light_hue_1

> It looks exactly like the two railroad bubbles. Potential profit is there, in the future. But you have to invest in the infrastructure first. If you can't make a profit and pay back the loans fast enough, the infrastructure goes bye-bye, along with all the funds used to finance it.

That's just not true. Profit is there now. If the hyperscalers stopped building new infra tomorrow, they would just roll in the profits available from what exists today!

Totally unlike the railroad bubbles which built out years and years ahead with no customers and then collapsed.

> "There's Still Plenty Of Capital To Raise" - IPO is not how you raise a trillion dollars. A million, sure. A billion, maybe? But a trillion puts retail investors - mom and pop - at risk. IPO is not how you raise funds for a railroad.

You're totally confused about what an IPO is. You're confusing the valuation of Anthropic with what they will raise. They intend to offer about $100B in stock, their valuation is at 1T.

> "Once AI companies become profitable" - there's the big red flag. This isn't Uber or Lyft that can float along on tens of millions in corporate hand-outs every quarter. They need 100x that much money, and nobody has it to hand out. So you can't wait around for profits. There's no magic cushion to float on.

Most AI companies are profitable aside from expenditures to build new infrastructure to reap more profits. That's a very healthy sign.

> "For starters, the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever" - They will in 4 years. "normal users don't want to have to deal with the hassle or expense of setting up something" - What hassle? You download a program with a fancy GUI and run it. There are a half dozen of these projects already, that provide ChatGPT on your computer from one binary. All you need is a GPU.

Uhuh. A GPU. In your phone? In your laptop? The average laptop in the US is sold for about $700, desktop for about $1k. A good GPU to run a reasonable model is $10k+. It makes zero financial sense for most people to run their own inference. The issue isn't, and never was, the software, it's the hardware. And one thing we've seen from the past years of growth is that people don't look at the models from 3 years ago and say "Oh well, that's good enough, at least I can run it slowly on my $5k+ desktop". Until that happens this is a fantasy.

So is Google! They buy real estate on your phone to make themselves the default browser. They pay other browsers and phone manufacturers for integration.

The only reason why Google search is doing well is because it's a real estate business like McDonald's. And lately their search quality has been similarly crappy.

Because VR failed to deliver at all. The experience is narrow, isolating, and frankly pretty horrible. People get motion sickness. The set of games is limited never mind the set of non-gaming activities. AR similarly has a lot of issues like narrow FOVs, low resolution, and brightness issues.

VR is a toy with a few very narrow areas of application in industry. That does not describe the current status of AI.

Those limitations come from a "protecting the user" mentality. That they know better what you should be allowed to do than you.

We had something similar with my father in law who just passed from pancreatic cancer.

The doctors each saw one small part of the case, he was being passed between multiple doctors and NPs. There was no coherence. At one point he ended up on so many medications that made no sense he passed out. Only at the hospital when a doctor looked at everything together did they realize what a mess had been created and got him back on his feet.

I ended up giving all of his records to an agent and making it the coordinator. It found a bunch of problems. He was being given the wrong pain medication on the wrong schedule, the moment that was fixed he felt a lot better (unfortunately he lost so much weight on the wrong schedule it's what got him in the end). They also use voice transcription software, which led to a key error about what genetic markers he had. Fixing this changed his treatment plan!

In general, I wish we had been much more aggressive with this. Last time we had a major medical issue an NP almost killed my wife. At the time there was no AI, so we just had to recognize things were in decline and start being aggressive about getting in with the right doctors (the moment we found the right one she was diagnosed, had surgery and was cured in weeks).

He started doing better when the AI became the central coordinator and doctors/tests/etc. became their inputs. It was an excellent advocate. And while we have science backgrounds, we aren't doctors. But it could present evidence for actions in ways that the doctors appreciated (his oncologist was impressed and called the AI a member of the team).

Unfortunately his physical reserves were very drained at that point. He probably would have had another 6-12 months with his family if it wasn't for the disorganized mess of a care system that we have.

These are not explanations. They're visualizations. There's a huge gap between the two.

Explanations give you a mental model: when I move this parameter this the effect it has. This just shows you the obvious, make a thing bigger, it gets bigger on screen. That's not an explanation.

Models are quite horrible at explaining things. They produce local narrow views that don't take into account the mental model of the listener nor do they attempt to produce the kind of long-term knowledge gain that a teacher does. I taught for over a decade.

This is why models are extremely good for people who already know what they're doing. That narrow why is all you need, like, tell me the 3 sentences that describe the mechanism behind this paper, and I'll get the rest. But building the scaffolding onto which to hang a lot of knowledge?

