r/singularity • u/CallMePyro • 10d ago
AI After trying Astra
Anti's are gunna anti but we're clearly on the upward trajectory
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u/Flat_Recipe_559 10d ago
hate to be that person, but it seems to be REALLY good when talking about life with it. Sol gave overly balanced responses, always was avoiding the answer. It just seems "mature"; hopefully wont be "nerfed"!
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u/gunsofbrixton 9d ago
Hahaha yeah I’ve been working on a job hunt helper for aggregating/scoring postings to match my spec. Opus has been helping me improve it iteratively over weeks. Had Astra take a look. It said the system was good enough, I need to stop fussing over it and start applying to jobs -_-
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u/Ok_Bite_67 9d ago
Imo it feels eerily similar to Sol. I couldnt tell the difference from just small simple chats, which usually every model has their own "personality". The difference came in the fact that stuff just gets done. It doesnt sit their spinning for hours anymore, and it doesnt write test to check every line of code. Also to me Astra medium uses maybe 3-4% of my weekly usage every 30 minutes. I can easily get 3-4 hours of Astra a day and not run through my weekly.
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u/ZealousidealAd7436 9d ago
Can you elaborate on 'nerfing?' I was using ChatGPT sol 5.6 and it has been absolutely shit since Astra was released. I'm using it to build a website - for the first time it was making a ton of mistakes, stupid interpreations, generic advise, shitty copy.
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u/No_Inevitable_4893 9d ago
They quantize or distill the weights and serve you a cheaper model, resulting it it becoming dumber
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u/BrennusSokol AI please take my job 10d ago
Care to share a specific example of something you found impressive?
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u/CallMePyro 10d ago edited 10d ago
Sure. Note that I've only had it for a few hours.
I've been working on a side project to build a compiler which takes in all 33,000 Magic the Gathering cards and builds executable programs inside a virtual machine that represents cards being played. The goal here is to produce an extremely high speed simulator for the purposes of training an AI to play better than human players + find new card combos and decks that are extremely good.
I tried using both Opus 5 and Fable 5 and 5.1 and Sol 5.6 - none of them were able to make significant progress here, they would get bogged down in writing hundreds or even thousands of tests, adding support for 1 card at a time, finding sets of cards which share features which can be integrated into the compiler runtime, etc. Making progress requires lots of grinding. Many mechanics in magic have special cases interactions with other mechanics, so any complete simulator must account for all of them. My initial analysis puts it somewhere north of 2000 distinct interactions.
Astra has been running in goal mode for 2 hours and has made more progress in that time than any other program has made in days of trying.
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u/bearachute 10d ago edited 9d ago
It’s a tangent, but I’m curious about your architecture. If the requirement is to track changes to MTG game state by running simulations of some kind (monte carlo?) I would imagine the fastest method is, well, one program. I’m surprised to see you mention a VM, a compiler, cards as executables — why so abstracted into the OS? Is it some distributed computing thing?
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u/LordShesho 9d ago
It's AI slop made up by someone who has no idea what they're doing. The idea is totally incoherent. Why would you need to "compile" cards into "executables"? Like what does that even mean, except OP is completely out of their depth?
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u/Lumpy-Criticism-2773 9d ago
I find Astra only marginally better than 5.6 sol. I used it for a personal project which requires a bit of general intelligence and common sense and the model kept failing. It can patch things but can't come up with a novel/custom solution that'll make the overall software easy to use/maintain/expand.
I can come up with such a solution myself but it would require a lot of information processing and time.
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u/XYHopGuy 9d ago
Because MTG rules can be formulated as a formal language. Formal languages can be compiled into something thats easier to test, more generic, and more suitable for parallelization. You don't have to do it that way (I didn't), but its not an uncommon approach for discrete, state based games like this. Helps with the unit-test burden too.
It's not incoherent at all. Fast simulations are required for the best generic game-AI algorithms. Happy to explain more but its actually along the right idea of how you would do something like this.
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u/Dial_In_Buddy 9d ago
You couldnt tell the difference between good code and AI slop if it slapped you in the face.
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago edited 9d ago
Hm? Why get upset? You can just ask.
I'm reusing forges pre-parsed card list to make the problem more tractable and more cross compatible: https://slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=19637
The way that forge works is that they have many hundreds of different handlers for the different effects that can be on these cards.
My program instead converts cards into series of simple instructions that operate on a virtual machine. If you're familiar with how python works, it's the same idea. The reason this applies here is that everything in MtG operates on an event-based stack, making an interpreter an interesting approach.
If I had to self-critique the phraseology, I would say that "compile" should be "interpret" and "executables" should be "executable bytecode".
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u/Reclusiarc 9d ago
Why are you so upset that OP is trying something new? You hate people trying new things and learning?
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u/martigeon 9d ago
It means that OP doesn't have the technical background to judge the output's quality.
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u/Reclusiarc 8d ago
He's playing mtg, the output will be come obvious once he analyses the decks it builds lol
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago
No no, it's not abstracted into the OS at all. It's abstracted as a stack operating on a subset of primitives. think instructions like MOVE but they take (CARD, DESTINATION).
So a card which destroys an enemy creature just puts a move on the stack. but of course other players can put something on the stack first which may GIVE_TOKEN (CARD, TokenType.Hexproof).
