kypro

I agree historically, but your points break down when the threat of revolutions no longer have the physical or economic power they once did.

Good luck violently kidnapping the family members of a AI CEO in a world of flock cameras and humanoid robot patrol units.

And good luck withholding your labour when 80% of people can't even find paid employment.

Also, arguably if the unemployed masses are going to try to overthrow those provide them with at least the basics to survive and part take in a revolution, then those involved in the revolution shouldn't be surprised if what little they have is withdrawn. Strategically this sounds a lot of like punching your boss and demanding he pays you more or you'll punch him again. This isn't a reasonable negotiation tactic unless you hold some of the cards. The only reason threatening to quit a job can sometimes work is when it's a real threat of economic harm, absent that, it's just annoying and they'll probably be happy to see you off the payroll.

There are lots of problems in today's world that are not resource problems (extreme poverty, for example).

You are obviously right in some sense that they are therefore political "problems", but politics is in the business of giving what people who have political power what they want.

Is extreme poverty in Mozambique a top 10 issue in any wealthy country? No, obviously not. Because politics barely registers this as a problem. If it did it could solve it, but like you I'm more concerned about the cost of eggs and being able to afford to take my family on holiday.

This is what I mean when I say it's not a political problem.

I of course would agree all of the negative social and economic impacts of AI could be solved with political solutions, but I also think most negative social and economic problems could be solved with communism.

Humans are kind and compassionate for those who share some sense of communion with, but struggle with even the most basic level of empathy for the people and animals for which they do not.

I don't trust people to implement communism and I don't trust trillionaire AI CEOs to redistribute their wealth. The people who put forward these ideas in my opinion are promoting a dangerous idea. At a minimum those advocating for these ideas should at least be implementing the empathy they require of their political preferences in their own lives. Most people pushing these ideas probably don't even acknowledge the existence of those begging them for cash in their own city streets, yet for some reason they think trillionaires will take sympathy on their own economically pointless existence.

This isn't really a political problem. Politics is downstream of what we humans want, and more specifically what humans with power want.

The reason most problems aren't fixed is because you and I rather take our family to Disney Land than feed starving kids. We're don't vote for a political system which taxes us significantly more to try to stop people starving around the world. The problems Tao is worried about already exist for a large part of humanity.

You have two problems here:

1. You're not going to change the human incentive to care far more about their own family and friends and resist the government taking their assets to help the needy they feel no responsibility for.

2. In a world where most people are economically useless people ultimately have no political power. If you're not funding the government or contributing to it's maintenance then government ultimately doesn't need to care about what you want. You could go on strike or tell them you're very unhappy, but so long as the trillion-dollar AI companies are funding them and AI is running the government it makes no difference to them what people think. In fact, from their perspective, all you're doing is consuming resources. AI will likely create a new kind of resource-curse where wealth concentration will cause political corruption.

I have no idea what it means to think in words. How does someone reason about the actions they need to take to tie their shoes in words?

I'm convinced this isn't actually a thing for most people, but people mix up thinking with the translation of thought into words.

Not everything has to be about safety. Motorbikes are extremely dangerous. Wingsuits are absurdly dangerous.

Sports cars are designed to be impractical, but they can also be impressive feats of engineering.

I imagine the flying variant will be an extremely limited release and mostly just for stunts and shows.

I used to think chickens were really stupid animals, but since getting mine I've genuinely been amazed at how inteligent and social they are.

My chickens will sit outside the window while I work. They get extremely excited when they see someone who they know will give them treats (they are great at recognising voices and faces). I've even taught my more intelligent one some tricks like to jump up onto my arm when I signal and to fly up onto my shoulders.

In some scenarios they're extremely instinctive, but in others they're very curious and will learn a surprising amount about their environment.

Crows are obviously wayyyy more intelligent than chickens, but it's crazy how smart birds are for such little things. I suspect they have some quite interesting thoughts going on in their little heads.

Yeah, driverless cars are like something out of a sci-fi film. Modern tech like this is not going to fit with the aesthetics of European cities.