Give it a try. Try to have a model teach you something new. Not like "how do I tie a knot" but like a new area of math where you're going to dedicate 3 months of your free time to learning it. The results are pretty horrible.

It's chartjunk filler.

And you see this in the other examples too. The teach the CLT piece was funny. It's and error-ridden mess that isn't even an explanation at all!

The best part is, someone looked at that and thought yes, that's right. Shows you clearly why programmers will be needed in the future. The LLM might be able to run circles around that person in math, but that person also has no idea when they're being bullshitted.

I wish this just implement tikz without latex. I've yet to see a better drawing library that is both simple and has the depth to build the most complicated things.

There will be many scientists, myself included, that would band together to break the cartel if it forms. It's just a matter of money. It is absurd.

Any logic shows that this is really about their valuations and being tired of innovating instead of having any safety concerns. What would happen if the US did this? Chinese and EU labs would eventually win. And then either the US becomes a backwater or they have to eventually spend the money to keep up anyway. But in the meantime they will have bought themselves a few years at insane valuations.

Also, look at the stark choice they want to offer "we'll kill everyone or you give us the power to do whatever we want with the most important tech around". That's it. If we aren't in an oligarchy now, we will be if this goes through. They're going to end up stealing trillions of dollars from the rest of society.

If you think that OpenAI won't look at your data to gain a massive advantage, you're naive.

The real story here: the priority dispute and its implications on AI.

When your hosting provider has unlimited resources to throw at any problem, all they need to know are the good problems, and they can learn that from your logs, how can you trust them?

They could easily have looked at the logs. We don't know. We'll never know!

You can't trust places like OpenAI or Anthropic with your IP if you're a business. They can easily review all of your logs for interesting discoveries. For example, if your drug discovery pipeline fails to find something that they think might work with 1000x the compute, they can do it. And now suddently they have a new business and you don't.

As usual a split decision along party lines. The entire US judicial system has lost its mind.

It's clear at this point that judges pick the outcome they want then find ways to interpret the case, precedent, etc. to fit. You can see it in the dissent here. https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...

Hard to see where we go from here as a society where arbitrary laws that bind us all are essentially written on the fly by whatever judges happen to be in the Supreme Court, circuit courts, state courts, etc.

How is it possible to have a democracy under these conditions?

"Flooding" implies some nefarious purpose. There's no evidence of that in this paper. Maybe these agents are finally giving people who could never find the time, resources, knowledge, etc. to engage with the system.

"Public services are increasingly becoming more accessible with LLMs" How about that as the title?

They also have zero evidence that this is because of LLMs. They just got some data related to volume, did a really crappy analysis that wouldn't even stand up as an intro to stats course project, and declared their biased opinion as likely true.

There is a certain amount of slack that we have. Things that are obvious consequences of what we've already discovered but that we haven't taken advantage of yet. AI is reaping that slack. It isn't adding brand new ideas at the moment. We will run out of this slack pretty quickly.

> Again, by using differentials instead of derivatives, we have transformed a number of processes that students find unintuitive into a single process where the intuition is supplied by the student’s knowledge of algebra.

Ah yes. Algebra. The subject all students love dearly. If only we could get students to love and appreciate calculus as much they love algebra!

I have a hard time even imagining an article that is more disconnected from the reality of teaching calculus to tiny humans.

This animation is worse than useless. I've taught a lot of students. This is not learning, it's stamp collecting.

You're just memorizing a nonsensical recipe. What are the constraints? Why do we do X rather than Y? How does a particular thing scale? etc.

All you're doing is fooling yourself into thinking that you've acquired some knowledge. When in reality you haven't even learned the basic mental model to reason about this stuff.

You've learned something when you have a mental model that makes correct predictions. Until then you've memorized it at best, and as with most memorized things it will decay exponentially and will be gone from your memory soon enough.

> The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe.

This just isn't true. The Wright Brothers solved fundamental problems in aviation that no one else did.

The three axis control mechanism is still what every plane uses today. They literally had to invent that notion. Adverse yaw is something that every single pilot learns about and handles.

They discovered the notion of stalling (literally they were the first to identify the notion and use the term) and the relationship between angle of attack and stalling. This is the sort of thing that will 100% kill you immediately when you fly, but if you know what to do it's part of routine training.

And that's just the start of it. You should read "What the Wright Brothers Did and Did Not Understand About Flight Mechanics—In Modern Terms" by Fred E.C. Culick

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothe...