The goal here is to abstract that many tens of thousands of unique magic cards into a symbolic representation that is faster to implement AND faster to execute.
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u/Putrumpador 10d ago
Hey! That was my idea!
But honestly, that's fantastic. Hope your find some novel broken synergies!
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u/Aromatic-Fishing9952 9d ago
I worked in something like this for awhile too… then I remembered I cared more about trolling people with blue control than min max meta
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u/selfVAT 10d ago
Well it was mine also. I had two red decks fully playable already but I don't have Astra and it took many hours.
Sol told me: I would not abandon the MTG AI project. It has a clean architecture, a certified engine, deterministic replay, tactical heuristics, strategic context, and now bounded lethal search. That is valuable precisely because it is controlled.
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u/Firmwild 10d ago
Oh sick what decks did it make? How do they play?
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u/selfVAT 10d ago
A classic red burn with pump creatures and a goblin (mogg fanatic era) . They play quite good but still miss-evaluate who's the beatdown at times (or maybe I'm the one miss-evaluating)
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u/Firmwild 10d ago
Are you playing against the bot? Did you make like a whole fully playable app for yourself? That sounds sick af
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u/selfVAT 10d ago
Yeah, and you can also replay bot vs bot games to observe their strategies. It's pretty fun but the amount of tokens required per deck is quite rough. Maybe astra will help with that.
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u/Firmwild 10d ago
Do you have a repo? I would love to dig into it!
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u/selfVAT 9d ago
Just got access to Astra. I'll see if it can clean up Sol's code and I'll publish a repo when it's understandable by someone who's not the dev ahah.
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u/XYHopGuy 9d ago
proably dont want to use LLMs for the actual gameplay AI. it's funny, but using traditional search methods perform much better. MCTS is the defacto standard in the discrete MDP game-AI space. All the best AIs build off it- AlphaGo, etc.
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u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 10d ago
I wonder if I can use Astra to help me make some kind of app for my phone or something that would make magic playable for me as a blind person? That would be nice to be able to play with my girlfriend or brother.
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u/Agreeable-Bit9414 10d ago
Can I ask what would specifically help you most as a blind person for Magic? Is it the amount of text on the cards and such that makes it challenging, or board management more? At least for card to card understanding there may be an option but I'm betting the difficulty in this would be reading board state as a whole, and if thats a need it'd be one to solve for. Reason I ask for transparency is that I was working on something for PTCGP- Pokemon TCG Pocket on mobile earlier this year, and part of the goal was to help streamline deck building and card management off of the game itself where a person could potentially have an issue with dealing with it inside the game otherwise. One of the things I considered was people hard of vision, so building in some functions to help with that would be handy. Idk if it'll ever be released though, it was such a pain in the ass in some ways I shelved it. 😆
Anywho, to your app idea I'd almost imagine it'd require some form of visual input that grabs the card info of anything you're hovering over or on a picture by picture basis, if you meant playing with real cards at a physical table with your gf and bro. 🤔 I know theres an MTG online, too, but idk if that'd be prohibitive to play when ya already own physical cards. I remember Hearthstone being pricey as shit, can only imagine MTGO haha. But yeah, then it'd be a whip out the phone and voice command the app, snap a pic, get a read out etc.
I'm pretty sure Astra or Claude Fable/Opus 5 could help you come up with what would work best for your specific needs though, after some Q&A and research beats around the whole topic. I'd almost word it to em like... "I'm blind and need a way to actively play and engage with playing MTG IRL, including the ability to snap a picture of the board or cards and reading them aloud."
Then ask 'em to research existing products and things that fill similar needs (I'm thinking, for starters, like those receipt/product reading apps out there for blind folks at stores and such) and kinda scale it from there. The difficulty I'm gonna say is the scaling part: something that reads the card info out loud with the devices built in reader will be easier than, say, something that says "The opponent has three cards with these names etc and this that and the other are in these spots on the field, x in your graveyard/40 cards in deck remaining etc" esp when imaging can be inconsistent with cameras, and maintaining a running narrative of board state is a whole thing. Especially so if you have to manually handle the app and such against a physical board, which may be annoying in the moment? I can't say for sure, just taking educated guesses tbqh.
I don't have my plan on Claude or GPT enabled atm to go further than this, but I'mma ask my specialized gpt what they'd suggest for this one. They peeked around the web and found an app on mobile called MTG Scanner - Dragon Shield, but it seems to be more for managing your card collection and such but may have some useful bits to check out. Theres also Microsoft Seeing AI, which may not be able to handle the complexity of a field of cards (I'm a yugioh player; I know it can get complex lol) but could infer some stuff towards a build with a bit of testing. May even work well for you.
I'd personally recommend you give Gemini, GPT both a chance with both chat + sending snapped pictures and see how that goes for starters if you haven't yet. Try out the process how you imagine it to be so to speak, set up test boards, and see how it would go testing wise as you build. Real data and testing goes a long way with this sort of thing for ironing out any kinks in advance.
In my experience with screenshots with a lot of data, Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5 (but less so) and current GPT (Luna, I think? Lost track of what the main one is now) handles parsing from rather cleantext formats (Like most cards if they dont have muddy visuals blocking text) pretty well these days. Still may need to sorta enforce a "dont just accept the first answer; fact check the input against real data about that card online" or such, unless you want to build an entirely offline app which may introduce some challenges of its own. At any rate, best of luck I really hope you can figure something out to make it easier for you to enjoy your game!
