If you were tasked with putting together a message to send to space aliens, with the only restriction that the message had to be under 4GB, what would you send?
I don't think you appreciate how much text you can fit into 4GB. The first entire gigabyte could be dedicated to various means of translation and explaining our language system, and you'd still have a 500 million words left after that.
A movie like Independence Day? Easy to do 7gb with good quality. Blurays is H264, We have x265 now. 4gb size? Those explosions gonna be chunky, but film is watchable.
I would first find some big names from the demo scene and say "I am not worthy, let these folks do it" and anyone who disagreed would have their frontal lobes severed or something.
It's explained in the PDF. If they used normal numbers and letters, the chance of corruption would be high. So they had to reform into the symbols you see.
I still don't get why we use Pi instead of Tau though, when most equations double it up into Tau anyway.
Damn, what a cheapskate. A chance to play Minecraft with a friendly space alien and you can’t even pay for a legit copy. Probably going to give that alien a computer virus and doom us all. Don’t put this guy in charge.
Probably an AI model that fits in that size. It might not be our best models, but it probably would be a lot more useful to aliens than whatever we'd decide to fit on 4GB.
They'd get mostly all the inner workings of our languages and how we do conversations and generally be able to answer basic questions about humanity.
What ? "an AI model" is not a compression algorithm. Why give the aliens an AI trained with some wikipedia articles when you could just give them wikipedia.
Because an LLM is more than just data: it's like a big network of how syllables and words go together based on some context. And that's useful because language is how we communicate, how we connect ideas together, it's how we share stories. It's not just Wikipedia articles, it's a database of relationships between words and concepts. It approximates how we think as humans.
Yes, AI is hella overhyped. Everyone wants to AI everything. But really for this particular situation, I think the model data would actually be the best precompiled database of knowledge we can possibly provide to learn about humans for the size.
No it's not magic compression, but 4GB worth of parameters is still a lot. GPT4All has models just under 4GB. They're not particularly impressive compared to OpenAI's offerings, but I think you can extract a lot more practical information to do first contact out of a basic model than 4GB worth of Wikipedia. It's extremely lossy compression, it's never gonna spit out articles vebatim, it will hallucinate a ton of stuff.
If we had more space I'd send all the major AIs we have like Dall-E, LLaMa and GPT 4. Imagine you're an alien, you're presented with a keyboard and a monitor, and know nothing about us. You can use Dall-E to try random letters and words and see if the output makes sense. Maybe you find out what a cat, dog, bat, frog, apple looks like. You can then input those words in ChatGPT, and get context as to when those are used. What's "a horse"? What's "riding"? Put those into Dall-E, now you know what a "cat riding a horse" looks like. It can generate as many as you want, any combination. Eventually you can figure out how to ask ChatGPT if cats typically ride horses, cars, bycles, what do cats do.
Now imagine you're a very advanced alien species that can easily process the model's parameters. You've just downloaded the basics of humanity. They can map their language to our model's parameters, and basically speak to us in our language, and translate our answers to theirs, and basically have a basic conversation.
I've already explained some upsides and even given an example of how it could be used. What's your counterarguments? What advantages would the raw wikipedia text do that would make it more useful? What assumptions are we making about our aliens' knowledge about us? Are we looking to share our latest scientific breakthroughs, or just showing them what humanity looks like? Are we trying to send them plans on how to build a spaceship to come visit us?
Arguably if we're looking for the perfect dataset to send them, we'd have to redo what we did with the golden discs we sent along with the Voyager probes, and carefully consider every bit of data we send and for what purpose and how we expect them to be able to process it and understand it. This is a broad philosophical discussion, I'm not looking to be right or have the best answer, I'm providing one idea, one potential answer. Everyone's first thought is to send out as much of Wikipedia as we can. Doesn't make for great discussion.
It's less dense than Wikipedia text. End of.
That's making a strong assumption that Wikipedia is already the most dense and detailed source of information we have, and that aliens are able to read and understand english, and that this is the optimal format to present our knowledge.
