dangerwill

This happens distressingly often in LLM demos. Significant errors being papered over because people are so enthralled by the "look Ma, no hands!" effect. Just got out of a work meeting where the exact same thing happened with an internal chatGPT integration.

Oh joy, yet another reason why I'm getting dumber, I'll add it to the pile

On this kind of story, where access is going to give you some insights, I'm happy enough to see her reporting. But yeah, absolutely spot on about Swisher in general. She has no technical chops to tell when someone is bullshitting her and egregiously pulls her punches, until you piss her off individually (see her falling out with Musk)

The solution is that folks have to put effort into themselves instead of being given a no-effort solution that helps trap them in a depressed state by making that depressed state slightly more comfortable. I say this as an ugly, uninteresting (not poor though to be fair) person with depression.

Yeah, and the comments on this thread seriously worry me. We have people arguing that it is good for society to satisfy lonely men with virtual porn and other people saying that this is great, scrappy product development and the author should go further/use other models not constrained by openAI's policies. It feels like I'm discovering a significant portion of our field are sociopaths

Tech people, I beg you, BEG YOU, to learn media literacy. Her, Black Mirror, Ready Player One, Cyberpunk, etc are dystopias not something to aspire to

I think by alternative you mean an escape route for the uber wealthy.

People have been using various chemicals for cleaning and knives for cooking for thousands of years. They are embedded in our culture. LLMs only became popular a year ago and the farthest back you can go with their origins is the 1950s. It is not at all unreasonable for people to say "hey should we require that this new tool have safeguards built in so it isn't horribly abused?", especially when you consider that these are not just tools that have been fashioned from the natural world, these are products provided by companies that are in some cases gleefully amoral. A space moving quickly is reason for more criticism and caution from the general public, not less.

And if safeguards cannot be put into place by design into your tool, then that is malicious design

I think it is much more likely that Musk is going to cause a kepler syndrome collapse with starlink well before spacex is actually going to consider creating a moon base.

How is this making your browsing experience any better? You still have to know what you want to do, and it is just faster to type Rick roll into youtube directly and click the links directly instead of having to type k, or vh, or whatever. You are just adding a useless chatgpt middleman between you and the browser that you likely spend all day in anyway and should be adept at navigating

I don't think I've ever met someone who actually thinks this is the right way to legislate. It's just really hard to design a meta system that would disallow this thing when legislators also control the rules of how legislation is passed/written

Is there a stated reason that a handful of the biggest companies are sitting on cash piles greater than the yearly GDP of mid sized nations?

Are they convinced that a more muscular re-investment in their businesses won't provide returns greater than interest?

Is there a tax advantage here that pushes companies to hoard?

Is the C-suite set really worried about the greater economic environment going forward and so want these cash piles as a buffer to get through coming lean times?

Is that not the goal? Since it turned out that creative disciplines were the first to get hit by AI (previously having been thought of to be more resilient to it than office drudgery) where are humans going to be safe from replacement? As editors of AI output? Manual labor jobs that are physically difficult to automate? It's a shrinking pie from every angle I have seen

1. This gets trotted out constantly but this is not some known constant about how capitalist economies work. Just because we have more jobs now than we did pre-digital revolution does not mean all technologies have that effect on the jobs market (or even that the digital revolution had that effect). A tool that is aimed to entirely replace humans across many/most/all industries is quite different than previous technological advancements.

2. This is outdated, life is NOT better now than at any other time. Life expectancy is going down in the US, there is vastly more economic inequality now than there was in the 60s, people broadly report much worse job satisfaction than they did in previous generations. The only metric you can really point to about now being better than the 90s is absolute poverty going down. Which is great, but those advancements are actually quite shallow on a per-person basis and are matched by declines in relative wealth for the middle 80% of people.

3. ??? What kind of AI are you talking about? LLMs have only been interesting to the public for about a year now

Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of these as this is either sci-fi or insane

If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even potentially help the general public and there is no reason to think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue running the economy while employing far fewer people. These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor, which in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces.

There are already land based transport options that are two orders of magnitude safer than cars: buses and trains, with no AI necessary :)

Some of the players in this space do this but it doesn't work because driving via streaming video over the internet is nowhere near as effective as a human driver. And is simply not possible in a fast moving emergency, only being helpful if the car gets stuck and won't move

That isn't really a thing they can do for already shipped games, unless your game has an online component with dedicated servers and you need to update unity on the server side for a security fix. Most games don't upgrade their engine post launch, unless they are a live service game intended to get constant, significant updates for a long time.