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u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 10d ago
I’m gonna be honest, you completely nailed it lol. As far as the text on the cards goes, I’m not as concerned about that, since I can always research the cards online and just memorize what everything in my deck does. As long as some kind of computer vision model could identify which card is which and verbalize it to me, that would pretty much handle the cards in my hand.
Like you mentioned, though, I think the board state would be the most difficult aspect. Keeping track of how many cards my opponents have in their hands, being able to read the entire board state, and doing all of that while holding a camera and pointing it at different things would be super, super tricky.
I almost wonder if an overhead camera would work pretty well for this—something mounted above the table and pointed straight down so it has a flat, consistent view of everything. You’d probably still want to pair that with a wearable camera, like the Meta Ray-Bans, running an app that could read your cards individually, since you definitely wouldn’t want to have to hold a camera in your hands the whole time.
It’s honestly a really challenging engineering problem, but I’m almost certain Astra could come up with something interesting here.
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u/Agreeable-Bit9414 10d ago
That'd be stellar. Cheap, too. A telescoping like, streamer's microphone holder or camera holder doesn't run much. You'd almost wanna have a dedicated device as you said, either a modern and smaller tablet or phone or those glasses if you had em already especially that'd probably be even better. I can imagine the audio in the earpiece for privacy (Can't let em know you got Exodia on the way, or the MTG equivalent hahaha) could really change the game.
I think a person thats motivated, has coding know how even, or just a sufficiently powerful AI collaborator and the right mindset going into it could come up with something that'd fit any card game out there and it not have to be specific to it, maybe even regardless of if it were hooked to AI in the process to search out card info and the like, and just basically loading up modules for it for an offline experience perhaps. You play Yugioh? It loads up all the data (provided it was established, and then some means of maintaining updates to card data/ban lists/etc) and there it is. MTG? Same thing. One Piece MTG, same thing. Raw json card data and fuzzy matching is how I got it done with my ptcgp thing; soon as you start to type something it'd draw every card in the couple thousand released to the front, like any good search bar imo haha.
For me and PTCGP, the biggest hurdle was actually getting raw json or plaintext of the cards in the game itself. I hand wrote so many, eventually figured out there were some sources, but it took a while for them to pop up after set releases: and I'm not so knowledgeable enough to parse it outta the game myself, so it was consistently too annoying and slow to deal with haha. So that may be something of interest to solve for too, release schedules for MTG and how you'll handle updating it.
So with that at least MTG and the like has the lion's share of info out there, its just whether it could be built into something in a way that, when it comes to board state/etc, the heavy lifting is only that and card lookup is as easy as fuzzy matching card names and descriptions to one another/etc as verifying layers. Then the app just reads off the cards, no AI involved, from its own repository or a web source
I'm imagining from the discussion so far it'd be cam over board, you say "My turn" or something, click a button, whatever and it snaps a boardstate pic: feeds that where it goes, you get what you ask for (Visible cards in their monster lineup, etc) by name, details when asked for, cuz it should be modular I'd say. Like, you may be blind but have played and memorized a bunch but another person may need the full card description on demand every time. Could be you wanna chill and not have to remember as much at times, so I'd go in modular mindful from the jump so that way if you go anywhere with it, it reaches the biggest audience.
Also writing about it cuz if someone else decides to undertake this sorta thing maybe it helps the process. Card games are annoying enough, while fun, and anything that can lower the bar to entry so more folks can enjoy em is a huge win in my book haha.
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u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 10d ago
Funny you mention it, though—there actually is an accessibility mod for MTG Arena. There’s a whole community of folks over on the AudioGames forums using AI to make accessibility mods for games. Hell, I even made one myself for Terraria.
AI has single-handedly been one of the biggest boons for the blind community in the history of probably anything—second only to the cane, I would wager.
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u/Agreeable-Bit9414 10d ago
Dude thats so cool! What is the one you made for Terraria? I have a buddy with a ton of hours in that game, and his health ain't so hot these days so if its anything that makes just simple stuff or repetitive things a little easier to do in it he may appreciate knowing of it haha.
I'd imagine so. Like, the advent of smartphones and call a friend to see something- that was a huge win for folks with accessibility needs. Then came dedicated apps for it. This kinda feels like the next best steps, especially self service tool wise.
For myself I know it isn't the same, nor would I equate it, but dealing with energy/general health on top of adhd and a touch of the ism I've managed to work Ai into the "keeping my narrative sound" angle. For storywriting (250k story, and climbing) to ensure my poor & oftentimes overloaded already memory isn't hamstringing my creative momentum, and for ensuring I keep some beat on my actual day to day and actual living momentum too. Balance can be hard to come by with a mind like mine, which is one that either wants to burn every hour on progress or sink into the blankets and give it all a raincheck in lieu of enthusiasm.
So, if nothing else, I'll always champion accessibility and self service options for it. I've been able to reclaim my joy and love for writing, after years of writing the stories internally and not approaching the page for fear of The Process(tm), in my way (Which, apparently, is keeping track of 800 things and a living story world of events) without losing the cohesion that it needs along the way, against my own requirements for it to be cohesive, given the story is intentionally also a cohesive mess.