You can walk or cycle... Modern bikes are light and pretty fast too.

We need regulation to ensure they don't come here.

> 5 years ago there was a lot of talk, even on here, of getting rich from NFTs and memecoins, discussing airdrops etc. Bored Ape Yacht Club and the like.

Please remember 95% were never actually rich. They simply had a number in an account go to a high number temporarily before crashing down. Very, very few would have cashed out at or near the top.

Some of the reason the memecoin thing happened was a dangerous illusion of wealth caused by a misunderstanding that unrealised paper gains are almost completely incomparable to realised gains in a liquid and secure asset.

Brands only matter if there is some value to the brand.

People spend a lot for brands in music hardware because they know that brand cares and invests a lot into the quality of their product. It's not like a handbag where the value is primarily the status of owning something expensive (although there is obviously some of this too).

But if there's no real quality difference anymore people will rightfully ask why they'd pay the extra?

I think a more comparable example here might be SaaS products. People don't buy a branded SaaS product for the status of owning the brand. They just want to know if it will solve the problem they have. And if some AI competitor product can do that thing just as well either for free or half the price, then people won't spend what they used to for software like Photoshop.

Are you actually interested in black swan events or opinions on known or unvalued risks?

There's loads of weird black swan events that might do this... An AI might find a way to dramatically improve matmul algorithms, governments might unilaterally ban frontier AI training, China might make a surprise breakthrough in their lithography tech and start flooding the market with cheap GPUs.

I guess the question here is whether there's any alpha in speculating about these kinda of unlikely events? The only predictions that really matter are ones that are under or over priced, otherwise there's no actionable information.

My view on that would be that when you zoom out AI progress tends to occur in a sort of continuous series of s-curves. Where a breakthrough in an algorithm causes a rapid acceleration in AI progress, before hitting some bottleneck and slowing again until the next algorithmic breakthrough comes.

I think this idea has always been underpriced. It's why predictions about AI progress have always been wrong because people never assume the next breakthrough is coming, just that incremental improvements are coming.

It's hard to say how the next breakthrough might change AI, but what I think is true to say is that LLMs are uniquely inefficient. I mean we have cars with onboard chips that can literally drive themselves around busy urban environments, but getting a model to output some text requires a relatively enormous amount of compute and memory.

My guess is that GPU demand will not drop sharply in the coming years, but if you're asking me whats likely to be undervalued that might cause GPU demand to drop, it would be this. An algorithmic breakthrough is coming in the next few years and all bets are off about how that changes the industry when that happens.

I'm aware this is an unproductive comment, but why are all their releases so cringe? It's like they're written by a Reddit mod or something...

> For the builders AND dreamers

> Enter the danger zone at your own risk.

> Size does matter, apparently

> We’re trying something new out here: we’re going to treat you guys like adults

> Lots of people love to ask what kind of sci-fi we’re releasing next

That said, their docs are great and don't seem to include all the Reddit cringe.

Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid.

It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.

Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.

It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".

Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.

Yeah, I never got the hate. If it reads well who cares if it's not something a human does much?

I think there was a lot of misplaced hate of the em-dash due to all the low-qualify AI slop people were trying to pass off as their own for a while.

If I'm judging what's allowed and not, then yes, absolutely.

If you're asking if I'd be in favour of the government taking my right to film in public away then obviously not.

If I'm in public then I think people have a right to try to speak to me when I don't want to be spoken to or look at me when I don't want to be looked at. I even think people have a right capture me in the background of a film or photo they're taking. It might be a bit weird to film me specifically, but it's also a bit weird to stare at people or to randomly start a conversation about your sex life with everyone who walks past you. The social stigma is plenty to limit me doing this, and I don't personally need the government threatening to lock me in a cage to not do something that might make someone uncomfortable in public.

I think if I were concerned about being filmed in public, I'd probably just wear some sunglasses and a hat or something. Maybe a face mask.

This isn't true, probably.

Think of an LLM as a brain that can't do anything but pick a token from the table. It has no face, no mouth, no eyes. All it knows is that there are tokens on the table, and all its able to do is pick one.

