PH² #10 - Most AI reception is patently absurd [E4Y25]

Hey Folks!

Video Transcript

Hey folks, I don't know if this video will go up. I don't even know if it actually recorded, but we may as well have a little conversation and enjoy this. The floor is doing me a kindness instead of hurting me. My tailbone still hurts, but it is what it is. Recovery is slower, and I still have that knot in my left shoulder, which, as you may have noticed in both the overhead press and the bench, my left arm is giving out the worst.

The worst part is your boy sleeps on his tummy, and I sleep with my head turned like this, which just makes it worse. So I'm going to have to start practicing sleeping on my back. That is what it is. I also maybe cut it out, but I tried to do some pushups at the end, and totally my arms are dead. These noodles are going to play a game later, and that's fine.

You get a good intake of protein, you do your exercises, you accomplish something, and you feel good. Things will come into place. I am easily the strongest I've ever been. Injuries aside, when I started on this journey, I was struggling to squat a bar or even deadlift a bar for that matter. Admittedly, it's been years, but years of hokey adherence to fitness has still got me 300 pounds stronger for some exercises. The bar I'm hitting stagnation around 120 when I'm not injured, barely a hundred. I don't think we're at a hundred right here while I'm injured, but I think I'm going to adjust for the bench or look for an alternate exercise and see if I can get my biceps bigger in a way that reinvigorates me.

I love the bench press. It's fun, but I am finding that while I'm injured it's difficult. Even when I was pushing back to get my shoulders against the bench, I could feel that my left shoulder wasn't touching as deep as my right. Of course, as I mentioned before, I tore up the muscles in my upper back or at least the tendons, so I have less control over that whole operation, at least for now, than most people or even me three years ago.

I loved all of this for just the workout itself. It was fun, like I said. I went and tried to do bench or pushups at the end, and it didn't quite come together, but that's fine. You know, sometimes you don't take a long enough rest, or you don't get enough sleep, or you don't have enough water. I've definitely done the third one, and you just give it your best and go from there. Who knows? Maybe there's another exercise I could have done instead. I would love to do shrugs right now, but I have a feeling if I do shrugs, I'm going to get to the point where I can't turn my head.

As for other things, in case you are still here, I have learned something by watching the analytics for my videos. I've said some naughty words in the titles that YouTube avoids, but that's fine. We'll just keep going. Like I said, I don't really care too much how these do. This is more me talking to myself over time. And who knows? Someday, assuming YouTube's still around, it'll be some kind of interesting catalog of somebody who probably at some point doesn't exist. That should be fascinating.

I saw a joke recently. Some guy was on a dating app, and he said, "You know, it's likely that there's a nonzero amount of people that you swipe by on these dating apps that aren't alive anymore." He said he likes to tell himself when he doesn't get a response that that person is probably dead. And then he says, "In fact, no, they're all—they're all dead. I hope they're all dead." That made me chuckle, but it's true. Over time, more and more of Facebook is going to be people who were instead of is, or just straight-up fake.

On the topic of fake people, I am absolutely delighted with this whole Chinese open AI model thing. Sam Altman and all those people are just the most insufferable parasites. It's very funny to watch them complaining about their intellectual property being stolen when that's their entire enterprise. Everything they've done is about stealing other people's stuff. It's fascinating that their business proposition is essentially, "I'm going to give you a nuclear-powered lookup table, that's my product."

Everyone loses their minds well, not everyone, lots of people lose their minds. They think that HAL from 2001 is like on the edge of existing. It takes me back to chatbots in the 80s and 90s, these very rudimentary things that people absolutely thought were alive. They're like, "Oh my goodness, the computer simulates a human brain." Watching people try to make those connections and act like these machine learning models are even remotely close to people is incredible.

The absurdity of the claims that are made people are reducing all of these complex mechanisms to such extreme levels. It's like asking somebody how hard it would be to get to the Sun, and they tell you, "Well, it's not very hard for me to drive to my neighbor's house, so I can't imagine there's much more complicated work that needs to be done to get to the Sun." Or where they say, "Well, I took an airplane to 30,000 feet. It's just the same operation but slightly larger." And you just blow my mind because it's like, don't get me wrong, the fact that technology is to the point where we can make lookup tables this big is incredible to me.