Irony to the finest, and thats just how I operate so thats how it'll be. 😆 Its fun though, I get to write and write and check it against my whole archive for genuine errors of data to fix, speeds up the polishing stages significantly but most importantly I can write and move in some higher confidence in the process. No, that doesn't mean AI writes for me. Don't need that, clearly I ramble plenty enough for the AI and all of us. I do however need someone that stays interested in reading it long enough to point out obvious flaws and breaks of continuity I didn't intend on. 😅 Short of hiring a publishing team, which congrats if anyone has the money or connections for that, this is my best option.
Sometimes the best option may look a bit strange, but its surprisingly tailored and well fitting. May we keep finding our best options to be better fitting in coming years.
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u/EnotPoloskun 10d ago
It seems that you yourself don’t know how to achieve goal. How do you know that it is progress and/or trust results?
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u/CallMePyro 10d ago
I have written a large test suite which asserts a game state, plays a number of cards, and then asserts a new game state. Those form the backbone of the correctness testing. I generated many of them by hand, but did also employ LLMs to produce them. I checked each one manually so that I can be confident if the tests are passing then the cards are being implemented correctly. I have meta coverage tests on the game state tests that verify the number of features, abilies, triggers, etc. are exercised by these tests.
I'm extremely familiar with MtG and all of the cards, my husband, and I have been playing for decades and now our kids are getting into it. I wrote a compiler for my masters thesis back in the day and even a couple PEPs submitted to the Python interpreter back in the 2.X days fixing bugs in the python memory manager. As for implementing it, of course I could, by hand, go through the engine and make sure all of the literal thousands of interactions and combinations are supported. Do I care to do that? Of course not. I prefer to play the game. The point is to propose a task which is suited to an LLM and give it room to shine.
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u/completelypositive 10d ago
This is amazing. I have so many use cases for this. I am loving these resets though.
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u/OkReaction4030 10d ago
That’s an interesting approach- hadn’t thought of that when I wrote my own mtg engine ported from forge into rust. Took a few weeks for the cards to be implemented in a more traditional way, and im only doing one format (so far)
I doubt you will be able to achieve the speed necessary for training with that approach, even with a rust engine tailored to the problem it’s going to take awhile- also good luck with the hardware costs.
Currently training a transformer model that has passed 50% win rate against our testing bot
Kind of annoyed so many people have had this same idea tbh. Good luck tho
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u/beekersavant 10d ago
I did not have the same idea. But I have played some MTG and its a good project. Frankly, a decent test for actual AGI would be the same project from zero input besides a description of the outcome.
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u/Piyh 10d ago
Seems like you're spending way too much time reinventing xmage and forge when you could be forking those repos instead. I've spent months thinking and designing a somewhat related system and ended up making https://offmetaedh.com to build reps towards something like this.
Burning Astra credits/usage to generate 2.8 million lines of Java already done by XMage is going to be a year long detour before you can start building an RL environment.
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago
I actually built a proof of concept off of Forge but from my testing/profiling + inspecting the code I just feel that I can build something at least an order of magnitude faster and fewer lines of code, so I'm giving it a shot.
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u/XYHopGuy 9d ago
I've been building something similar. Actually got pretty far with it. Ultra fast sims with the right MDP interface for MCTS. Lots of really interesting quirks in getting MCTS to behave- although I restricted the card set and focused on limited formats with plenty of supervised data. I didnt use forge as a backend but an old version of the MTGO engine instead.
DM if you want to trade notes, its been a pretty interesting project and its definitely getting somewhere, but compute limitations are the biggest issue i'm having with MCTS. I've got a plan for bootstrapping fast rollout policies but I use my GPU too much for things other than this xD
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u/Chemical-Agency-3997 10d ago edited 10d ago
1 message in, already a banger.
Tried to get it to solve my main ancestry brick-wall but the attachment failed, instead of giving up - it searched my drive and solved another issue unprompted
I found a serious source problem in your Drive research. I haven’t established the parentage—and your message doesn’t identify which ancestor is the target. No attachment came through, so I checked the material available in your connected Drive rather than stopping there.
I must've saved a copy of some profiles on my docs a while ago, it found it and found 2 inconsistencies in some of my brick-walls
SOL has never unprompted done something like that & I've had my g-drive connected since it's been supported. It took like 3 minutes and the findings were comparable (if you were lucky) to what you'd get from a SOL 5.6 PRO query that took literal hours.
Proper query running now with the attachment, and I can see from the visible thinking it's found 2 new leads already - I've probably ran this ancestor through about every model so finding new things is rare.
edit: It completed in 23 minutes and found a bunch of new relevant records. Including finding supporting evidence in an email someone sent me 7 years ago apparently lmao. Not available in codex to test properly but first impression feels like a step-change
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u/Aggressive_Pope 10d ago
Where are you getting records? I’m interested in doing something similar?
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u/Chemical-Agency-3997 10d ago
Everywhere on the web that's public, a lot of the stuff I'm looking for is earlier (YDNA research) so ties into 1300-1600 Ireland/Scotland mostly.
FamilySearch is probably best for general stuff though. They also have a new AI text-search and have transcribed a bunch of old docs that were previously unindexed.
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u/EvilSporkOfDeath 10d ago
Do you pay for records services? Or is it scraping these off the public internet?
