There's an AI behind the video feed optimized for keeping your attention for as long as possible. That is quite different from making your media more engaging.
The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from.
True, though stochastic gradient descent replaces all that human guesswork with predictable scaling laws. The hyperstimuli of the tomorrow will be nothing like what we recognize today as entertainment.
Yup, hence why only a reckless person or fool would try it.
But, since only a minority of people get addicted to heroin (i.e. the evils of heroin are overstated), and since no one is actually seriously arguing that viewing TikTok is as risky (23-38% chance after exposure) as trying heroin, or has as bad side effects, I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.
>I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.
I don't think that follows from your premises. Who is overstating the evils of heroin? Plenty of people argue that viewing TikTok (or AI-optimized short-form feeds) has bad side effects, mostly in the direction of eroding your ability to pay attention to anything less stimulating.
One thing that makes heroin more benign is that it's "finished" in some sense. The drug trade will find more addictive substances (e.g. fentanyl), but a vial of pure heroin isn't going to gradually become more addictive over time in ways that are imperceptible to the user but visible on the backend because the loss function trends downward.
Fun fact: the Chinese central bank is not at all independent, but one-party rule prevents monetary policy from becoming incoherent as a result of short-term political interests tied to the election cycle.
An independent central bank fixes this in a democracy, but now it can exert considerable influence over political outcomes.
Consider that Carter was punished by the public in his re-election campaign for a recession which was ostensibly caused by Federal Reserve policy choices which ultimately benefited Reagan.
Indeed, the singularity has come for the University, and now the University's death rattles are heard in the form of academics writing opinion pieces desperately trying to grasp at anything that might save their privileged position, searching for an imaginary escape hatch that relieves them from the compulsion of joining the rabble in contemplating their professional obsolescence.
>As an example, ask an LLM to do some 10th grade math. Inspect the thinking process. It can regurgitate the process and the rules but cannot perform them.
It seems to me that the solution is just RL to get the language model to delegate the actual calculation to the appropriate tool.
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