cs702

I found the OP insightful and worth a read. Thank you for sharing it on HN.

The only aspect that is poorly analyzed by the OP is business model viability. All players are investing insane amounts of money in infrastructure with the expectation that their future profits will justify all that investment. The winner or winners in the AGI race, they believe, will find the proverbial "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."

The OP glosses over questions of business model viability with a brief qualitative discussion and very little hard data. For example, to earn an annual return > 10% on every trillion dollars of capital sunk into infrastructure, the owners of that infrastructure must earn free cash flow (operating profit less investment) in excess of $100 billion per year in perpetuity. Is that feasible? Why? How?

The OP does not really consider such questions.

The OP never claimed that this is history. The purpose of the story is to explain how things work. Please don't attack a strawman.

Wow, what a fantastic blog post!

While there are some necessary simplifications, I couldn't find a single mistake on a first pass.

Anyone who wants to understand current monetary systems should read it.

Substituting "stones" for gold is a brilliant stroke of the pen. It will surely be helpful to any readers who are hung up on gold.

Thank you for writing this and sharing it on HN.

> The six incidents included models developing ways to ignore “normal constraints”, fabricating and misrepresenting data and hiding mistakes made while conducting tasks, the San Francisco-based company said on Wednesday.

Thanks. The exaggerated framing is the only reason why I posted my comment :-)

Yes, it's interesting research, I agree and even wrote so in my post :-)

But the submission title calls it a "backprop alternative." It is not, at least not yet.

"Backprop alternative" was the OP's headline.

I think my initial assessment is correct: interesting research, but not an alternative, at least not yet.

~74% on CIFAR-10. Still a far cry from backprop.

I didn't see ImageNet. TinyImageNet is something else.

~85% accuracy on MNIST. Sigh.

How does it do on CIFAR-10, or even better, ImageNet?

Interesting research, not sure it's a backprop alternative.

===

EDIT: accuracy on MNIST is not ~90%. It's ~85%.

"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is." - Mark Hanna

Mark Hanna was a political consultant in the late 1800's, in the US.

Source: https://quote.org/quote/there-are-two-things-that-are-import...

To me, it looks like the leading labs are investing more and more to improve their frontier models, and are being forced to charge less and less for them due to competitive pressure.

Maybe I'm wrong, but "reasoning as a service" is looking more and more like a... commodity.

Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode in which a blue animated bear named Waldo nearly wins a by-election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment

Reality these days sometimes feels as strange as fiction.

That is my reaction too. It looks like great work!

Valuable not only for inference, but for training too (think proprietary datasets).

I would add, a single individual did this.

One person can make a difference :-)

The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:

> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

It's not hard to imagine that will be able to do as good a job as a human accountant in the not too distant future.

It's also not hard to imagine tax authorities using AI to audit everyone's tax returns every year.

We sure live in interesting times.

Arguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown.

I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.

Yes, agree.

Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments.

Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.

Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.

Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.

The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.

Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.

The little photo of the guy with a top hat, dancing, with high-wire towers behind him, cracked me up. It's a literal "high-wire act!"

> the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.

Yeah, it sure feels true.

There's even a book about it, you know, to help people cope with it:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691276786/on...

Yeah, that's true. Sigh.

Sure, touchscreens are cheap, but high-quality touchscreen software is most def NOT CHEAP!

Apple and Google have spent untold amounts of money developing iOS and Android. CarPlay and Android Auto are really nice.

Tesla has spent gobs of money on its touchscreen software too. It's the only native car touchscreen UI I've tried that feels smooth, snappy, responsive, simple.

I've tried the native touchscreen UI of quite a few US and European carmakers. All of them fall short. They feel janky, clunky, obtuse.

Physical buttons are much, MUCH cheaper than high-quality touchscreen software.

Love the title. I think it's a great idea to associate pervasive surveillance with the all-seeing eye of evil incarnate from The Lord of the Rings.

General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.

Reminds me of caveman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47647455

Very interesting. The author claims to have proved that markets can be informationally efficient or competitive, but not both. The implications for policy and regulation are significant.

The author looks credible:

https://philipmaymin.com/about-philip

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

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To the mods: The title needs to be edited to replace the equal sign with not-equal.

... and funny too. A great book!

Interesting, these really old menus would not look too out of place at a restaurant today.

> The problem is millions of people have been raised in a bubble built on the assumption that this is a good thing.

Please don't attack a straw-man. I've never met anyone who believes extreme inequality is a good thing on its own.

However, I have met plenty of people who believe capitalism, combined with a safety net and democratic institutions, may not be great, but is definitely better than all other alternatives that have been tried in the past. No other system has produced significantly better societal outcomes.