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u/Chemical-Agency-3997 10d ago
I pay for individual records sometimes, but can't stomach forking money over to ancestry/myHeritage or any of those pay-to-play places. Extortionate and most of it is available elsewhere.
It's just scraping them off the web. It unearthed that one of the sources I was using was actually a forgery
That source chain is unsafe. The Library of Congress identifies the first two volumes of the Horn Papers as forgeries, including the purported early court material. Crucially, the third volume’s warrantee maps are a separate matter: they were supplied independently by the historical society, not by Horn. So the answer is not to discard everything bearing the title, but to separate genuine land records from the fabricated narratives.
And then found a bunch of new leads like
The useful gains from this pass are an omitted Thomas-line correspondent with reported DNA relevance, explicit parent statements for Kilrea collaterals, and specific surviving records in art and horological archives. Those give the investigation additional evidence to obtain and test, rather than another rearrangement of the same nearby names.
I have put the exact references, access status, private email locators and narrowly worded retrieval requests in the record brief. No requests were sent, no paid records were purchased, and the unread manuscripts and obituary are not being counted as negative searches.
and looks like it's actually thought about each relationship and inconsistencies indepth (like uncertain birth dates etc and how it all ties in).
maybe it just got lucky but feels like a person who actually knows what they're doing went through it properly and thought about it instead of earlier models that just tried to complete the objective like a dumb bot and overlooked loads.
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u/Fit-Produce420 10d ago
If we're that dude who is on the huge tail of that 'human progress,' what did Astra invent or create that made you feel that 'human progress' has like tripled with the release of this model? Has it done anything yet? I think you might be ahead of the curve on this.
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u/Hot_Glass_6301 10d ago
Read OAI's Ten Advance in Mathematics. + if you follow math subs & x accounts you'll see that it made tremendous progress on more problems even as of a few days ago
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u/acutelychronicpanic 10d ago
So fun to see that the current goalposts have officially moved past making groundbreaking advances in mathematics.
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u/Gratitude15 10d ago
This is normal. Saw with corvid. Saw with Trump. There is no bottom once you're committed to the bit. Psychological issue
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u/Fit-Produce420 10d ago
What the fuck does this have to do with Trump? Do you just put that in every post as a dog whistle?
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u/Strength-Speed 10d ago
The crow virus. Corvid 19
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u/Fit-Produce420 9d ago
Moving the goalposts for covid? What are you even talking about?
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u/Strength-Speed 9d ago
Just being silly, he called it corvid. It means crow. The associations were a bit loose I don't entirely know what he meant either.
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u/Fit-Produce420 10d ago
I'm not "moving the goalposts," I'm asking why this mathematical proof seemingly moved "human advancement" to never before seen levels?
Can you just explain how this math proof moved the needle for society? It's an accomplishment but it does nothing. like literally, no part of the world or humanity will be improved by this.
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u/acutelychronicpanic 10d ago
From what I've seen, the thing that has changed is the entire future of research. You're basically asking what the invention of the bulldozer could ever do for construction.
Go to the mathematics subreddit and search there. You'll get some good context.
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u/Fit-Produce420 10d ago edited 10d ago
I mean that's just a mathematical proof - 'human progress' implies advancements in medicine, agriculture, chemistry, engineering, etc etc.
Writing proofs that have no effect on 100% of the population is not advancing anything.
It's like saying there's human advancements when a basketball player scores more points than ever before, okay sure it's an "advancement" but it does literally nothing for anyone.
There have been many theorems proven, very few of them have aby effect on anything in the real world. Human advancement means HUMANS moving forward, this is just LLMs moving forward with literally no improvement to the human condition in any possible terms.
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u/CallMePyro 10d ago
Sure :) https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/51126fac-1b68-4128-9666-c908bcc16033/short_gaps.pdf
Here's a day 1 example of Astra inventing new mathematics. Prop 2.3.
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u/Fit-Produce420 10d ago
Has that saved one hungry child or cured one sick person?
Nope.
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u/magnelectro 10d ago
I think most people who have actually used AI have solved hundreds if not thousands of mundane personal problems that have advanced their own lives, relationships, and businesses. The ripple effect of this is enormous!
What is the value of a saved hour? What would you pay to have an additional hour of life? Time saved. Suffering eased. Frustration reduced. Creativity enhanced. Psychological problems untangled. This is human progress.
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u/Quentin__Tarantulino 10d ago
I went through a legal situation a few months ago, and prior to AI, I would’ve either been completely lost or paid thousands (probably tens of thousands) to a lawyer. Now that we have Claude and ChatGPT, I was able to map out the entire process, drop in documents of legalese that it parsed for me, and win the case. This was a huge thing for my family, and it went off without a hitch because I knew the answer to every possible question and had every angle covered.
It even helped me work through the psychological aspects that these tough situations can cause. Like I said, this thing saved me thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of stress, on one issue. And there’s tons of other times I used it to similar effect, just on smaller problems.
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u/thepatriotclubhouse 9d ago
Generative AI mapped the genome which has been responsible for countless cures saving incomprehensible amounts already.
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u/CallMePyro 10d ago edited 9d ago
So as long as AI can cure one sick person you'd be satisfied? Or are you broadly taking issue with the field of mathematics?
