jackb4040

No, they're in post-colonial conditions and intentionally prevented from developing economically via a relationship of economic dependence on the imperial core. And as a result, they can't produce their own chemotherapy, insulin etc. and have to import it from developed parts of the world system.

If the imperial core spontaneously disappeared, they would begin developing - and that development would take the form of centralization and specialization and state-driven investment in underdeveloped sectors. Look at what Burkina Faso is doing right now for example: they went from contracts with French companies to export gold and uranium for a thousandth of their market value to now climbing the value chain by developing their own gold refineries.

To keep the example but circle back to the original point: If you lived in a future Burkina Faso that successfully developed its economy, proposing that they go back to small-scale production with worse economies of scale would be a step backwards, and yes the logical conclusion of that in any country is hunter-gatherers. There can be other important learnings from doing this as a constrained experiment within a development model, like resiliency. But thinking this is a development model in itself is a cargo cult mentality that misunderstands industrial production as some evil external imposition on humanity rather than the system that proved most effective at feeding the most people.

Those companies, and those people within otherwise decent companies, have existed since long before the advent of LLMs. Avoiding their influence is a career skill as important as the code itself. And I'm not saying you can just avoid them for your whole career, they're everywhere and are being supercharged by LLMs.

It's disappointing that the prevailing sentiment now is that architecture is less important than we thought. Software is always going to be getting more important, and all of it should be well thought out. If these people had these tools in 2004 they might've made thousands of fragmented buggy social media startups and actually slowed progress on that front.

Thank you! It's made me lose a lot of respect for my field how credulous everyone is to any argument that starts out with a fig leaf of pretending to be on your side.

"The AI labs are scared of their own models, surely they must be credible sources on how powerful those models are"

"They are asking the government for regulation, they must be even more responsible than the average company"

"They are claiming to be a software engineer who automated their job with AI, surely I have to buy their course"

There are many boilerplate pieces of software that an LLM can generate faster than a human, but nearly half a decade into the LLM era there is no evidence that it's leading to the apocalyptic end of software organizations. And that's all with the subsidy in place that is now disappearing. Everyone online is lying for money, and that money is coming out of the same investor-subsidized marketing budgets.

I think you're entitled to your opinion, but want to point out that there's 2 different axes on the graph here. You are unhappy about LLMs' affect on your working conditions, but also concede it's inevitable and the labs are at least somewhat sincere in their predictions of it displacing a significant amount of the value in the software engineering market.

It's not necessarily a given that the person you're replying to agrees on the latter, and therefore they might not be stoked on you starting off by agreeing with them but going on to make an argument that supports the companies responsible for the very thing they're complaining about.

I think there's a contradiction in you stating that management thinks LLM-generated output is "maintainable". They went to business school, they don't know what that means. It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.

> The ability of people to freely associate

> solipsist

This is exactly the point they're making though. This is an exercise only available to the privileged. It is not available to people who haven't worked in tech for some amount of time, if not actively working in tech or holding equity like the homesteader above us.

It takes for granted the concentrated specialization of production that is modern, "on-grid" cities to produce things like microprocessors and food safety and insulin. This lifestyle is not available to masses of people, and we have a word for a society where everyone lives off-grid: "hunter-gatherers".

There can be other value in doing this, like Hundred Rabbits' exploration of how tech itself could be made more resilient given different macroeconomic conditions / incentives. But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do.

LLMs are very useful, I use them every day as a software engineer to solve problems and search for information represented within the data available to them. But they are a specific type of intelligence, with many advantages and disadvantages vs human intelligence and it's not clear that just scaling or tweaking them without a theoretical, architectural change will make them more generally intelligent than humans (despite all US AI companies promising exactly that).

They are fundamentally based in language, and achieving deeper models of the world through language alone is deeply inefficient compared to the way humans model the world for years without any language at all. They do not learn at inference time. They don't have semantic understanding of the difference between their own output and other sources. etc etc.

That depth is the key for me. Of course they are capable of producing novel sentences that aren't in their training data, but the depth of that novelty is basically within the bounds of language itself. They are capable of more serious depth and more abstract reasoning than that, but I have experienced limits, which it then tries to surpass with tools to convert things it can't understand back into language (unit tests, LEAN) upon which it is trained.

Because I'm not an AI booster, my account is limited to 5 comments a day. So this is the last reply I'll be able to make today, if you want to continue the conversation we'll have to wait for tomorrow.

Open sourced by whom? Was this a standalone company or a spinoff of Figma or something? I imagine they must have been making serious money to afford that domain.

I do hobby work in Three.js and have always felt more comfortable using the declarative scene.add()-style API to manage my scene vs fiber / reactive stuff. But I imagine I'd feel differently if I were making 3d components tightly integrated with the state of the rest of a normal react app, rather than a fully immersive game scene.

I'm glad both apis exist.

But doesn't that just amount to labs intervening to teach the models to use a particular strategy to mask this one very obvious marker of the difference between their intelligence and biological intelligence? (And similar surface issues like using tool calls / reasoning for arithmetic, even though humans writing on the internet don't typically break show their work for multiplying two numbers)

The deeper architectural difference is still there, which manifests whenever you try to get the models to apply known techniques to modalities and problems outside their training data.

