Dwarkesh Patel
You wrote an interesting comment about getting your work into the LLM training corpus: “there has never been a more vital hinge-y time to write.”
Do you mean that in the sense that you will be this drop in the bucket that’s steering the Shoggoth one way or the other? Or do you mean it in the sense of making sure your values and persona persist somewhere in latent space?
Gwern
I mean both. By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren’t writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it’s enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn’t care about you.
There are ways to influence the Shoggoth more, but not many. If you don’t already occupy a handful of key roles or work at a frontier lab, your influence rounds off to 0, far more than ever before. If there are values you have which are not expressed yet in text, if there are things you like or want, if they aren’t reflected online, then to the AI they don’t exist.
I had been thinking this way this year as well. But increasingly I think this might just be a hubristic image of online writers - that in a sufficiently tooled future, any agent would be able to capture more information than just online writing or other such media.
But I do think the writing now will be most easily available/trained and may well be weighted much more highly in the future.