I'm not arguing that LLMs encode more information. They certainly don't. That's not the point. I'm arguing that I think it has a higher likelihood of being useful to communicate with us. That's the first thing we want to do with an alien species: open dialogue. Language is the fabric of our entire world, and that's what Large Language Models do: language. The model is a representation of billions of relationships between words (or tokens, to be technical) in the input, and probabilities that the output will be that other set of words/tokens. When it sees "wheel", that signal propagates through the network and all the weights and it comes up with probabilities that it's related to "car", "bycicle", "tree", "mountain". Does it even know what that implies? Nope. It just knows you're much more likely to be talking about cars than trees when a wheel is involved. Billions of those relationships are encoded in an LLM along with how weak or strong that relationship is. That's useful information especially when language and communication is involved.
If we had an LLM for ancient and long forgotten languages, we wouldn't even need things like rosetta stones. We could keep throwing inputs at it and see what comes out and make deductions based on that. We'd also get some information and stories from the time as a bonus and side effect of those being somewhat embedded in the model in some way. But the main point is, you can give it as many inputs as you want and it'll generate as many outputs as you asked. Way, way more than the size of the model itself. You could have an entire conversation with an AI Egyptian or something, and learn the language. Similarly, an alien could get semi fluent in english by practicing with the model as long as they need. Heck we already do this as humans: so many tips about using ChatGPT to practice and refine your presentations, papers, prepare for interviews, etc.
That's my value proposition for shipping an AI model: language and general culture over raw scientific data.
A history of all of our misdeeds and self-inflicted suffering, probably 1gb of compressed literature and 3gb of imagery and video, along with an Earnest plea:
Please if you are able, either teach us how to save us from ourselves, or be merciful and destroy us. Don't let this self-inflicted carnage of we barely sapient creatures commit on one another due to lack of meaningful intellect or empathy continue.
Either take our hand and teach us as the confused, selfish, irrational children that we are, or just end this evolutionary mistake.
I imagine sign language would be much less information dense than text, as it would have to be pictures. And they may not even understand the sign language.
I think they meant "age/sex/location?" which was a common first question when getting to know someone online when instant messengers as a concept were novel
4GB is an absolute fuck ton of text. Like, solid chunk of Wikipedia would fit in there.
If you were restricted to just 700MM words, what would you say?
the other day I learned you can download Wikipedia and it's something like 50 GB of text plus 50 GB of pictures
A few years ago (~2010) I had the entire German Wikipedia on my 8gb iPod touch. It was only about 4gb in size without media.
So you send them text that they can't read?
I don't think you appreciate how much text you can fit into 4GB. The first entire gigabyte could be dedicated to various means of translation and explaining our language system, and you'd still have a 500 million words left after that.
You can also get 2-3 movies worth with 4gb depending on its length and quality. Maybe even more.
So they need to understand our colors, video codecs, displays, sound, and so much more?
Unless you compress it heavily, a Blu-ray rip is in the 20 to 40GB range.
700mB aXXo DVD rip then
Blu-ray is yes.
A rip implies higher compression /changes.
A movie like Independence Day? Easy to do 7gb with good quality. Blurays is H264, We have x265 now. 4gb size? Those explosions gonna be chunky, but film is watchable.
pff just send star wars and male them confused
Or female them sensible
I would first find some big names from the demo scene and say "I am not worthy, let these folks do it" and anyone who disagreed would have their frontal lobes severed or something.
This, in its original form, was 4kb.
So, none of us are worthy. Unless one of you is on Lemmy.
Edit: this one is 1kb lmao. None of us are worthy.
Can you tell me a little more about these? What is the “demo scene,” how were they made, and why were they made?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
It's as rad as it could possibly be.
Wouldn't be surprised at all if anyone from that scene lurks on lemmy.
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4kb
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Rickroll, comeon
Bee movie script in all languages
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the actual messages humanity has sent into space in the hopes that aliens will hear it since those are actually pretty cool.
