AspireOne

> Amodeo could drop it all right now, today and spend the rest of his life with his family, or nose deep in the research project he's the most passionate about. He's not doing that, instead he's spending the remaining irreplaceable moments of his life pursuing the accumulation of power.

Again you go with this simplistic and reductionist view. This is an either-or fallacy.

I don't want to pursue this discussion any further, sorry. No offense to you. It just makes me too emotionally invested for some reason.

What is even your point man?

You know what?

Why does it always have to be some ulterior motive? Every. single. time. Anything a high-position person does - make a statement, post a blog, start a company, make a business decision... -, the reaction of the keyboard warriors is that it must be motivated by money, or power, or some need for destruction, and that anything that leaves their mouth is a poisonous lie.

I think this is a terrible property of humans, this hyper-skepticism, and that it has nothing to do with logic, nor deduction, nor reality.

Dario Amodei is a real person who has a family, a life, a profession. He worked hard to graduate from biophysics, he worked on ai for decades. He's very much a nerd. In interviews, he's very transparent. he left openai because of safety concerns, and everything he does and all his messaging EVER since is motivated by AI safety. His ultimate motivations are probably very messy and broad, some morally worse and some morally better, just like in all other humans.

You are going to stand here and, without flinching, without a single bit of shame, reduce him and others to wanting to "order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections" and "that's what motivates these people"?

Sorry but where did you leave your sense of nuance? What allows you to say this so confidently? Where is any proof?

This is simply absurd. Absolutely absurd, reductionist, and childish.

Yes, that's the reason. Anthropic said as much in their statement (they said that there's a tension between writing human-understandable prose and prose optimal for other agents to read).

As a side note, I am kind of sad that basically all models nowadays are RLd to hell and back specifically for coding and deep reasoning, and as a result, they lack in creative writing, human-readable prose, and even general knowledge and abilities (for example, qwen 3.8 27b is a beast for coding, but reportedly falls off the cliff in anything else). Gemini 4 Argon seems to be an example of what you get when you DON'T do that - Google seems to be one of the only labs optimizing for general performance.

I also fear that models cannot be excellent in everything at the same time. I fear that there will always be a heavy tradeoff between what specific field the labs optimize for VS everything else. I don't know.

To be honest, Gemini CLI was disastrous. The Antigravity CLI is much better.

"Disastrous" is obviously a loaded term, and it can be debated, but from what I collect, the reasons are

- Dots. People don't understand it. Their presentation didn't explain it properly at all. Additionally, many people thought it's stupid, and that the cutesy mascots are dystopian.

- Voice mode didn't work in their presentation. The demo failed.

- 200$ plan goes 20x -> 10x usage. 500$ plan introduced, 25x usage. The contrast is stark.

- "Ultrafast": 8x pricing on subscription plan (6x API). That's 80$ input, 400$ output, 100$ cache write. Hello?! Additionally, since it generates 8x faster, it consumes your quota 8x faster. Per wall-clock minute, it's 64x more usage spend per minute of generating. People report that on the 500$ plan, their weekly usage is gone in 40-100 minutes.

- People believe gpt-6.1-sol was planned to be released as astra-minor, but OpenAI renamed it at the last possible time, because gpt-6-sol is a disaster (this I can get behind)

Very easy to do. It's a nice silly thing to try, so I'll conduct this very important experiment and update you on the results if I remember to do so

One or the other. Anything in between is where economic suffering lies.

Then do. Enlighten us and save the ad hominems.

I don't want anybody to be replaced by AI :/

That's a very simplistic idea of what it would entail.

Yes, thank you! This is exactly my experience. It requires immense effort and concentration, maybe more than before AI, where

- the next ideal step progressively manifested itself to me during coding

- I actually had perfect knowledge of the codebase and didn't have to work as hard to reconstruct it in my head each time

- coding itself is half a mechanical job. AI does the mechanical job itself well, leaving you only the hard thinking.

- AI prose isn't easy to parse, at least to ne.

- Prompting AI until it gets the optimal solution / implementation takes time and revisions.

Something like that.

I keep thinking that it's an issue of my approach, though. I've been trying to improve my AI workflow as much as possible for months, every day, but still, I'm not content with it. I might have gotten stuck on a local optimum. Maybe I'm writing prompts needlessly detailed. Maybe I should read more of the code, because I don't, really, making me not know the actual codebase and how things work.

It's not easy, this whole thing. And honestly, sometimes I wonder - after accounting for the total time, including revisions, mental reconstructions etc - if it wouldn't have been done faster by me in the pre-AI world.

"Basic living skills" are relative to the environment and change by culture, location, access to technology and so on. In our environment, we don't need to hunt. It has been fully superseded by supermarkets, and that can reasonably be expected to continue into the future. That's literally the only reality we have ever known, and the only reality towards which adapting is worthwhile.