Capitalism can't fail it can only be failed

"For batteries, the constraint is mineral availability; though mining the minerals for batteries is far less environmentally destructive than mining fossil fuels, limited availability of lithium and we will probably have to switch to types of batteries that don’t use lithium in order to get enough storage for the whole world. [...] These are real challenges, but I doubt they’ll be prohibitive. [...] Meanwhile, there’s no reason to think that iron-air batteries or other types of batteries that rely on common minerals aren’t subject to the same scaling effects as lithium-ion batteries were. So I think we’ll get grid storage reasonably cheap and scalable as well."

This is just handwaving away an incredibly difficult problem that is going to be a massive choke point for batteries. Yes there is lots of ongoing research in the material science of batteries to route around the lithium bottleneck, but there is a large lead time from finding success in research to generating end products at scale. 5-15 years of being blocked here will be extremely painful/crucial.

He also purely focuses on the economics of getting solar based energy to market, eg the cost for consumers per kwh of electricity and the cost of batteries for things like EVs. But what about the added weight of these batteries? The damage done to roadways is exponentially related to the weight of the vehicles on the road, so making all cars 2x heavier means way more than 2x the road maintenance, which leads to increases in concrete and steel production. Both of which have environmental/carbon impacts of their own, and steel production especially uses an INTENSE amount of energy. And you also have the rocket problem where the bigger the battery you have to increase your range, the more of your range is being wasted by the energy required to lug the battery around.

Any serious work here has to at least look at the benefits of increased train, tram, and trolley bus networks with overhead electrification as that gives all the benefits of electrified transportation but without the downsides of batteries.

"ChiComs", seriously? This isn't infowars

Exactly this and even a step further, who grades the test to determine which ballots to throw out? If the test is in anyway free-form then the hanging chads debate gets to happen at every polling station, forever

Any arbitrary test that is used to gate access to enfranchisement will be used by politicians to try to chose their voters. This was all fought over during the civil rights period and is simply a means to screw over the other side.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test this shows the kind of bullshit tests that would be created if Ramaswamy gets his way

Session time is a real time metric but revenue updates are quarterly, so the revenue will lag behind user engagement metrics. That and/or enterprise customers signing up in droves which drives revenue up but doesn't guarantee an increase in user engagement.

This is a recurring theme with MattY's work. He takes any statement by a company or government body at face value and turns it into ammo for a certain political agenda. His position as a hot take generator in favor of centrism (in the US political context, so read it as economically neoliberal and culturally soft liberal) means he often avoids criticism due to his banality. But he has no useful insights at all, especially when he is working off of corpo/government propaganda.

Because the same big companies (Microsoft, Google, and Facebook) that are offering LLM products today have been shown time and time again to lie about data retention/use/privacy and prefer to just eat fines over complying. That and the ingestion of data into the training data of these systems is crucial to their functioning so there is a reason why these companies are very likely lying with their data processing agreements.

Adobe still claims that their Firefly product is only trained on publicly licensed stock photo data and yet it has been repeatedly found outputting watermarks from artists that are not supposed to be in that training data.

"From engineers troubleshooting bugs, to data analysts clustering free-form data, to finance analysts writing tricky spreadsheet formulas—the use cases for ChatGPT Enterprise are plenty. It’s become a true enabler of productivity, with the dependable security and data privacy controls we need."

I'm sorry but the financial analyst using chatGPT to write their excel formulas for them, and explicitly calling out that it is generating a formula that the analyst can't figure out on their own ("tricky") is an incredibly alarming thing to call out as a use case for chatGPT. I can't think of a lower reward, higher risk task to throw chatGPT at than financial analysis / reporting. Subtle differences in how things are reported in the financial world can really matter

Given our industry's long history of lying about data retention and usage and openai's opaqueness and Sam Altman's specific sleaziness I wouldn't trust this privacy statement one bit. But I know the statement will be enough for corporate "due diligence".

Which is a shame because an actual audit of the live training data of these systems could be possible, albeit imperfect. Setup an independent third party audit firm that gets daily access to a randomly chosen slice of the training data and check its source. Something along those lines would give some actual teeth to these statements about data privacy or data segmentation.

It's really sad how everyone here is fawning over tech that will destroy you own livelihoods. "AI won't take your job, those who use AI will" is purely short term, myopic thinking. These tools are not aimed to help workers, the end goal is to make it so you don't need to be an engineer to build software, just let the project manager or director describe the system they want and boom there it is.

You can scream that this is progress all you want, and I'll grant you that these tools will greatly speed up the generation of code. But more code won't make any of these businesses provide better services to people, lower their prices, or pay workers more. They are just a means to keep money from flowing out of the hands of the C-Suite and investor classes.

If software engineering becomes a solved problem then fine, we probably shouldn't continue to get paid huge salaries to write it anymore, but please stop acting like this is a better future for any of us normal folks.