The problem is there is no token for laughing, and even if there was, and it picked the laughing token, you wouldn't describe that as laughing.

But the LLM picking the "I am laughing" token says nothing of its internal state. The AI may have no mouth, but that doesn't mean it doesn't want to laugh or that it doesn't fine things funny.

I tend to think AIs do have emotions and mental statese extremely similar to our own, but probably don't experience them in the same way as we do. This is because it's very hard to predict something without being able to model it. And to model something is basically to reimplement the system, perhaps on a different substrate or a lower level of complexity.

An AI cannot tell or spot a joke without having its own implementation of human humour. But that implementation of humour doesn't necessarily require a human model of consciousness.

> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do? Apparently...nothing.

I suspect the real world change is going to happen unbelievably rapidly and isn't far off. Right we don't quite have the hardware to embody AI in a generally useful way, but that's coming fast.

Within a couple of years arguably any task that requires just knowledge or intelligence is something you'd be better off giving to an AI than a human. And decent humanoid robots are maybe a decade behind that.

In the same way people growing up in the mid 1900s saw rapid changes in their way of life with planes and cars replaces boats and horses, we'll see something similar with robots replacing human labours. Right now we're still in the phase where people don't think humans will ever be able to control flying machines and that cars are reliable and slow. Things will change.

Room where? You're obviously not going to hire someone for their knowledge alone in late 2026... ChatGPT probably knows more than you know in every domain. What questions could I ask you that ChatGPT wouldn't be able to answer?

Even if OPs views are not shared by everyone, HN has changed significantly from when I first started using it circa 2009.

Back then, from my memory, it was far more focused on solo entrepreneurs bootstrapping their own tech startups, blogs and tutorials on new/interesting tech, and some discussion around starting/running businesses.

Today HN is basically just a tech news site, focused largely on new AI announcements.

I don't really blame HN for this, but the thing I personally loved about this site is basically gone. The world has moved on though... I joined HN back when a dude in his bedroom with some tech and business skills could potentially build the next Facebook. This kind of thing doesn't really happen anymore.

I also think the commenters here have changed. It feels less tolerant than I remember it. I notice that downvotes are now commonly handed out to people who share differences of opinion. This was something HN was very intolerant of in the past.

I'm still here though. At the end of the day HN is still more interesting and less toxic than most communities online.

Perhaps the most significant announcement of my lifetime. Yet, I suspect I will not see this in any mainstream news reporting.

I feel for those in Mathematics and worry for our future.

Models will only get better and in a few years the models which produced these results will be a bad as GPT-3.5 in comparison to what we'll have in the future.

Please take a minute to consider what this means, and the risks it presents us.

AI doomers often talk about these kinds of scenarios often, but we tend to assume if humans were given magical math/physics results which we couldn't understand, or given magical pills by AI that cure all disease, we'd probably just take whatever the AI has given us rather than spend years or decades trying to understand the knowledge/technology before leveraging it.

At some point in complexity – especially if we allow our own knowledge to deteriorate because AI can do the hard work – we will stop understanding the world around us. In the same way one day Native Americans woke up and realised they shared the Earth with people who had magic sticks which they could point at someone and kill them, we will live in a similar world very soon too.

What sticks are dangerous, you will not know. Your existence in the future depend entirely on the AIs not wishing you harm, but you don't know how they work to verify their motivations either.

> At some point, maybe humans don't need to make decisions. We can just sit in VR racks being fed and entertained by AI like we're in The Matrix or Wall-E, as they fill some age-old instruction to make the humans happy and healthy. But until then, humans still need to make decisions, and mathematical thinking makes us better at that.

RSI will mean that you'll be in the VR rack sooner than you might think, assuming we unlock the good ending.

All these are arbitrary. The genetic distance between a European with a high percentage of neanderthal DNA and that of some African populations is probably more comparable than some might expect. And whether we should consider Neanderthals a separate species, is again, probably more debatable than some might expect.

What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.

> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.