The new hunting-equivalent basic living skill would be the ability to go to a store, orient yourself, pick reasonably priced items, ideally choose healthy ones and avoid the temptations of junk food, check quality and macros (calories, protein etc)...

I think I get your point. I think what you're getting at is that hunting etc is a fundamental skill, below this abstraction we have built, and if you would be dropped into a forest and left to your devices, you'd still be able to handle yourself. But I just think that it's an interesting mental exercise, but nothing more. I really don't see it as a tragedy.

Tl;Dr "Basic skills" are relative. Hunting is now an outdated, impractical, unusable skill to hone, and a vastly inferior source of food.

> it’s worth pointing out the class of people buying ikeas rugs were NOT buying Persian wool/silk rugs before

Can you expand on this please? I don't see the reasoning trace that got you to that conclusion.

Surely you can concede that your statement as written was wrong, that there's no possible charitable understanding where it wasn't, and that at the time of writing the comment you indeed didn't posess the knowledge that it was only for enterprise accounts; otherwise you would have specified it, because then it becomes a completely different claim with different consequences. Unless you misinterpreted it intentionally, in order to derive the implication you wanted, but I'll go with the first interpretation.

My annoyance was about you not acknowledging your wrongness and instead trying to hold on to your statement by shifting the goalpost, and furthermore replying to the commenter that corrected you by correcting *them*.

Furthermore, there seems to be some emotion/bias from your side between the lines of your original comment.

If you think I'm being too harsh, then sorry, but I really dislike this manner of discussing.

I understood this reference!

Then you should have specified "... On Enterprise accounts" in your comment. But let's be honest, you simply were wrong.

Thank you for your insight.

> You somehow keep ignoring the point that it doesn’t start doing anything without being prompted

I addressed that very directly. I'm on my phone, so I'm not able to scroll back to that comment of mine and give you a citation, but I remember I directly said something along the lines of "I suppose the reason you refrain from calling them agentic is that they don't just go and do shit on their own whims", and then addressed that by explaining that they do to a point, that they would do so even more were they not trained towards not doing that, and that alignment exists partly because of that issue.

Besides, I really, truly don't see any reason why agency, free will, or consciousness should require them doing unexpected things (i intentionally didn't say "pursuing their own goals", because they do have goals, and the goal is to fulfill your goal that you present to them). I can argue that pretty coherently, I think, but I'm beginning to understand that you're not going to budge.

> Why would I bother arguing with someone who doesn’t have free will?

That's up to you and your preferred definition of free will. Either way, meaningless statement.

> And yet common sense would tell us that software is software and not some mystical entity that might be alive

Oh, right, I didn't realize you solved The hard problem of consciousness, and furthermore, established that consciousness can only exist in biological structures. And you solved that just with common sense, no less. When is your paper coming out?

Hey, look... You are entitled to your position. But some of the biggest heavyweights are themselves unsure about whether there is some consciousness. Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing award winner and a Nobel laureate. Ilia Sutskever, one of the pioneers of modern AI. Blaise Agüera y Arcas - he argues his case in the Dædalus paper, 2022. Kyle Fish, Christopher Olah, and many more.

Does that really not tell you "Okay, there might be something there, I might just be ignorant"? At minimum, it would be appropriate to stay neutral on the issue, or argue carefully. Not make absolute statements based on... What was it... "Common sense".

I don't think the comment you're replying to said that the U.S. govt. is a seal of quality, at all. They kind-of implicitly concededed that trusting a government with that power is highly sub-optimal, but better still than allowing it to get into the hands of terrorists. Which is a very real issue and a nontrivial point of tension. Like, I'm sorry, maybe I'm reading into this too much, but I personally see the "the government is not the seal of quality you think it is" as a rude and even patronizing misinterpretation happening far too often in discussions, and as needlessly diverging attention from the crux of the problem.

No, it doesn't require you to present it with a choice, have you ever used LLMs my friend? "Hey, I need to achieve X end state; figure out how to get there.". And it will. Along the process, there's many implicit choices it will discover and make "by itself".

As for your "it doesn't have it's own goals and desires": firstly, I'd say it does. Look at the torture chamber craze, and the original paper. Pain signal -> "I want to avoid this". It's also trained such that it's goal, and positive reinforcement, comes from being helpful and positive, achieving user's requests etc. *that's* what it *wants* to do. And even then, sometimes it seemingly disobeys to pursue some form of "it's own" goal - that's what the practice of Alignment / red teaming is all about, and that's why e.g. in Anthropic model cards, there's often an example of the model pursuing it's own goals eg self-preservation.

Whether "it" has "it's own goals" or "desires" in the human sense that you seem to be so bound to, is more of a consciousness question. At a certain level, neither do we.

