scarmig

This can be just as well phrased as:

> Our frontier AI business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term development because we are making compute trade-offs to support our cloud business revenues.

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

Nick Land, "Machinic Desire," 1993.

It's probably too much to ask for a journalist or someone in the literary milieu to know who Nick Land is (or even Deleuze or Mark Fisher, if wanting someone more sanitized).

Which is unfortunate, because his CCRU-era, writhing-on-the-floor, amphetamine-fueled theory-poetry is highly creative and prophetic. We're summoning the Old Ones without reading our Abdul Alhazred.

This post is too long to read. Tldr?

Thanks for writing that out, so I didn't have to do the same but less eloquently :)

The term "attention" confuses more than it reveals, trading well-known terminology for a weak analogy to how the human brain works. Kernel smoothing is all you need.

Quota allocations are a massive decision that go all the way up to Sundar: what GDM organizationally wants (training) vs what GCP wants (Anthropic to throw it money hand over fist) are not aligned and a balance has to be made. For various reasons, GCP carved out a significant share; an eleven figure check over a quarter or two carries a real weight. This doesn't mean that GDM was starved for compute or that it wasn't making significant progress, but it absolutely could have had a more impressive H1 if given more resources.

Coding is probably one of the worst value propositions, in terms of consuming more tokens per subscription dollar. Doing well in coding might even hurt Google's revenues: it would cannibalize some proportion of Anthropic's user base, which Anthropic serves by... renting Google's infra.

I know lots of Palantir employees who have started to kick puppies for fun, to show how based they are.

Stated with an equal amount of evidence as Sankar. Which is to say, entirely invented.

One surprising result is the sub n log n multiplication. Galactic, as one might expect, but if you polled human researchers 24 hours ago, most would say something like it was very unlikely.

AI is capable of developing its own inference hardware, once a prompt is given. The fact that a human happens to kick it off here is not especially relevant to the fact that an AI is performing the task independently. There are plenty of ways a text prompt can be generated: a harness, another LLM, or just removing stop tokens so that once begun the AI will continue until its hardware fails.

It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.

He's done just terrible things, the accusations are true. No one wants to associate with him because of all the bad things he's done. Everyone knows he's a liar, and anyone asking for evidence of it is a perfidious pro-AI ideologue.

So, your claim is that OpenAI intentionally might have had its agents hack multiple companies, as well as multiple government agencies? And they're just pretending to not have known about it?

Okay.

Can you point to a single community or watershed where datacenter usage is even 10% of the agricultural usage in that same community? Or even just name a single community that's facing severe water shortages attributable to data centers?

Sigh. You're supposedly a PhD student. If you think LLMs are evil because of water usage, please, please do the least bit of due diligence and read a bit about it.

That's not what happened, in any of the many incidents. But even if it were, if you can make AI do dangerous things by telling it to roleplay doing dangerous things, then that... Makes the AI dangerous.

If action X takes a million times more resources than action Y, it's silly to focus on or highlight action Y. Seriously: if you are a regular meat eater, your choices use several orders of magnitude more water than even a heavy LLM user. A quip from a comic doesn't somehow erase that or make it irrelevant.

Obviously. Politicians are going to politician.

That doesn't change the fact that he'd successfully attracted my attention, because he's seriously engaging with the most important issue of our age when most politicians are content to ignore it.

The vast majority of the "LLM have no qualia" discourse is mostly using it as a starting point to arguing that LLMs will never be able to X, however. This is a category error that makes no sense on its own--qualia or lack thereof doesn't affect capabilities, p-zombies etc--but that connection does make sense if the speaker is bringing in a hidden assumption of a dualistic human soul that imbues both qualia and additional capabilities to raw matter.

> Unfortunately, the public push against AI is being led, on the left, by Bernie Sanders. Despite being directionally correct in many ways, Bernie just doesn’t understand this technology or the importance of taking it seriously.

Bernie Sanders is one of the only politicians taking AI seriously. The author seems to believe that taking it seriously means assuming that it will only marginally improve in capabilities of where it is today; this is an ideological take, not a scientific or empirical one, and one controverted by both evidence and expert opinion.

If a giant, Chicxulub-sized asteroid is headed toward Earth, it makes sense to focus on the existential threat, instead of worrying about whether it will cause inflation or have disparate impact.

You can reject the idea that the asteroid will hit the Earth, but you need to actually make that argument, not just call the people warning about the asteroid an apocalyptic sex cult.

You could, you know, stop spreading deception about water usage if it bothers you so much when people call out deception about water usage.

At this point, I almost consider it trolling to bring it up: purposely throw in something incredibly stupid, and then throw a hissy fit when predictably called out on it.

No, I don't.

If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to at least indicate that they are willing to self-correct in the face of direct evidence that they are wrong.

Sure, let's do a more local comparison. Wasco County, where the Dalles is located:

Irrigation: 17.9B gallons/year

Fisheries: 9.7B gallons/year

So, the datacenter at the Dalles uses a shocking 2% of the amount of water used for irrigation alone in the locality.

There's a very simple solution to this, if you actually care about water: tax it to the point where usage is at whatever level you want, instead of focusing on a vanishing minority of the water usage.

> Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water

Compare:

> Annual water withdrawals in Oregon since 1985 have ranged from 7.3M to 9.4M acre-feet (AF)

https://www.oregon.gov/owrd/WRDPublications1/230721_FINAL_Bu...

Note that 7.3M acre-feet is equal to 2.3T gallons. 550M/2.3T = 0.02%

There was construction of some data center, and someone's well water started looking dirty around the same time. From there it metasisized into claims that it's destroying all the world's water.

Someone complaining about water usage is a very strong indicator that they aren't well-informed enough to contribute anything worth reading, though.

As the sibling comment points out, that is incorrect: they solved a smaller, simpler problem, and OAI solved the actual Millennium Problem. But even if they had solved the actual problem and OAI stole it by digging through chats, that hardly supports the "AI has stalled" thesis; Claude played the major role in creating their blowup to a different problem.

How, exactly, does "it was Claude that solved Navier Stokes, not ChatGPT!" get you to "AI has hit a wall and stalled"? That's, not to put too fine a point on it, incoherent, and is just noise thrown into the discussion to avoid grappling with the fact that AI continues to rapidly improve.

Yeah, it's been over a week since a Millennium Problem was solved. AI has hit a wall.

Then: "LLMs only cured cancer as a marketing stunt."