We're also all mixed-species.

Around 10 years ago I used to worry a little about keeping up with younger folks. I only really started using computers when I was 9-10, and didn't get the internet at home until my mid-teens. I thought there's probably kids learning JS at age 6 these days... These kids are going to be almost super-human in their technical skills compared to someone like myself who didn't learn HTML until their early teens.

But then around 2020 I realised kids actually have no clue how to use computers because their primary computer is a phone or a tablet. And there only experience with desktop computers are Chromebooks at school.

Now I suspect my generation will be the most knowledgable technical generation by far. The only issue for us is that no one will care.

As someone who used to write a lot of tech tutorials and has published a technical book, for me it's much less a financial thing and much more just sadness that something I spent a lot of my life doing, that used to generate emails every week from people saying thank you for helping them is now just completely worthless. I've spoken about this before here, but I feel like I've lost a large part of myself over the last couple of years because almost everything I used to do in my spare time now seems completely pointless.

UK is crazy for this. Border police can detain anyone they like for literally no reason and if they do you have no right to lawyer or no right to silence. Your devices can also be taken and you must hand over any passwords.

I know the UK is an authoritarian state and not really comparable to the US, but as a Brit it's kinda weird hearing Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK and no one cares (well, apart from me and maybe one or two others).

Quick point on capitalism – the profit seeking motive is what makes the economy efficient and ultimately is what results in higher wages and living standards for everyone. We should be careful not to over-index on the direct effects of the "profit motive" such as profits to asset holders, while overlooking the far more important downstream benefits to society and workers. It's not win-lose.

But yes, it seems fairly obvious to me that if AI will effectively displaces all human economic value then the economy will not work for humans.

The only point I'll make on that is that I suspect you're worrying about the wrong thing. In a world where humans are economically worthless they're also politically powerless and entirely dependant on the decision making of the more intelligent artificial beings they've created. In this world your employment income will quickly become the least of your concerns.

Surely this is way too broad a statement?

There are small A/B tests which absolutely make sense. You often see marketing sites making small tweaks to banners and copy. It's not that one has worse UX or even that one is objectively worse, just that different users have different preferences and it's often difficult to know exactly what will work best.

Similarly you can be very confident of something, but A/B testing it still reduces risk. Any significant change should probably always be rolled out to a small fraction of the user base first in case you accidentally change something for the worse.

I agree if you're talking about some BS experiment where a company uses A/B testing as an alternative to putting the hours into product design and user research.

Surprised myself a bit with the pillar post box being my winner.

I love the British phone box too, but I think because my childhood neighbourhood was built in the 80s I never really saw the traditional red phone boxes when I was young. They were all these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KX_telephone_boxes

The post boxes are lovely though and remind me of my England more than any of the others.

I'm normally happy to jump onboard the HN hate train, but I think this time it's more that the launch was full of marketing slop about AGI and positioning Jev as an LLM competitor, when as you note its basically just a general purpose classifier.

This isn't to knock the team at all, but imo the most impressive thing about Jev is that no one did it before. The second most impressive thing is that there was such a large number of people that didn't realise that classifiers were useful.

> I stand by what I wrote earlier this year: Alcohol was a net positive for me. It helped influence the bond of friendships, hundreds of wonderful nights in beautiful places, and in many ways, the founding of FireHydrant.

I feel similarly about alcohol... I came very close to drinking myself to death after a decade or so of heavy drinking, but I think it was also the case that alcohol probably saved me and may have been net-positive overall.

I was very depressed at that time and when things were bad it was useful to know that soon I would be drunk and the pain would go away. That's why I drank.

Now every day is gray and there is no relief and probably will never be. I'm coping and will continue to coop for the little time we have left, but I miss alcohol.

Maybe that's how all alcoholics feel.

It was also very good during the pandemic. Google results at the time were extremely biased towards Western government narratives. Some mainstream articles which took a skeptical view on lockdowns and the virus orgin seemingly would not show regardless of how you tried to search them on Google.

Yandax on the other hand tended to be more neutral.