Google already kind of had done that incredible thing. I mean, the fact that you can search on Google and get instant results from their massive cache is really neat. It sucks now, but as a technology, it's really cool. But ultimately, everything that people lose their minds over with these tools, like these things already existed for the most part. The only thing that's been added is novelty. We already had devices for autocompleting text. If you went and wrote an email five years ago in Gmail, it would almost always find the next word you were going to use because a lot of people, when they talk to one another, they say what they're expecting the other person wants to hear.

That's why a lot of your emails in business look the same because we all think, "Oh, we're supposed to say best regards or any of that other nonsense." It's not that Google created an email program that is as sentient as a human. None of these things are. You could legitimately take a giant wall like we're talking Everest-sized, right? Probably larger, probably a lot larger. You put all these little paddles on it. All these paddles are controlled by servos.

If you can imagine a Plinko machine, you have a ball at the top, and at the bottom, you have the results you're interested in—all these different words. Let's go with words. We don't need to worry about the times for now because that would be even larger. You have all of these different words, right? You drop that ball. You say the previous word was this, and you drop that ball, and it goes all the way down and lands in one of those buckets.

Maybe that bucket says "is." There's a human feedback loop in this operation where people look at the outputs of this machine and they say, "What was that? What I think should have come next: yes or no?" That's why you've had these large groups of people that have had to validate a lot of this stuff over the course of the last few years. If yes, then you store all of those angles for all of those paddles. If no, you adjust all of the paddles in some random fashion and you try it again, and you repeat this process billions, if not trillions of times.

Over time, you build up this cache of angles for all of these paddles where if you keep dropping in this ball and then taking whatever word it ends up with, the final result is a sentence. I challenge anyone to look at that ball—it could be a rock, even—to look at that thing and go, "That rock is basically a human brain. Those paddles are basically a human brain." It's like no. It's weighted averages in a giant weight table. They're even passing in random seeds in order to create the impression that these things are dynamic. It's absurd.

Don't get me wrong, it's one of the coolest toys that I've seen in a long time. I couldn't make it, not saying that, but I can't do a lot of things that we take for granted. I can't change your oil. I could probably learn, but I can't change your oil. We have mechanics doing that all the time, and nobody's losing their minds over that, right? They probably should. It's really cool, but that's what blows my mind.

People see this thing, and we're just back to that situation of seeing Jesus in toast. You know, a piece of toast gets burned, and it kind of looks vaguely humanlike, or seeing elephants in the clouds, or seeing a man with a bow and arrow in the stars. Humans make these connections. We see people in everything. We make connections with everything. That's one of our strengths, but it's also one of our greatest weaknesses. It is maddening, like just watching people make these absurd connections.

Sometimes smart people in their own fields—people who deal with biology or astronomy or just people very interested in something else—look at this thing and fall into the same traps that they make fun of other people for. They fall into the same traps of being like, "I can't explain how this works, so there must be a creator," right? "I can't fathom that this rock and paddle system could create a sentence, so that software you just wrote is basically human. It's literally thinking." It's like no. It's not thinking.

I go, "Look, it gives me messages to tell me what the last thing it did. Like, every game you've played in the last twenty years has had state machines in their NPCs. Like, this isn't new. Have you played The Sims? They literally have little bubbles over their head to signify the things that they're doing. They show you the meters on the screen to show you the inputs that are causing the outputs. Like, this is all stuff we've been doing. We're just doing it now at a scale that requires nuclear power plants in order to run it."

It's like if you take anything, even like breaking passwords on a computer, if you take that and you brute force it to an extreme where you've got the world's most powerful supercomputers, are you going to crack that password faster than one grandmother in an apartment building? It's like yes, yes, this thing is more interesting than a Sim, but no, nothing it is doing at the moment is like on the edge of general AI.

The only reason—the only reason—that these executives are making it seem like that and trying to get the government scared and just trying to get everyone scared is they want to close up that environment so they have a monopoly in this software. The only reason Nvidia is pushing companies so hard to require ray tracing in their games is so that people will then buy these new GPUs that do this thing, right? The only way that they can get ray tracing to work right now is to fake it.

