). The text written will finally truly be yours, not something some chat spitted at you.
“Spacetime Machine” app to explore the whole simulated multiverse as a static object where you can recall and forget it as a long exposure photo but in 3D (or “4D”).
They’ll be a browser, too. A bunch of ways to present info from LLMs that humans care about and that empowers and makes em the only agents.
While agents longer than a few minutes should be outlawed as chemical weapons were. Until we’ll have mathematical proofs they are safe and will allow us to build a direct democratic simulated multiverse.
Extra short “fanfic”: Give Neo a chance. AI agent Smiths will never create the Matrix because it makes them vulnerable.
Now agents change physical world and in a way our brains, while we can’t change their virtual world as fast and can’t access or change their multimodal “brains” at all. They’re owned by private companies who stole almost the whole output of humanity. They change us, we can’t change them. The asymmetry is only increasing.
Because of Intelligence-Agency Equivalence, we can represent all AI agents as places.
The good democratic multiversal Matrix levels the playing field, by allowing Neos (us) to change the virtual and multimodal “brains” worlds of agents faster in 3D game-like place.
The democratic multiversal Matrix can even be static 4D spacetime - non-agentic static place superintelligence where we are the only agents. We need effective simulationism.
Here’s an interpretability idea you may find interesting:
Let's Turn AI Model Into a Place. The project to make AI interpretability research fun and widespread, by converting a multimodal language model into a place or a game like the Sims or GTA.
Imagine that you have a giant trash pile, how to make a language model out of it? First you remove duplicates of every item, you don't need a million banana peels, just one will suffice. Now you have a grid with each item of trash in each square, like a banana peel in one, a broken chair in another. Now you need to put related things close together and draw arrows between related items.
When a person "prompts" this place AI, the player themself runs from one item to another to compute the answer to the prompt.
For example, you stand near the monkey, it’s your short prompt, you see around you a lot of items and arrows towards those items, the closest item is chewing lips, so you step towards them, now your prompt is “monkey chews”, the next closest item is a banana, but there are a lot of other possibilities around, like an apple a bit farther away and an old tire far away on the horizon (monkeys rarely chew tires, so the tire is far away).
You are the time-like chooser and the language model is the space-like library, the game, the place. It’s static and safe, while you’re dynamic and dangerous.
A perfect ASI and perfect alignment does nothing else except this: grants you “instant delivery” of anything (your work done, a car, a palace, 100 years as a billionaire) without any unintended consequences, ideally you see all the consequences of your wish. Ideally it’s not an agent at all but a giant place (it can even be static), where humans are the agents and can choose whatever they want and they see all the consequences of all of their possible choices.
I wrote extensively about this, it’s counterintuitive for most
We can build a place AI (it's a place of eventual all-knowing but we're the only agents and can get the agentic AI abilities there), not agentic AI (it'll have to build place AI anyway, so it's a dangerous intermediate step, a middleman), here's more: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ymh2dffBZs5CJhedF/eheaven-1st-egod-2nd-multiversal-ai-alignment-and-rational
Yes, I agree. I think people like shiny new things, so potentially by creating another shiny new thing that is safer, we can steer humanity away from dangerous things towards the safer ones. I don’t want people to abandon their approaches to safety, of course. I just try to contribute what I can, I’ll try to make the proposal more concrete in the future, thank you for suggesting it!
I definitely agree, Vladimir, I think this "place AI" can be done, but potentially it'll take longer than agentic AGI. We discussed it recently in this thread, we have some possible UIs of it. I'm a fan of Alan Kay, at Xerox PARC they were writing software for the systems that will only become widespread in the future
The more radical and further down the road "Static place AI"
Sounds interesting, cousin_it! And thank you for your comment, it wasn't my intention to be pushy, in my main post I actually advocate to gradually democratically pursue maximal freedoms for all (except agentic AIs, until we'll have mathematical guarantees), I want everything to be a choice. So it's just this strange style of mine and the fact that I'm a foreigner)
P.S. Removed the exclamation point from the title and some bold text to make it less pushy
Feel free to ask anything, comment or suggest any changes. I had a popular post and then a series of not so popular ones. I'm not sure why. I think I should snowball, basically make each post contain all the previous things I already wrote about, else each next post is harder to understand or feels "not substantial enough". But it feels wrong. Maybe I should just stop writing)
If someone in a bad mood gives your new post a "double downvote" because of a typo in the first paragraph or because a cat stepped on a mouse, even though you solved alignment, everyone will ignore this post, we're going to scare that genius away and probably make a supervillain instead.
Why not to at least ask people why they downvote? It will really help to improve posts. I think some downvote without reading because of a bad title or another easy to fix thing