AnodicElegy

Pretty sure that's Luna xhigh.

'In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they do not believe there is a place for them in the future.'

It's quite a leap to go from "I'm afraid of not getting a job after graduating" to "I do not believe there is a place for me in the future". Maybe it hasn't been the case for computer scientists in the past decade, but it's pretty normal to be worried about getting a job after graduating from one's college problem, even if one knows that most people get jobs when they graduate.

I stopped reading soon after that, when it became obvious that the article was LLM-written.

Agentic checkout? What does that even mean? It had never occurred to me that an online store checkout was something I might need help with.

The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.

The game is broken for me. The ball just sits in the middle.

The #1 thing these frontier model companies can do to help alignment is to provide the user with the chain-of-thought traces, as the open models do. But let's be real, their commercial considerations are a much higher priority than alignment.

"The same kind of argument was used when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. And indeed, lots of new jobs were created, just not in the Western world."

China's entry into the WTO is really not a good evidentiary example for AI causing mass unemployment. Unemployment in the U.S. had already been increasing at the time, peaked soon after, decreased to well below the point it had been at China's entry, and only went up again during the Great Financial Crisis, which had nothing -- or at least very little -- to do with competition from China. That's not to say that jobs weren't lost, even en masse, but they were replaced, and U.S. unemployment has been near record lows in recent years. China's WTO entry is a supporting point, not a counterpoint, to the idea that jobs lost to AI will be replaced by new ones.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

In many areas of criminal law, willful ignorance is not an excuse. One could potentially argue that the sandbox setup at OpenAI that led to the hacking incident at Hugging Face could fall into this category.

Beyond that, there's always tort law, which doesn't require intent.

"OpenAI’s primary bet here has been chain-of-thought monitoring. It is based on an appealingly scalable idea: a lot of the model’s capability comes from a verbalized reasoning process (chain-of-thought). If we scale optimization on the outcomes of that process, but do not supervise the process itself, that chain-of-thought has no direct incentive in training to hide any misaligned ideas or objectives. This does not mean the model will learn to externalize misaligned tendencies that don’t rely on using the chain-of-thought; however, it can allow us to monitor exactly the capability increase from reasoning."

Yes, and it would greatly aid alignment if the user could monitor the chain-of-thought! The open models, including very powerful ones like Kimi K3, are delivering this. The fact that OpenAI and Anthropic are not clearly indicates that a commercial consideration (avoiding distillation) takes precedence over alignment -- regardless of how much they bloviate about the latter.

If someone uses an LLM to write and is able to tailor their writing such that it isn't obviously written by an LLM, then I'm fine with it! But two of my otherwise-favourite news sources -- the Hacker News front page and FT Alphaville -- are inundated by articles where the LLM usage is blindingly obvious.

This update really gives OpenAI a boost. Not saying there's anything inaccurate or untoward about that, but the timing is unfortunate. It would have looked better had it been done prior to the Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 releases. I guess AA would say that there's no perfect time to do these updates, given the rapid fire pace of releases!

It's very different than it was earlier today, so pretty sure it's v4.2.

Everything in moderation! With the big predators you get mercury, with the bottom-feeders you get persistent lipophilic compounds like PCBs and PFAS.

I could just fish for perch, but what's the fun in that?

(I'm mostly kidding, I love fishing for perch too.)

Any angler will know that, in some lakes, it seems like every fish is full of worms. I've always dealt with that by frying the crap out of them -- no medium-rare bass for me, sorry. Alternatively, I'm sure they're fine after a few weeks in the freezer.

Rivers seem to be better, with worm presence (or at least, obvious worm presence) being less common. Additionally, I've never seen worms in bottom-feeding fish like catfish and carp.

If you scroll down in the Artificial Analysis page you linked, you'll see all the individual benchmarks.

Confirmed: the compound proposed by the author has been made and studied since at least 1992 (https://pubs.acs.org/jmcmar/article-abstract/35/22/4135/7112...). It had activity interesting enough to be published, but like almost all active molecules, it wasn't interesting enough to push into the clinic.

Some other inaccuracies I noticed in the post:

"DXO is more lipophilic, meaning it’s attracted to fats and lipids."

Dextrorphan is more polar, and therefore less, not more, lipophilic than dextromethorphan. It is still able to cross the blood-brain barrier because it is still a fairly lipophilic molecule.

"My first thought was replacing the methoxy group with 3-fluoromethoxy. On paper, this seemed like it could be an effective way to interfere with CYP2D6-mediated demethylation, but synthesizing a fluorinated DXM analogue would be difficult and costly."

There is no such thing as a "3-fluoromethoxy" group. What I think the author meant was "trifluoromethoxy" ("3-" and "tri" have very different meanings in chemical nomenclature). The trifluoromethoxylated derivative of dextrorphan has, in fact, been synthesized and patented (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/24997117).

"The structure of DPO is (+)-3-(isopropoxy)-N-methylmorphinan, with the 3-methoxy group of DXM replaced by a 3-isopropoxy group."

The "+" indicates the direction that a chiral nonracemic compound rotates plane-polarized light in solution. While there are computational methods to predict it, it can't be assumed that the derivative of a "+" compound will also be "+". Better to use "R" and "S" (CIP nomenclature), since they are determined entirely by the 3D structure of the chiral compound and don't require a physical measurement to determine.

This is pure speculation, and he really doesn't know what he's talking about:

"The main problem is that DXO also contains an amine, and that amine can react during the process. So the first step would be to temporarily protect the amine so that it doesn’t interfere."

Anyone who's taken introductory org chem knows better than this. That's a tertiary amine, so you're not going to be protecting it. Not that the compound can't be made -- it probably has been already. I'd check on Reaxys but I don't really want a morphinan in my search history...

It was in the link in the parent of the thread to which I replied. But you can find it on Artificial Analysis's website now.

This stood out:

"Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1

61.2"

So on the Metacritic of LLM benchmarks, it's.. basically where everyone else is (except for Fable 5.1, which is a bit ahead).

Zitron has staked his bear position and isn't budging, so regardless if he's been wrong and wrong again, he'll be remembered for calling the bubble if/when it pops, if only because so few in the media have done so without equivocation.

Fable 5.1 is actually more expensive than 5.0 when run on the Artificial Analysis suite:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-efficiency-tabs

The data and graphs are great, but it would have been a much higher quality report if the text and titles were written by a human.

Why call out "drink less" but not "smoke less"? Both are recreational drugs, both are socially stimulative, but only the former has the propensity to lead to serious harm in the short term.

I switched two of my PCs over to Linux Mint last week. The automatic driver support is shockingly good compared to when I last installed Linux on a PC (almost 20 years ago). It even found a driver for the random no-name USB wireless receiver I bought on Amazon, whereas I had to install that driver manually on Windows.

Part of my motivation was that one of the machines was still on Windows 7, but more than anything it was the incessant push to associate my OS account with an online Microsoft account, and the cramming of Copilot into everything, that have left a bad taste in my mouth.

Accessible with free FT account

Artificial Analysis benchmark is out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450353

Impressive. It kicked everything between itself and Sol xhigh out of the Pareto frontier. Can't wait to try it out.

Net debt to GDP is arguably a more important metric. Look at Norway, for example. Presenting it as an indebted nation is hardly the whole picture.

"How this article was written I wrote this article and used Grammarly to proofread and fix it."

What a brave new world we're in, where this is necessary. Regardless, it's appreciated. Although, I have the feeling that those using an LLM to do most of their writing will be less likely to include such a disclaimer.