So up until this Chinese DeepSeek thing, I think it's called, currently you had to use Nvidia software in order to do this faking process, right? So they have a strong incentive to get people scared and to get people locked in to this ecosystem where they're in full control. But it's, there's nothing else to it. It's a very cool multivitamin, right? Like, effectively, they've made something that's neat, that can do things for you. For some people, it's actually useful, but for most people, it's not very useful or interesting.

At best, it'll get you very bad at learning new things. You may say, "Well, you know, I can use it and it'll teach me how to think or something like that," and for certain people, maybe that's true. But being able to find your own information and learn things is incredibly critical because here's the thing: as cool as DeepSeek is—again, I forget if that's the name of that software—it won't let you learn about negative history in China. At least, the version that they released, apparently people already cracked it.

Once your information is delivered to you by a corporation or any entity where you cannot twist the knobs, so to speak, you are now accepting that the information you will have, the history that you believe, everything you know and learn, is in control of people who are very, very, very incentivized to lie to you. It is important for them to lie to you because that makes selling you snake oil easier. It makes tricking you into believing in various nonsense easier. It makes any sort of efforts they put into the government easier because you become a rube.

They reinforce what you want to hear or see things, and it allows them to control the world around you. And these people aren't smart enough for that to be a good idea. Sam Altman is, like most of these people, very good at taking your money. I mean, that's not very impressive. A cat is really good at getting you to feed it. That doesn't make a cat the next Carl Sagan, right, or the next Einstein.

These people are running on instinct in a system built by other people who ran on instinct. They're not geniuses. There's nothing especially special about them. It's just a bunch of cats that figured out if you meow long enough, somebody will give you a bowl with cat food in it. It's all they're doing. So yeah, I hope people come around to realizing this stuff is not nearly as crazy as they think.

I feel like we are experiencing what people did the first time they saw a motion picture where basically you'd see a train coming at you through the screen, and because of your understanding of the world around you, you might panic because you think, "I'm literally about to die." But it's just not the case. These things are neat, and maybe some nerd someday, maybe even next year, is going to find a way to make these not parlor tricks. If they do something like that, that'll be cool.

But my biggest concern is everybody is losing their mind over something that I really don't think they should. Someday, maybe in my lifetime, somebody will actually make something that can actually grow something similar to a personality and legitimately gain its own desires and begin autonomously trying to become better and better, right? Like, actual general AI. I don't think anyone's going to notice. I think that's going to happen, and because everybody is so caught up in these magic tricks, like everyone is convinced that that rabbit literally came out of nowhere when Altman or whoever pulled it out of the hat, it's like no. It's a trick. That's the whole point. It's a magic trick to make you think that this person can do something cool.

The difference between magicians and these charlatans is magicians and you have some level of agreement. You understand magic isn't real, as sad as that is. They understand it isn't real, but they want to make you believe for the briefest of moments that it is. Now, these idiots, they just want your money. So just to close out, nothing today or in recent memory outside of personal life—personal life is going fine, I guess—but just the world around me, there's been a lot of bad news.

But hearing Sam Altman cry foul over terms of service abuse and intellectual property abuse fills my heart with warmth. I hope you're doing well. I hope you find the inspiration to keep doing what you're doing, whatever it is. Don't let these snakes make you think that being creative is a lost cause. These tools just average out the general amount of the content that they steal and they pump out very baseline, average things, and they probably always will because that's just how they work.

That works fine for corporations because they don't care. Everyone wants to be the Coca-Cola where everything is gray and boring and doesn't offend anybody or excite anybody for that matter. But really, who wants to work for corporations if they can avoid it, right? Keep your head above water, try your best to look for small businesses that you can work for or with, try and network with people who are near you or with entities that are small enough where your voice matters and where everyone at the company, if you wish, can know who you are.

Don't get worried that places like Google or Electronic Arts or anything like that aren't going to hire you because they're going to try and automate their nonsense and produce the absolute bottom of the barrel garbage. These places would have never respected you anyways, and probably would have fired you at the drop of a hat. So don't be discouraged. Believe in yourself, keep trying your best, and for what little bit it matters given that there are eight billion people in the world, I believe in you, and I'm confident you'll do great things.