This has nothing to do with being American or not.

Ironic that "Reinvent science" would publish such a trash article. Did they even read the original paper? This is not at all what it says.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.13169

The "poisonous scientific literature" removal is on page 14. Look at the table. Removing academic pieces changes performance by on average 0.44%! You could sneeze and change the performance by that much. You could rerun with a different seed and change the performance by more than that. You could retrain on a different GPU that orders floating point operations differently and change performance by that much. etc. This is meaningless.

Also, the authors explain exactly why this happens! It's on that page even. The academic data hurts a little on datasets which aren't academic. It hurts on common sense reasoning like SocialIQA (Q: "Jordan wanted to tell Tracy a secret, so Jordan leaned towards Tracy. Why did Jordan do this?" A: "Make sure no one else could hear"). Shocking that you can't learn this from academic publications.

This is just substandard blog slop that give science a bad name.

The scary part is: "Dan Recht and Ben Reinhardt trained as scientists and now coach scientists. They do other work but don’t link to it here." As someone who has advised plenty of PhD students I can't find the words to express my disdain at that line and these jokers.

As someone who has worked in two industries that are at the maximal end of data sensitivity and privacy this comes across as a tinfoil hat issue not a real business requirement. In such cases we've always found ways to trade dollars for the privacy we need without having to run our own inference at excruciating slow speeds.

Every single time any story has the words "Google developers" in it, they're behaving like arrogant, disconnected, anti-consumer jerks. From constant GCP breakage, to not acknowledging obvious Android bugs, to intentionally braking Chrome. It's a stark contrast to behind the scenes interactions with them.

And lose the tax advantages? That's crazy

If people want to learn more, at ICML (one of the top AI/ML conferences) this year there was a whole tutorial on this topic: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~schmidtm/Documents/2026_ICML_Tutorial...

Yes. "Second to" takes a set as an argument in English. Even the empty set works!

England is second to none.

This is the view of an HLD that someone without any actual HLD experience would have.

This is too generic. There's some code I need to write like core abstractions that are going to set the pace for everything. Or tricky steps that can look good without actually working well.

Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc.

I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.

> Perhaps. If we need more, we can make more though, and at a faster rate than Iran can.

We can't. We built a system that creates a very small number of very expensive munitions and that can't be scaled up. We've been trying to scale up munitions production for years now with the Ukraine war. And it just isn't possible.

Not only does it take years to make any missile now. Our total capacity to make missiles is incredibly low. Like, we can make 600 Patriot missiles per year. We've expended twice that so far with Iran alone. We can make 100 THADD per year. We've expended 300 so far.

The US will run out of missiles way before Iran does. Iran could easily produce 2000 missiles per year and if it pushed it could make closer to 8000.

Iran will recover its missile stocks from the current war in a year. It will take the US until 2031 to do the same.

This kind of data-free opining reminds me of the Mythical Man-Month. Yeah, in theory adding more people to a project will speed it up. And all people are replaceable so I can hire 100 bodies for cheap and we'll be done with this project ASAP.

Sounds great! Have you tried this? Did you see what went wrong? Otherwise this is just the same nonsense as always.

> Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.

The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.

India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.

The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.

It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.

Go with your report back to your doctor.

A family member has cancer and we treat chatgpt as part of the team (our doctor's words). I ingest everything into it, work with it to make a good report. Then at the next visit we review it.

This gives you the best of both worlds. You get peace of mind and the doctor explains why and how the agent was right or wrong.

Twice now we've caught consequential mistakes (wrong pain medication and incorrect notation of the exact mutation that he has). Which have made a difference to his quality of life and treatment path.

Most of what the doctors have said is in line with the agent but when there have been disagreements they've been very reasonable. Sometimes the doctors have gone with the agent's version sometimes they've explained why that's inappropriate.

I'm amazed that PG can't see his own arguments clearly lead to massive social harms.

Facebook once existed as "How is a company going to make money from undergrads stalking one another online?" but that company didn't make it big. It was only when it turned into an addictive harmful website that thrives by massively raising the suicide rate of kids, that's when they made it big!

AirBnb once existed as "Who's going to pay to sleep on an airbed on someone's floor?" but they didn't make a billion dollars doing that. It wasn't until it turned into a DYI hotel that displaces local resident, concentrates wealth, and makes housing unaffordable. That's when it made serious money.

So yes, nominally, each of these startups sounds good. But many of them turn into rent seeking, closed ecosystems, that prey on users.

> You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done.

Correct. I wish PG would do that. Instead of telling this idealized fantasy.