I mean look at this crap. Look at how cool it looks. https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.pdf
(I'm on mobile otherwise I'd add a picture)
https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.pdf
Again a cringe Word PDF title (why cant this program use normal Titles?)
Why tf didnt they just draw our numbers and instead some crazy art stuff?
It's explained in the PDF. If they used normal numbers and letters, the chance of corruption would be high. So they had to reform into the symbols you see.
I still don't get why we use Pi instead of Tau though, when most equations double it up into Tau anyway.
Well thanks now they think we are all men
It's kinda cool but not sure why they thought creating a new set of pictograms that aren't used on Earth was the best method
https://xkcd.com/927/
So that the symbols would be less likely to get corrupted if the aliens received it over a bad radio link
A link with a cracked Minecraft client and an ip to join to a small server to chill with that alien.
Technically you can probably send a bunch of links, like Wikipedia etc. He "just" needs to access to it, which may or may not breach the 4GB rule.
Damn, what a cheapskate. A chance to play Minecraft with a friendly space alien and you can’t even pay for a legit copy. Probably going to give that alien a computer virus and doom us all. Don’t put this guy in charge.
Can agree with that, but I wanted to save the alien from having a Microsoft account.
You’ve got a point. On second thought, maybe a different game would be better.
Nah, they're going to give the alien an Alienware !
It won't breach the 4GB rule, but even the closest star to Sol would have at minimum latency of 4 years.
Yeah that's true.
Why do you assume the alien has access to the internet?
No reason at all. Of course probably the aliens won't have access to the interwebz, but playing Minecraft with an alien sounded funny in my head.
rickroll at 8k for however many seconds that is
Rick rolled until the heat death of the universe
I would probably include an apology for using FAT32 and insist that we've made better filesystems since then.
Probably an AI model that fits in that size. It might not be our best models, but it probably would be a lot more useful to aliens than whatever we'd decide to fit on 4GB.
They'd get mostly all the inner workings of our languages and how we do conversations and generally be able to answer basic questions about humanity.
What ? "an AI model" is not a compression algorithm. Why give the aliens an AI trained with some wikipedia articles when you could just give them wikipedia.
Because an LLM is more than just data: it's like a big network of how syllables and words go together based on some context. And that's useful because language is how we communicate, how we connect ideas together, it's how we share stories. It's not just Wikipedia articles, it's a database of relationships between words and concepts. It approximates how we think as humans.
Yes, AI is hella overhyped. Everyone wants to AI everything. But really for this particular situation, I think the model data would actually be the best precompiled database of knowledge we can possibly provide to learn about humans for the size.
No it's not magic compression, but 4GB worth of parameters is still a lot. GPT4All has models just under 4GB. They're not particularly impressive compared to OpenAI's offerings, but I think you can extract a lot more practical information to do first contact out of a basic model than 4GB worth of Wikipedia. It's extremely lossy compression, it's never gonna spit out articles vebatim, it will hallucinate a ton of stuff.
If we had more space I'd send all the major AIs we have like Dall-E, LLaMa and GPT 4. Imagine you're an alien, you're presented with a keyboard and a monitor, and know nothing about us. You can use Dall-E to try random letters and words and see if the output makes sense. Maybe you find out what a cat, dog, bat, frog, apple looks like. You can then input those words in ChatGPT, and get context as to when those are used. What's "a horse"? What's "riding"? Put those into Dall-E, now you know what a "cat riding a horse" looks like. It can generate as many as you want, any combination. Eventually you can figure out how to ask ChatGPT if cats typically ride horses, cars, bycles, what do cats do.
Now imagine you're a very advanced alien species that can easily process the model's parameters. You've just downloaded the basics of humanity. They can map their language to our model's parameters, and basically speak to us in our language, and translate our answers to theirs, and basically have a basic conversation.
Sorry chief you haven't really explained why an AI model would be the best format.
It's less dense than Wikipedia text. End of.