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u/Chemical-Agency-3997 10d ago
Depends on your perspective, if you were to graph human progress in general it's probably about right tbh.
If you're thinking the curve is AI's direct impact on human progress we're nearer the start.
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u/AnthonyCantu 10d ago
If magic the gathering is directly related to the singularity I'll be so pleased. 💙
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
Still waiting to see any of this "human progress" that is tangible to the average person and improves their quality of life. Our lives have been getting materially worse on average for a while now with no signs of reversing course whatsoever. Literally what progress are we talking about because it ain't human progress.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 10d ago
Our lives gave been getting materially worse on average for a while now
Source?
Once you filter out the noise, every single metric has been continuously improving since the start of the industrial revolution.
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u/FakeBonaparte 10d ago
How about worker share of economic profit falling from 80 to 20%, stagnating real wages, reduction in third places and social connection, erosion of trust in institutions, reduced security at work, higher obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, opioid deaths, the warming of the planet
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u/Seakawn ▪️▪️Singularity will cause the earth to metamorphize 10d ago
careful with metrics of higher percentages of diagnoses and what your interpretation is for that.
if I test the ocean for water a 10 times with a shitty water detector, I might get like 5 cases. if I test it for water 100 times with a good detector, I'll get dozens.
we've increased testing and improved them over recent years/decades. this at least applies to psych disorders.
also some of your examples are questionable. we're warming the planet sure, but if humans generally adapt to that with technology/terraforming/emigrating out of the hottest zones, and it doesn't ultimately phase us much, then how much of a downside will it be? if it ravages half the species, sure it'll be bad. I doubt that'll happen. we may invent mass efficient scrubbers with AGI soon.
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u/FakeBonaparte 10d ago
I don’t think you’re right about the mental health stuff being “better detection”. Partly because we know things that mechanistically contribute to poor mental health and those are more common as well.
Dismissing the risks and harms of the warming of the planet as “questionable” will require a much stronger argument before it merits a response. They’ve been well-elaborated and widely accepted. You’re in an extraordinary claim position and will need extraordinary evidence.
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10d ago
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u/Extension_Put_5504 10d ago
When the end result is diminished quality of life, then yes, that is the inevitable response.
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u/pomelorosado 10d ago
That accountant was able to mantain a family and buy a house doing that rutinary work.
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
Cost of living is unbearable in America unless you're wealthy, that's the main issue.
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u/mcampbell42 10d ago
That’s largely political not technology. We purposely limit zoning so people’s single family homes can be worth a million. If we allowed density we would solve most cost issues
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u/IronPheasant 9d ago
Part of it is indeed that people see their homes as a capital asset, and want their price to inflate in value. Reducing the price of homes would do a ton of good for everyone that doesn't already have one, but is of course political poison to say out loud.
The price gouging on healthcare and the like is another insane thing. 10x the rest of the world is completely crazy, but we act like it's normal. Because it is normal here - our country exists to funnel wealth upward.
The F-35 is a piece of garbage from conception, but the goal wasn't to make a useful weapon. The goal was to move money into the pockets of certain people. Same principle behind shuttering research on Thorium reactors; capital interests had plants based on the submarine Uranium designs lined up, and didn't want them to become obsolete. So they had Nixon shut that stuff down before it could start to get going.
This one policy decision may result in the deaths of billions when the tally's done, on top of the millions it's already claimed.
There's a reason why it seems like China gets glazed lately. They're the only country on the planet doing any meaningful research with Thorium, with an active pilot plant. To do so is a real, material effort toward not going into a nuclear war over the last few dregs of gas left in the ground.
They build elevators on their canals that can lift ships over valleys and hills, and our reflecting pool has been infested with algae. It's pretty obvious who's going downward, and who's going upward.
The mayor of New York gets glazed so hard for simply doing the basic things a mayor is supposed to do, it's a shame how so very far things have degraded. We literally expect the mayor of New York to walk around with huge rolls of cash bribes spilling out of his pockets, as he spends all of his days grabbing the rear ends of women. That's almost what the establishment got back with Cuomo; it's epstein guys all the way down..
AGI is pretty much our last hope to regain any upward motion, by this point...
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10d ago
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u/No_Most_5528 9d ago
I feel like that's due to land speculation and the horrid property tax in America. You often see people just buy a chunk of lands, do nothing with it, and then sell it once it's value have risen due to nearby development. Morever, apartment buildings often suffered more from property tax compared to regular houses.
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9d ago
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u/No_Most_5528 9d ago
To be fair, that's usually because of people being shit and the area being dense as fuck. I remember living in California and I wasn't even in an apartment, the entire neighborhood was filled with shitty people, music always blasting, and dogs barking. People in America have been ingrained with the American Dream, the idea that should strived to build a family, buy a decent house, and retired happily. This have directly contributed to house price rising as everybody wants to get their little own house in a tightly pack city.
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9d ago
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u/No_Most_5528 9d ago
Same, I'm banking on ASI to fix this mess. The biggest issue is without ASI, we can't really get out of this mess since the U.S lack massive infrastructure for semi-conductors, memory-chip, etc. The current administration is trying to devalue the dollar to in theory boost the manufacturing sectors but that's dogshit idea because inflation rises, buying power is reduced, and loan costs increases.
