mindwok

I use AI extensively in my trips. It’s not that I literally prompt ChatGPT and then walk away while it books everything. It’s just a search engine on steroids that I use to generate ideas and collate options until I choose the things I want.

A posttraining data commons and the infrastructure surrounding it is the next great open source project IMO, akin to Postgres or Linux.

The Marin project from Stanford (and I believe now ran by Openathena, the authors of this blog post) is really promising and cool: https://marin.community/

One possible explanation for this is that it’s basically a systemic failure of the market. Shareholders are pricing companies as if being a winner in the AI boom is the most important thing. Company leadership then must position themselves as a winner, or the market responds by devaluing their share price and they lose their jobs and probably their incentives. The most legible way for leaders to show they’re in the AI race is to spend money on AI infra, even if it means taking on debt to do so.

So if this is in fact a bubble, nobody can really act differently until the market stops treating AI spending as a winning strategy.

Yes, it’s kinda been that way since at least the ethereum fork when the large players in the network just decided to rewrite history because whoopsie.

Interesting to see the open weight models drop so drastically from the changes here.

They perform pretty badly on the new benchmarks introduced.

Give it time. Mathematicians have expressed interest in their results, let them digest it! It can't happen overnight.

Political movements are the crests of the waves that are voter opinion. When they move, it means the underlying beliefs move.

It’s also much more effective to grow support across the spectrum then to have an extremely polarised issue where one side gets power and just overpowers the other. Then you get the insane back and forth tug of war when they get in power and just undo everything you did. It’s pointless.

It is mind blowing that these long-standing conjectures and open questions are just falling by the dozen every other week. What a time to be alive.

I've become pretty cynical of company principles and values. My experience of this is that it's usually an exercise of leadership getting together and coming up with a bunch of things they wish they were, then putting them on the wall as if it makes them true. In reality though it's really hard to make these things true.

This feels like rage bait, but yes they do, that’s why it was added to Python after decades of not having it.

First, two things can be true: the models can be amazingly good, and they can also be insufficient to run a company, at least now and maybe forever, because they are not "intelligent" in all the ways we are.

IMO the invention of AI is redefining what we think of as "intelligence". You would probably describe Albert Einstein as highly intelligent, and you'd probably also describe Bill Clinton as highly intelligent. Even before AI, you can easily look at that and see we aren't describing the same things even though we're using the same word. Einstein's intelligence is highly abstract, observational, mathematical. Clinton's is interpersonal, pursuasive, articulate, etc.

The AI we have today is extremely good at intellectual tasks like Einstein. It is not good at social intelligence and social agency like Clinton. Also, before you say that they can be really empathetic, persuasive, people are already socially dependent on them etc, that's not what I'm talking about. They are extremely knowledgeable about human socialising, but they cannot actually perform it. You could not set an AI out into the world to go and make a few friends.

I think the key moment will be if a single AI can get more than one person to care about what it has to say and what it's doing. Think about today how when someone tells you about their conversation with their AI agent, you probably roll your eyes because who cares, it's a highly individual experience.

Companies need a lot of this. They have to form relationships, become trusted amongst society, etc. AI cannot do this right now, and it's increasingly clear "intelligence" is not sufficient to do it, at least not in the way LLMs are intelligent. Maybe one day they will, but I'd imagine that will be another enormous leap in what AI even looks like akin to how ChatGPT was an enormous leap.

It’s possible they don’t if they fundamentally believe the AI market is going to end up being an exercise in just mass manufacturing tokens, which China is going to easily win because they can generate way more electricity than any country and manufacture almost everything they need to do it domestically.

The models are just a distribution mechanism in that case, and it’s in their interest to get that into as many hands as possible.

I think unfortunately this is a stage people have to go through when they're first exposed to AI. You just have to let it play out for them to realize actually they still need to cooperate with humans to get anything meaningful done.

You’re on a site created by a startup accelerator for people in the startup world, you’re going to get overwhelmingly utilitarian capitalist views.