I don't quite understand the leap you're making between stochastic AI models for robotics (maybe with an LLM making api calls to it) and embodied AI / the rate of progress towards a singularity. Because they're both trained on a GPU? Up until 2022 GPUs were for video games and mining crypto, and neither of those produce a synergy that accelerates progress towards general intelligence either.

The American state is the most militaristic and violent state on the planet today, and the American people are the most armed in human history and regularly experience mass shootings and even school shootings.

Drone warfare relies on large numbers of drones overwhelming enemy electronic warfare countermeasures, in urban or open landscapes that haven't been specifically designed against it. A billionaire in a western country against a rag-tag group of guerrillas making drones from commodity radios is just about the least favorable conditions for it that could exist. You may catch a couple of them on accident up front, but they're very well-suited to adapt to it.

Effective altruist / rationalist doctrine is that the best thing a person can do is become ultrawealthy and use that wealth to fund technological progress. It is an ideology tailor-made for those who strive to become the richest person alive, and / or want to worship that person as a god.

When they speak of "existential consequences", it is not as members of humanity. It is a projection of their control over humanity. Personal risk for them is just being made into a regular human (no longer being ultrawealthy). They can't even contemplate physical risk. Case in point, this exact same class of people are buying up private islands and literally purchasing the blood of poorer people.

They would never accept your wager. It's the kind of thing Elon Musk would say "sounds interesting" to on Joe Rogan ten years ago, and then the only consequence after that would be his fanboys reminding everyone how cool it was that he said that.

Targeting? I think you meant to say "upstanding citizen in the vicinity when chemical reaction leads to AI-CEO-involved incident"

They shift between

"we need the government to halt model training for us (and potential competitors who are currently behind us) due to hypothetical sci-fi future bad things"

on the one hand, and then

"we should not face consequences for that time we helped a teenager plan a mass shooting"

on the other so effortlessly, so instantaneously. And virtually the entire media helps them do it!

Huh. Apparently if you Google "GoogleBook", the first 2 results aren't for GoogleBook but for Google Books.

Don't worry. The more they slow ASML's progress, the closer it puts SMEE (China) to parity. Then we won't need to worry about sanctions ever again.

The Europeans have some amount of leverage over the Americans, much smaller than the Americans have over them. But they use 100% of it to keep the Americans involved in the Ukraine War rather than to defend their own institutions / economies.

> If everybody already knows the other program

Thankfully what you're describing is a switching cost, not a permanently higher operating cost. Once the monopoly is broken and the state is using open source tools, there's every reason to believe it will be cheaper - no expensive proprietary certifications etc.

It would be unbelievable that the US would rather continue facilitating a genocide than retain Microsoft's global enterprise software monopoly, had they not already destroyed the UN, the ICC, and the global economy for that goal.

All they had to do was make keep the other costs lower than the switching costs, and they could've continued setting terms forever.

It's not not-inevitable because everyone will work together to make the world sunshine and rainbows.

It's not-inevitable because no one has proven it's even possible, and all the people claiming it is keep being revealed to have staged publicity stunts to make it appear like they're making more progress than they are.

It's so funny that a tiny group of cultists from the Bay Area was really able to convince most of the smart people in America of this. It's not true. China isn't working on this at all. The only people who are trying to make a world-ending God-computer are americans.

Comparing it to nuclear weapons is even more ironic from the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons. They are terrified of other countries treating them the way they've been treated, even though there is no evidence this is of even remote interest to anyone outside their hyperreality.

I think you'd be really interested in this recent podcast by Ed Zitron, Adam Becker, and Cal Newport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

None of them are AI boosters, but they have something of a debate over whether the AI labs are doing what they're doing out of financial desperation, or because they're true believers in the rationalist cult. They also bring up Nvidia, though through the religious lens they are supposedly not bringing up AI Safety because Jensen predates the rationalists.

In the end I don't know how much the distinction matters. It's easier to become an AI billionaire if you have an ideology that says AI billionaires are superheroes. The thing that pops this bubble will be economic reality, not them sobering up.

Anthropic claims that their intention with the agents that led to the Hugging Face hack was an offline experiment running against a hacking benchmark.

Either you're being pedantic and missing the entire point, or you're saying that Anthropic lied and made a fake sandbox knowing their agents would need to connect to the internet anyways.

I am also not releasing my newest A.I. model over safety concerns. And I'll do it for half what OpenAI will!

> but you can design

Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.

The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".

Seems pretty evident that once you get beyond that point you stop considering regular people fully human, and start doing crazy things like threatening to destroy entire civilizations or buying and selling children.

His contribution doesn't have to be worth zero to be not worth more than all the engineering and physical workers under him combined.

Who's talking about the government? The most obvious natural owners of a company to me are the employees, who are actually the ones responsible for its success.

The Fort Bragg Cartel and LASD would like a word

Damn did not expect to see that username this morning. Shouldn't you be soldering flipdot panels?