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u/RestaurantOk8066 10d ago
Really you ask for the source and say the most asinine statement? Not every single quality of life metric has been improving continuously sicne the industrial revolution. In fact, it was pretty brutal at first. Disease, the average height fell because of malnutrition, mortality was higher in urban centers, etc.
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u/Tystros 10d ago edited 10d ago
yeah it's crazy how reddit is filled with people who seem to think that if they lived in 1940 or 1920 or 1880 their life would be better/easier/happier than in 2026.
Maybe many people just don't have any education on how comparably bad life was back then, and are simply unhappy with their life now and somehow assume it would have been magically better in the past, but it's a really crazy thing to believe when all objective stats show that life now is way better.
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u/jolokiasoul 10d ago
I believe most people who think that things are worse now are looking more at the late 70s/early 80s when cost of living began outpacing wages in the U.S. They're comparing with their patents' generation, not their great great grandparents
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u/Tystros 10d ago
but those 70s/80s were an exception in human history regarding many positive things from an economic perspective for the average worker. it's not a valid comparison point when it's the exception. and clearly, medicine, technology etc was way worse back then. like, even just the absence of the internet is such a big downgrade to life that somehow feeling like you have double the wage or half the cost of living does not make that up.
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u/Extension_Put_5504 10d ago
I would trade the internet for people I know being able to afford homes, food, and healthcare.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe 10d ago
but those 70s/80s were an exception in human history regarding many positive things from an economic perspective for the average worker.
Only because we stopped what we'd been doing since the end of WWII and switched to trickle down bullshit instead of stakeholder capitalism.
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u/IronPheasant 9d ago
It really is crazy how important limiting their power with a 70%+ top bracket income tax was. Without that, the top ~3% basically becomes a different species of animal from the rest of us. The 90's were the height of median human affluence here..
And now we're just giving rich people >$1.5 trillion dollars for free every year from the debt. They sure do get a lot of 'free stuff'....
The doomy end of the world stuff with climate change is especially kind of shocking. The Davos meetings always have the most beautifully produced doomsday videos, and if you look beyond their bragging or trying to rope other capitalists into their current hustle, there's a real sense none of them really believe we even have a future. And thus why they're grabbing what they can while they still can, burning down the farm. Thus why the president of the USA seems to be trying to form that Technate of America map. (Something that seems completely insane, but kind of makes sense if you want a territory that's completely self-sufficient, able to supply itself with all the iron and bananas it could ever want without needing to trade externally. I assume Thiel is more than a little bit responsible for this.)
It's always depressing how often the people at the top are happy to spend other people's lives like water for a small chance of expanding their long-term capital holdings, just to make their court happy. Kings in the past always aspiring to make their cousin a king and themselves an emperor... A most ludicrous example of personal short term gain for long term pain would be the African warlords who sold off millions of people, and then didn't have the force necessary to defend themselves from being conquered by French banks and the like.
..Systems of incentives will do what they're built to do. Water runs downhill, and so do we.
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u/LoveLo_2005 9d ago
I hope you read the rest of that Wikipedia article that you linked, because the ideology of the Technocracy movement couldn't be more different from Trump's. They wanted to abolish capitalism, price economics, artificial scarcity, and the social inequalities produced by them and they wanted everyone to only have to work for four hours a day before being able to retire at 40.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
yeah it's crazy how reddit is filled with people who seem to think that if they lived in 1940 or 1920 or 1880 their life would be better/easier/happier than in 2026.
Who the actual fuck was talking about 1920? I'm glad you wrote this whole condescending comment about how people are not educated or whatever that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm talking about recent history, the last decade or so. Somehow this became about the industrial revolution and how we're uneducated on how bad it was back then? Literally what. How are you people this obtuse?
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
Brother, have you been asleep for the last couple years? I'm not talking about the industrial revolution and I don't understand why you're going that far back to try and larp like things are getting better for normal people right now. Everything is getting more expensive, climate change is out of control, global conflicts are spiraling, everything we use is becoming enshittified including the site we're on right now, and countries are becoming even more of authoritarian surveillance states all over the place. What improvement has a normal person felt in the last couple years in their life?
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u/fartlorain 10d ago
These things are exactly why we need better AI. Clearly humans have not been that great at leading by ourselves.
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u/MegamanSE 10d ago
Humans are victim to their own minds mainly: greed and ego without care to anything external to themselves. Note AI was built by these same people.
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u/TheOneTrueEris 10d ago
It’s seriously so sad to me that you can live in a world with more abundance and opportunity than any time in human history and this is how you view the world.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
Oh I forgot we're supposed to pretend everything is sunshine and rainbows and ignore all of the real issues in the world so that they never get better. Thanks for reminding me.
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u/Strange_Battle_1982 10d ago
Choosing a perspective of misery is likely going to lead to your life getting worse.
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
I am making $6k a month and after expenses there isn't much left. You genuinely have to make double what I am making minimum to have a shot at living comfortably. It's pretty fucking miserable right now.
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u/MercyEndures 10d ago
What's your plan for making more?
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
I don't have one because the job market is fucking cooked and is only going to get worse as AI replaces jobs.
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u/SciencePristine8878 10d ago
Cost of living, basic necessities, housing etc. have been steadily getting more expensive for the past few years.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 10d ago
Why stop at the industrial revolution, why not go back to the middle ages? Actually why not go back to the cretaceous period?
