agnosticmantis

This looks very cool, I’m gonna try it later today.

Out of curiosity, why the name Erdos? AFAIK Erdos was neither a statistician, data scientist nor AI researcher.

He sure solved many probability/combinatorics problems and famously had many many collaborators.

"His decision seems to have been based less on his famous scientific thinking and more on a very personal feeling. He wanted to retain his autonomy until the end and to shape his own end."

So you could say it was more system 1 thinking rather than system 2.

I would've expected the opposite given our survival instincts.

Only difference is soon you'll have Mickey Mouse tell you (and your children) to buy same old crap that the influencers were shilling.

Business idea: disrupt all these apps by creating an agent that watches all the brainrot for us so we all get our stolen attentions back.

How about the donor piggy though?

If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)

It’s wild that $goog is so undervalued (p/e 27) given Alphabet owns Waymo in addition to everything else, and yet Tesla is so overvalued (p/e 243!!!) despite zero Robotaxis in the near (or far) future and lackluster sales.

Goes to show empty promises and fraudulent showmanship sell better than actual working products that people use.

The ingroup circle of "we're not them (the outgroup), so we're safe" keeps getting smaller and smaller.

And the ads haven’t even showed up in the night sky yet!

It’s going to be much sadder once we start seeing McDonald’s ads wherever and whenever we look up.

Or as Anthropic's Safety team would write: "Trees conspire to take down human race by sabotaging the underground water network."

Unless the whole presentation was generated using sora-gpt-5 or something, this was very underwhelming.

We know for a fact the slides/charts were generated using an LLM, so the hypothesis is not totally unfounded. /s

What’s the profile of these talents like? And what are the skills that are most highly sought after?

Is it the researchers or the system engineers that scale the prototypes? Or other skills/expertise?

Thanks for the tips.

I placed an order for the AD3+Parts Kit and excited to dive in!

Thanks a lot for the recommendations.

Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?

What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t? The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.

Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.

Is April 1st the "no web scraping day" for LLM shops?

There may be health benefits for LLMs to fast on certain days...

Moonshot business idea: robots on the moon that jumpstart, tow or flip other robots in distress.

False dichotomy, when you could have both, and they can have non-overlapping censorship criteria.

What one censors the other doesn't, and you get less censorship when there are more options available.

It's a breath of fresh air how grounded and coherent Wenfeg's argument is as a CEO of an AI startup. He actually talks like someone technical and not a snake oil salesman.

Compare this to the interviews of Altman or Musk, talking vaguely about elevating the level consciousness, saving humanity from existential threats, understand the nature of the universe and other such nonsense they pander to investors.

“… we have a verbal agreement that these materials will not be used in model training”

Ha ha ha. Even written agreements are routinely violated as long as the potential upside > downside, and all you have is verbal agreement? And you didn’t disclose this?

At the time o3 was released I wrote “this is so impressive that it brings out the pessimist in me”[0], thinking perhaps they were routing API calls to human workers.

Now we see in reality I should’ve been more cynical, as they had access to the benchmark data but verbally agreed (wink wink) not to train on it.

[0: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=agnosticmantis#42476... ]

I had the ARC AGI in mind when I suggested human workers. I agree the other benchmark results make the use of human workers unlikely.

How can people check their data?

In the medium term the plan could be to achieve AGI, and then AGI would figure out how to actually write o3. (Probably after AGI figures out the business model though: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/s/OV4S2hGgW8)

This is so impressive that it brings out the pessimist in me.

Hopefully my skepticism will end up being unwarranted, but how confident are we that the queries are not routed to human workers behind the API? This sounds crazy but is plausible for the fake-it-till-you-make-it crowd.

Also given the prohibitive compute costs per task, typical users won't be using this model, so the scheme could go on for quite sometime before the public knows the truth.

They could also come out in a month and say o3 was so smart it'd endanger the civilization, so we deleted the code and saved humanity!

Just because you can generate numbers between 0 and 1 doesn't make them meaningful probabilities.

Are these based on data? No, they're rhetorical tools used to sound quantitative and scientific.

Nobody will be applying the calculus of probability to these meaningless numbers coming out of someone's ass.

And most importantly, is he himself willing to bet a significant fraction of his fortune based on these socalled probabilities? I don't think so. So they're not probabilities.

I think the achievements in the past couple of years are astonishing, bordering on magic.

Yet, confidently promising AGI/self-driving/mars landing in the next couple of years over and over when the confidence is not justified makes you a conman by definition.

If the number 3 means nothing and can become 7 or 17 or 170 why keep pulling these timelines out of their overconfident asses?

Did we completely solve robotics or prove a longstanding theorem in 2020? No. So we should lose confidence in their baseless predictions.

From Brockman's email:

"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity."

Well, reading this in 2024 with (so-called) "Open"AI going for-profit, it aged like milk.

Also a few lines later, he writes:

"We don’t encourage paper writing, and so paper acceptance isn’t a measure we optimize."

So much for openness and moral high ground!

This whole thread is a masterpiece in dishonesty, hypocrisy and narcissistic power plays for any wannabe villains.

It's amusing to see they keep their masks on even in internal communications though. I'd have thought the messiah complex and benevolence parade is only for the public, but I was wrong.

At his level of wealth and power he can unfortunately peddle in all sorts of highfalutin technical-sounding nonsense with zero accountability.

Few people like Yann LeCun can afford to call his bullshit and survive the reality distortion field.

It's amusing how Sutskever kept musking Musk over the years (overpromising with crazy deadlines and underdelivering):

In 2017 he wrote

"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)."

"We will completely solve the problem of adversarial examples by the end of August."

Very clever to take a page from Musk's own playbook of confidently promising self-driving by next year for a decade.

From Musk's email:

"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach."

Genuine question I've always had is, are these charlatans conscious of how full of shit they are, or are they really high on their own stuff?

Also it grinds my gears when they pull out probabilities out of their asses:

"The probability of DeepMind creating a deep mind increases every year. Maybe it doesn’t get past 50% in 2 to 3 years, but it likely moves past 10%. That doesn’t sound crazy to me, given their resources."

Related to the Hyperreal numbers mentioned in the article is the class of Surreal numbers which have many fun properties. There's a nice book describing them authored by Don Knuth.

I found that I learned a lot about RCTs by going beyond RCTs and reading about causal inference. You learn why each assumption is important when it's broken.

'Causal Inference: What If' is a nice intro and freely available: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-...

Now OpenAI only needs to figure out how to do Search profitably instead of burning VC money.

Only then will the comparison with profitable Search engines be sensible. Before enshitification all VC-backed products are a delight to use, but after the honeymoon phase there’ll be ads all over the results/responses.