Millenarism is a seductive idea.

If you're among the last of your kind then you're very important, in a sense you're immortal. Living your life quietly and being forgotten is apparently scarier than dying in a blaze of glory defending mankind against the rise of the LLMs.

This is correct. Most people hear about AI from two sources, AI companies and journalists. Both have an incentive to make it sound more powerful than it is.

On the other hand this thing got 83% on a test I got 47% on...

> On the other hand this thing got 83% on a test I got 47% on

Easy to do when it can memorize the answers in its training data and didn't get drunk while reviewing the textbook (that last part might just be me).

The Olympiad questions are puzzles, so you can't memorise the answers. To do well you need to both remember the foundations and exercise reasoning. They are written to be slightly novel to test this and not the same every year.

On the other other hand, it had the perfect recall of the collective knowledge of mankind at its metaphorical fingertips.

Is that supposed to make it sound more powerful or less powerful than it really is?

This thing also hallucinated a test directly into a function when I asked it to use a different data structure, which is not something I ever recall doing during all my years of tests and schooling.

Must have been quite the hangover to prevent your recalling this.

Counterpoint, a place like Civit.AI is at least as dangerous, yet it's nowhere near as well funded.

Sure, but I don't think civit.ai leans into the "novel/powerful/dangerous" element in its marketing. It just seems to showcase the convenience and sharing factor of its service.

a website that literally just hosts models with $5m in funding is plenty. It's not like they're doing foundation model research or anything novel, yet they nabbed a good amount of money for surfing the AI wave

Pony diffusion imho qualifies as “foundation model research” and while it’s not directly Civit.AI, it’s indirectly them.

This is like saying chatgpt is “indirectly” made by Reddit…

It 100% is though, unironically.

If you say so

It seems ridiculous but I think it may have some credence. Perhaps it is because of sci-fi associating "dystopian" with "futuristic" technology, or because there is additional advertisement provided by third parties fearmongering (which may be a reasonable response to new scary tech?)