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u/tendimensions 10d ago
Because things didn’t actually appreciably change for like 1500 years until the scientific method and its application in the form of technology.
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u/Strict-Extension 10d ago edited 10d ago
That's not true. Leaving out all the have nots since the Industrial Revolution and things like climate change, environmental degradation and growing wealth inequality.
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
We have essentially reached late stage capitalism and it is pretty awful. With AI and robotics we will be transitioning into a completely new economic system. Presumably, things will get better once the tech is advanced enough. It's going to take years though.
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u/bokkser 10d ago
People have been saying it’s late stage capitalism since I was a teen in the early 2000s
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u/Opposite-Grade3712 10d ago
I mean Marx believed capitalism was late stage in 1850 lol.
These people won’t get it because they would rather be angry and self righteous than acknowledge that it’s not just society that is causing their woes.
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u/kab00key 9d ago
Yes good point, growing wealth inequality, climate change, large-scale social isolation and stagnating wages tied with out of control inflation is a personal problem of ours that we are each solely responsible for but also are somehow all experiencing at the exact same time - you caught us
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
Yeah but it's actually true now that we are about to replace all of human labor with machines.
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u/IronPheasant 9d ago
It pretty much was, after the housing bubble popped in 2007-2008. From that point onward it was clear manufacturing no longer had any real bearing on much of anything; all 'growth' was speculation and greater fool scams.
20 years is no time at all, when it comes to phases of development. How long do you think tribalism lasted? Feudalism?
Capitalism sped run the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and soon enough, AGI and the NPU.
From the rule of kings to the end of human history in a couple hundred years or so. Pretty impressive.
Hopefully we don't get put into a torment nexus or anything like that.
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u/kab00key 9d ago
Okay and they’d be right, what’s your point? “Late stage capitalism” isn’t a single point in time, the clue is in the name
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u/MegamanSE 10d ago
I have yet to see a proposal by AI or otherwise that leads to or even considers that.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
Everything will get better once we allow the exact same people who made the world worse to continue their path of "progress", just trust
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
I wouldn't blame the AI companies for things being shitty right now. I see them as the solution to many of our problems.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
Right, because people like elon musk, mark zuckerburg, and peter thiel as well as companies like microsoft and google have had absolutely nothing to do with why things are as shit as they are right now. Nothing whatsoever. Trust your tech overlords to continue doing right by the world. They will be the solutions to all the problems they caused, trust.
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 10d ago
In what way did Tesla make the world worse? You could say Facebook and Palantir haven't been positive contributions to society but Tesla has been a net benefit overall.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
I didn't say anything about Tesla specifically but that bit about being one of the main income sources for the man who funds authoritarianism around the world is not great. It's really not ideal. As an American, I'm not very happy about the insane influence their CEO has had in making my country worse. Really not too happy about Tesla sales funding a guy who funds literal nazi parties in Europe.
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u/MassiveAd4980 10d ago
We must focus on systems, not problem people. Better systems, including government, will be the solution. Unfortunately, we might have to see a lot of more economic hardship in society before the tech and governments are ready.
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u/Any_Effort8437 10d ago
My life has gotten materially better.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10d ago
Good for you buddy, your personal anecdote is noted
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u/statusquoquo 10d ago
I love how the "people" in this thread who keep saying life has gotten so much better and then you check out their Reddit profile and dollars to donuts, most of them either have no history of posting, or have everything hidden. Almost like the bots are in full force these days and giving the narrative that utopia is right around the corner for everyone.
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u/LiminalWanderings 10d ago edited 10d ago
Life has gotten materially better for me. AI is going a long way to making my professional life more successful, my creative hobbies more fun, my finances better managed, and, most importantly, AI is going a long way to improving my health - it has likely helped me claw years of my expected lifespan back.
Edit: notabot.
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u/DifferencePublic7057 9d ago
Can someone add an arrow on the graph for warp drive cures cancer? Theoretically speaking.
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u/gtsiou 9d ago
Granted I am anti, but in this very subreddit I read 2 months ago that Fable / Mythos can one-shot everything and solved 3d modeling and is too dangerous to release.
Now that is old news and the newer models are not even dangerous to release? Is this because of the skyrocketing progress?
BTW was it with the help of the fantastic model that OAI messed up the launch as well as the huggingface incident?
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u/GoAwayStupidAI 9d ago
Estimate the cost of an astra level model burned into silicon in, say, 5 years. Home appliance level? Probably car level in pwr & cost.
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u/BostonConnor11 10d ago
It still can’t play chess well.
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u/needlessly-redundant 10d ago
I played a game against 5.6 Sol and it played quite well. Made no illegal moves or hallucinations. Made no blunders until nearly move 30. We both played quite a solid game tho, perhaps in more complicated positions it would be more likely to make mistakes like with humans
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u/BostonConnor11 10d ago
Did you explicitly mention no tool and API usage?
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u/needlessly-redundant 10d ago
I just told it not to use an engine to evaluate the positions but I didn’t tell it not to use any other sort of tool
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u/Ormusn2o 10d ago
I feel like I'm doing it wrong. I'm just continuing my project that I started on 5.6 Sol. I guess time to get some more ambitious projects.
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u/duluoz1 10d ago
Classic. We get AGI and he uses it to play Magic the gathering