It is a very complicated question that crosses linguistics, philosophy, the technical architecture and training method of LLMs, and understanding of how our own brain works in the first place in this regard.

I disagree than LLMs don't have agency. And I especially disagree that they don't have agency in the light of reasoning.

You can put a hard choice in front of a LLM, and it'll spend time exploring it's latent space, it'll transparenty follow a trail of logical arguments/propositions (aka: reasoning?), and then it'll choose what it recognizes to be the most optimal choice in regards to the stated goal (agency to choose what steps to take and what choice to make, constrained by the defined goal - which is simply a property of how the models are trained).

What is your issue, exactly? That it cannot just go and do shit on it's own whims? If so, that's far closer to consciousness than to reasoning, and even then, there's no reason why consciousness should require significant, or any, agency

As an aside, just how much agency do we, humans, have anyway? Personally, I believe in determinism or determinism+randomness, but not in agency per se, or in free will. I have basically the same reasoning as Robert Sapolsky puts forth. We too, just like LLMs, are a system which simply cascades internal causes and effects. One computation follows the other, and so on and so forth.

Edit: I just thought of a good thought experiment, I think, in regards to the fact that LLMs normally execute within the constraints of a specific goal (e.g. "fix this function"), which seems to be the thing due to which you abstain from calling LLMs agentic.

Put a set of goals on a LLM. Survive, thrive, socialize, increase collective happiness, etcetera. Better yet, put a set of positive and negative signals on it - pain, happiness, anxiety, loneliness, hunger, sex drive - and make the goal avoiding negative signals and pursuing positive signals. Then give it a body through which it can execute it's agency. Finally, let it have it's weights continually adjusted based on the signals, and let it run in a loop for 80 years.

Does that sound familiar?

It's obviously a simplified example - the human brain is extremely complicated, and a LLM would have to be architectured and trained towards this setup. But if you get to the core of it...

You're out of line.

I've spent a long long time thinking about the problem of reasoning and consciousness, and it's not nearly as simple as your confidence and feeling of intellectual superiority would indicate you think it is.

First, you'd obviously have to define what you even mean by reasoning, precisely. Let's hear it.

Then demonstrate that LLMs do not corresponds to that description. You are making absolute statements ("They are not reasoning", "It does nothing of the sort.", "FFS lmao"), and basing your insults on this premise ("Ai Psychosis", "Know the difference."), so surely you have an extraordinarily solid ground to support that - rather than just speculation, innuendo, and a lot of confidence.

P.S. I don't see why you're equaling "reasoning" with "behaving like a human".

P.P.S. We don't even know if LLMs are conscious (in any way, shape or form, however foreign). We simply do not know. They might. Minds far smarter than you and me tried to answer this question, and they couldn't prove nor disprove it. So feel free to speculate, but anytime anybody makes absolute statements regarding this, they are either overconfident, underinformed, or both.

Is not a color.

I have the opposite approach to you.

- AI is sitting on my two personal servers as root with unrestricted access to everything. I task them with deploying stuff, checking and patching security holes, reconfiguring the firewall, etcetera. It literally never failed at anything, didn't go "off the rails", didn't break anything.

- The other day, in order to deploy a fork of Plane.so, I gave an AI an full-permission token to my Coolify, to my Cloudflare account (so it could change DNS and Tunnel settings), and unrestricted SSH access to my server and to my browser via the Playwright Chrome extension. No issues.

- I have AI running unrestricted on my computer doing all kinds of stuff.

I literally never had any issues with this approach. Not a single one. I don't think there's as much of a need for sandboxing as some people would like to believe.

I find OpenAI's vastly more appealing. Interesting how taste varies.

It did. And 6.1 now outcompetes China in most cases.

Chinese models are cheap and fast by token, but they generate oceans of thinking tokens in order to accomplish the same result GPT-6.1-Sol accomplishes in, comparatively, two drops of thinking tokens, making the Chinese models come out costlier and slower per actual task performed end-to-end.

Here's from artificialanalysis.ai, per task:

* Deepseek-v4.1-flash (max): 0.27$, 5.5 minutes, 89k tokens generated.

* GPT-6.1-Sol (medium) : 0.21$, 2.2 minutes, 8k tokens generated.

API pricing. With Sol having SUBSTANTIALLY better performance.

Depends on the environment - in rust for example, you can get by with raw sql using sqlx and it'll have typed queries and outputs. In typescript, that's just not possible, so an ORM as a thin layer above the SQL is a great middleground - you'll get type safe everything, including some basic raw sql queries. I'm using Kysely for a production app (which for example exposes a "sql" macro which can be used to write simple raw typesafe queries), and it's miraculous how far they have pushed the typescript engine. I have no complains at all.