I'm usually a big fan of Anthropic, but this is a pretty insufferable vaguepost. No source code, vague self-congratulatory statements like "A new level of operational excellence is possible" with nothing concrete to demonstrate how this is true. This just makes me grieve for the blog posts we'd used to get from organisations of this caliber.

To be clear, I don't disagree with your sentiment that the disruptiveness of AI is causing a lot of grief. But magnitude of disruption is not an indicator of magnitude of benefit (or lack thereof).

Some of the most disruptive periods in history brought about the greatest long term improvements in society. This is the price we pay for changing how things are done, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. We don't know which one it is for AI yet.

Just like the nerds thought about computers, or the internet, or video games, or smartphones, or crypto, or... whatever.

The most passionate, intelligent people are usually a decent indicator of where culture is going to go.

Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up, give it some more time. We had smartphones in 2007, and e.g. By way of example, Uber didn't launch ridesharing until 2013, and then that still took years to seep into the public awareness.

By comparison, we're in the early years of AI. We're all still figuring out what this thing even means.

That's a pretty uncharitable take. It literally only exists because of him, he pushed hard for it for years, and now he's decided not to anymore it leaves a bitter taste? What do you want him to do?

Why couldn't this be a public service though? Governments spend so much money on producing and managing cash as a public good. Why can't we do the same for digital payment infrastructure?

It sounds like you're maybe in a bit of analysis paralysis, trying to find the optimal way to move forward. If you stay in that frame of mind, you'll spin your wheels for hours trying to find the best way to approach it, and then never actually approach anything.

My advice would be, as hard as it might seem, let yourself go slow and just do things. Spend a few weeks on webdev, or learning aseembly, or playing with AI. As long as you are engaged with whatever you're doing, that is enough. You will, via repeated exposure to smart people doing hard things, learn how to navigate and overcome all kinds of problems.

I actually disagree a little with the previous commenter about learning how to use AI. While that is useful, AI becomes second nature once you have been exposed to all these other things.

What makes them mediocre?

I agree some of the latest stuff feels slop-py, but the core offering is extremely good.

It depends what you’re doing for sure. If you’re into homelab type stuff Cloudflare is probably not going to offer much. But if you want to run things on the public web, workers and D1 are insanely good offerings, with R2 (their object store) close behind. You can run a public site or app with a proper SQL database, logging, TLS, authentication, with great performance - and never have to touch a thing. No certs, no setting up containers or services, no logging, no patching, and uptime is basically 100% and it’ll either be free or $5 a month. It’s absurd.

Hard disagree. They’re on a generational run atm. While the hyperscalers focused on big enterprise customers over the last 10 years, Cloudflare has built a product that lets a single developer run crazy projects for insanely cheap and with almost no maintenance. Now that basically everyone is writing and deploying software this is fast becoming the de facto deployment platform of vibe coders everywhere. Even ChatGPT sites runs on Workers.

If the child could do different things to the parent malicious processes would spawn child processes to do stuff they shouldn’t be able to do, though

OpenAPI does a similar job and is great if you're using different languages, but I disagree it's not much of a value add. You can send way more types between client/server in e.g. NextJS without thinking about it like lists, dates, promises, etc. OpenAPI can't do that, and OpenAPI also needs a codegen step and then you have to work with janky generated clients.

The main benefit is that it's very easy to have type safety and consistency between your client and your server. NextJS and the like make it feel almost like you're just calling a native JS function in your client, but it's actually doing lots of magic to make that work. The end result is your client is never out of date with your backend API, everything is type safe, you get full type hinting, and of course all of that helps LLMs write better code for you as well.

Nobody changes their mind by reading a debate on the internet. They change their mind by experiencing things that are different to what they believe.

I was asking what it'd need to look like, but you're suggesting they might be genuinely afraid but their voicing of this is not useful?

If they were genuinely afraid, you'd prefer they stay silent?

If someone did exist who was sincere and not fear-mongering, but was terrified of AI, what would their post need to look like for you to take it seriously?