Yep. Admittedly the post doesn't exactly claim it's due to biological aging, but it could be perceived as implied.
It seems appropriate to also recognize that it's simply tiring to be to be in constant opposition to most of the social environment, and most people can't keep doing it at undiminished intensity for a full lifetime.
I always thought he was fired for making crackpot statements to the press in reference to his professional capacity, and thus creating bad PR and embarrassing spectacle for his employer. Seems like legitimate reasons to me.
An interesting question now is whether he had standard mental health issues, or if he was an early example of AI psychosis or whatever we call people who are falling in love with their AI chatbots because they tell them how smart they are.
Considering Richard Dawkins has recently succumbed to the same delusion it is a reminder that no matter how intelligent someone may otherwise be, we are all human and have certain tendencies and blind spots; anthropomorphizing non-entities being one of those.
Richard Dawkins is 85 to be fair, just like Bernie Sanders is 84 when he made similar comments.
The other guy worked on Google's AI safety team where one would expect he'd have a basic grasp of how the technology works before making outlandish claims.
I can't find it right now, but something came up a few years ago (probably on HN) about highly intelligent people being more adept at making up arguments to rationalize beliefs and actions that they had taken for other reasons entirely.
Sort of makes sense that wielding a more complex mind would offer more complex ways to go wrong, doesn't it?
And on balance, it also can mean that they make connections and see truth where others only see the facade. Both statements can (and are true) because highly intelligent people are still just people. Some people’s “delusions” are absolutely correct, and others “facts” are nothing more than anecdotes told to convince themselves of what they want to believe.
Sounds more like “intelligence” isn’t the only defining metric for such behavior to occur in people, because that describes a lot of less intelligent people too. Though, I suspect highly intelligent people are at least somewhat more likely to end up on the “correct” side of the facts.
As someone who watched one of their heros fall for some stupid cult like thing ten years ago and wondered the same thing. Then many years later fell for some dumb stuff. The answer is you probably will. Try to stay intellectually flexible, it'll be okay.
I have seen people I consider as much smarter than me fall for some very idiotic things. I certainly don't consider myself immune.
I think that the advice to try being intellectually flexible is a good one. Strive to learn new things, expose yourself earnestly to ideas that challenge your beliefs, exercise empathy, etc
Optimization on "Human Feedback", early exposure to high-effort experimental systems... I wouldn't be surprised it that turns into a bigger field than is generally recognized today.
Looking at it from the outside, I think it's still pretty hard to see how he came to end up in that position, but with a bit of individual vulnerability, arbitrary time to boil the frog slowly, and a fairly large number people exposed, maybe it would be stranger not to have the event occur with someone.
Symptoms section is very LLM, and that includes why it's obviously urging that critical early recognition on symptom lists that are too nonspecific to really be actionable.
Imagine the workload if people started seeking medical examinations on basis of the Week 1-2 list.
Worms space program, and add a mode where after you land you discover an opposing team is already there and you have to battle them using rocket launchers and bombs across a rocky landscape.
Presumably we're cunningly exploiting specifics of their world view.
Despite the authoritarian rule, PRC still values education highly in quite a few contexts where it doesn't interfere too much with the authoritarianism, and the country not only has plenty of physics graduates who will have learned about the Josephson effect, but might well listen to them and give them adequate grants for R&D.
I think the issue would be mainly that people fail to realize the nature of what they're corresponding with, and take things from inside their heads and behind the walls, and put them into the chat?
No one is "corresponding" trade secrets outside of their company. I recommend reading up on ITAR and the resulting culture it has created around aerospace info.
Note that google cloud has an itar-compatible gemini pro and google drive / docs - so, people do talk to it - and google is of course contractually obligated to not export it, nor to learn from it.
This is very different that AWS fed-gov bedrock thingie - where AWS promises that the models are running on hardware dedicated to you, with no external logging, etc.
Maybe a better way to say it would be, no one is talking to AI that isn't on company serves, managed by that company personnel.
My overall point being, no one is submitting design files to ChatGPT for analysis or emailing their friends in China test reports to get a second opinion on the experimental results.
> google cloud has an itar-compatible gemini pro and google drive / docs - so, people do talk to it
A lot of aerospace engineering is touch and feel. Someone has a "sense" for when to do the next step, and how to finagle the part so it comes out a particular way. They can train someone, if they apply themselves intently. But they probably couldn't explain it in words if they tried.
Don't forget these companies are both civilian and millitary contractors. These kind of information will stored in separate air-gapped computer systems.
Morris' autobiography "Animal Days" (1979) is a very charming account of his early life and career, in case someone wishes to take this occasion to read more about that than appears in the obituary.
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