097 - Bletchley Fallacy

Today, as many discuss The Bletchley Declaration on the topic of AI, I'm reminded of something a colleague sent me a short time ago that accurately summarizes what that declaration means.

Countries are making hand gestures signaling their social standing with one another, but the declaration itself is just another embodiment of people who don't have the faintest clue about the state of technology trying to write a document with meaningless and often fraudulent buzzwords. The use of the term "Foundation Model", and even more so "Frontier Model" are both gigantic red flags, as LLMs are fundamentally neither of these things. They are the "Foundation" for nothing, they are narrow tools. They aren't at the "Frontier", and never have been.

Memes about this ridiculousness are already flowing like a mighty river, and most of those making them don't see more than fragments of how ridiculous things are in full. Countries are still getting worked up over trashbot technology when that technology is nowhere remotely close to the cutting edge, nor is it general in any meaningful sense.

Countries could choose to take meaningful actions, like throwing those guilty of very obvious fraud and perjury on this topic in prison. They could also throw those who invested heavily in the most obvious frauds in prison, as their accomplices.

They could also choose to invest in technology that delivers the capacities they claim to want, like transparency, explainability, ethics, alignment, safety, cybersecurity, reasoning, understanding, and factual grounding, but they do not. That would actually give them a seat at the table, as otherwise, companies are already preparing mobile barge data centers for operation in international waters.

Instead, they opted to write a letter and sign a petition addressed to nobody.

Governments are fundamentally slower to adapt than many other systems, and even many governments working together can't create any meaningful barrier. They can work symbiotically with those who are more agile, but that does require that they recognize the difference between symbiotes and parasites.

A table full of parasites and the people who take advice from them won't go anywhere worthwhile. Even an LLM can tell you that taking your advice from those who committed perjury against you is a bad idea.