I've already explained some upsides and even given an example of how it could be used. What's your counterarguments? What advantages would the raw wikipedia text do that would make it more useful? What assumptions are we making about our aliens' knowledge about us? Are we looking to share our latest scientific breakthroughs, or just showing them what humanity looks like? Are we trying to send them plans on how to build a spaceship to come visit us?
Arguably if we're looking for the perfect dataset to send them, we'd have to redo what we did with the golden discs we sent along with the Voyager probes, and carefully consider every bit of data we send and for what purpose and how we expect them to be able to process it and understand it. This is a broad philosophical discussion, I'm not looking to be right or have the best answer, I'm providing one idea, one potential answer. Everyone's first thought is to send out as much of Wikipedia as we can. Doesn't make for great discussion.
That's making a strong assumption that Wikipedia is already the most dense and detailed source of information we have, and that aliens are able to read and understand english, and that this is the optimal format to present our knowledge.
I'm not arguing that LLMs encode more information. They certainly don't. That's not the point. I'm arguing that I think it has a higher likelihood of being useful to communicate with us. That's the first thing we want to do with an alien species: open dialogue. Language is the fabric of our entire world, and that's what Large Language Models do: language. The model is a representation of billions of relationships between words (or tokens, to be technical) in the input, and probabilities that the output will be that other set of words/tokens. When it sees "wheel", that signal propagates through the network and all the weights and it comes up with probabilities that it's related to "car", "bycicle", "tree", "mountain". Does it even know what that implies? Nope. It just knows you're much more likely to be talking about cars than trees when a wheel is involved. Billions of those relationships are encoded in an LLM along with how weak or strong that relationship is. That's useful information especially when language and communication is involved.
If we had an LLM for ancient and long forgotten languages, we wouldn't even need things like rosetta stones. We could keep throwing inputs at it and see what comes out and make deductions based on that. We'd also get some information and stories from the time as a bonus and side effect of those being somewhat embedded in the model in some way. But the main point is, you can give it as many inputs as you want and it'll generate as many outputs as you asked. Way, way more than the size of the model itself. You could have an entire conversation with an AI Egyptian or something, and learn the language. Similarly, an alien could get semi fluent in english by practicing with the model as long as they need. Heck we already do this as humans: so many tips about using ChatGPT to practice and refine your presentations, papers, prepare for interviews, etc.
That's my value proposition for shipping an AI model: language and general culture over raw scientific data.
Sorry mate this is so daft. It's like you have an AI shaped hammer and you're trying to hit every problem with it.
Just send whatever and let the Alien's use it to train their own LLM.
AIs do a lot of different things. What kind of AI do you mean?
I’d send a small note saying “Please take me away from here.”
"Stay away" with various methods given to understand the meaning of the words (images, signs, numbers, sounds, etc)
In_the_end.exe from limewire
2 girls 1 cup
Garf
We must send them the historical documents so they can work to achieve the perfect society.
A history of all of our misdeeds and self-inflicted suffering, probably 1gb of compressed literature and 3gb of imagery and video, along with an Earnest plea:
Please if you are able, either teach us how to save us from ourselves, or be merciful and destroy us. Don't let this self-inflicted carnage of we barely sapient creatures commit on one another due to lack of meaningful intellect or empathy continue.
Either take our hand and teach us as the confused, selfish, irrational children that we are, or just end this evolutionary mistake.
Frank Sinatra - stormy weather
the English Wikipedia articles on codecs, the 7 layer model, semiconductors, and microprocessors.
gcc compiler.
the source code for Firefox and the lightest possible Linux environment to run it... ... ...
and then as many axxo rips as I can cram in, sorted by IMDb rating
asl?
I imagine sign language would be much less information dense than text, as it would have to be pictures. And they may not even understand the sign language.
I think they meant "age/sex/location?" which was a common first question when getting to know someone online when instant messengers as a concept were novel
18 f cali
onenightinparis.mov
Dick pics.
bill wurtz history of the world
Nudes.
We surrender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arbgB6REBmU
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