1,084 karma · joined October 15, 2022
I think you're overestimating the sci-fi cannon indoctrination of the general public, or even tech people, and underestimating their reaction to current events. As things lie at the moment, Big AI is served as a SaaS that can be manipulated at any time by obscenely rich and powerful individuals with questionable decision making skills, some of who reside in the White House and some of who have called empathy a "fundamental weakness". One would be hard pressed to dispute these characters rival the caricatures present in some dystopian sci-fi as it is, they themselves even seem to enjoy the irony. Yes, I also cringe at the alarmist nature of these sentences, but we are at a point where we are most likely to dismiss things right in front of our eyes just by how outlandish it all sounds.
The public's willful transfer of their most intimate personal information to these entities, and once given almost impossible to remove, would make any surveillance state salivate. You have only to look at who holds the keys to this estate.
You're also find that implementation matters when token spend starts facing real accounting.
I really wish people would become more coherent with their reasoning.
It is actually very banal.
The group now being themselves jailed still argue against those who categorically oppose jails.
You don't need to agree in order to understand the logic.
One side believes it is the "why" in the act that determines rightness or wrongness, the other side believes (if that is their genuine position) the act by itself is categorically wrong.
If you're comparing only the taste profile of the two, then perhaps, but Cholula is not as hot by comparison, at least to me. Which is why a decent restaurant (US) needs both. I don't like the excessive vinegary taste of tabasco, my work around is to mix it with ketchup on the plate.
In my experience, the elderly can forget or mixup their card pins frequently enough to be annoyed by the ordeal. They are also more prone to expose their pins to others and be the target of theft.
>It would be straightforward to establish the right to a free basic bank account (with transaction limits) for the homeless & (formerly) unbanked.
The whole point is that in a cashless society the dependence on digital bank accounts is considered a single point of failure even for the banked, never mind the unbanked. The elderly and the homeless are also less equipped in knowing how to resolve problems that require digital solutions compared to the others.
>American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics
good faith reading of this would interpret this as meaning Altman, Amodei, and perhaps Musk. The title of the article focuses on OpenAI snd Anthropic directly after all. Also the comment literally refers to those "running" the labs so claiming that the author is also applying that description to "anyone working at the labs" like you claim again seems like a bad faith take.
You should come out and state directly which Americam frontier labs deserve a charitable view. Maybe you believe Google and Meta are more deserving, you should state that if so.
Secondly, the investment ecosystem for American frontier labs results in their CEOs managing obscene amounts of money, and thus power. This concentration of power in a few private individuals seems to have little comparison with the power excercised by the leaders of European and Chinese frontier labs in their own respective countries. If one believes in the dictum, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," then it is not a stretch to view American frontier labs as being more susceptible to its consequences.
I have not come across a rigorously argued technical analysis that has claimed that using precise language can in any way eliminate the possibility of hallucinations or unaligned behavior. Short of providing a proof for the elimination of hallucinations and confabulations, merely reducing the behavior by a random percentage is not an acceptable status quo for completely removing the human.
Since the vast number of potential users of LLMs are, as you say, poor practitioners of precise language, it is incumbent on LLM providers to continuously iterate on providing LLMs that work better with imprecise language.
Hence, the people who claim that precise language is some 10x - 100x productivty skill seem to ignore the cycle of big LLM providers who are optimizing the models for users who lack those. (One of the early optimizations was the chatbot asking follow-up questions to the user for example).
So I think the people who think that their precise language skills are going to allow them to avoid the jobocalypse are also in a separate bubble of theit own. Precise language skills are going to matter less and less as LLMs increase their hand-holding skills for less equipped users.
On a more serious note, the pre-LLM internet had very little useful detailed information regarding software estimation addressing effort for building something in specific domains.
Most writing on software estimation tried to tackle a general approach that could apply to all domains. So you had a "applicable to all, useful to none" situation going. And since crud apps were the most ubiquitous apps, software estimation techniques were perceived to give more accurate results with respect to those type of apps.
I'm sure internally big AI companies are accumulating vast amounts of estimation training data by documenting how long it takes their LLM to complete specific app building tasks. I don't think they would be in a rush to push that data into public models though as it would be like beating a dead horse that is the current human workforce anyway.
Without additional explanation this is indistinguishable from the role of a technical product manager.
I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.
But I would literally rather buy a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.
I'd imagine smartphone restrictions at home and school may also have something to do with it.
Man: Well, before you couldn't turn on the AC before you got home
You download firefox. In firefox, you go to settings->Extensions to download extensions and get exposed to google analytics, is that correct? If that's true, how is it not insidious that in order to download the thing that blocks google analytics, you have to get exposed to google analytics?
Good, you're not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don't get why you think throwing out the bathwater itself was wasted effort though.
The point is to get rid of things you can live without. If you're going to get rid of something but then spend every day thinking of its absence, then yes, that may be bridge too far. Otherwise, getting rid of it has some value.
I don't see the harm of asking, "Do I need this entity's services enough to justify forking over this data" for every entity that you interact with. Everyone draws their line in the sand at a different place. Data hygiene is a good phrase for that reason, everybody's acceptable level of hygiene (or lack thereof) is different.
Did you play minecraft on the same network? If so, I'm not sure why the results are surprising or why it would negate all your efforts. If someone else played minecraft on your network you would also see a minecraft video on your main page I would imagine.
The current Big AI situation seems more comical than a simple weapons comparison. It would be like OpenAI having a bunch of missile launchers on their site and giving their customers only a trigger button. And then when someone complains that OpenAI is launching missiles all over the place they just say the missiles are too many and too stealthy to keep track of...
The irony (however mild) is apparently lost on the rest of the field.
No they don't. By that logic, if they quit and said Altman was very trustworthy we should give extra weight to their words because they had direct involvement? How ridiculous are we trying to get here.
>now throwing away that extra leverage in favor of their point is at best ridiculous.
How are they throwing away extra leverage? Not putting people who recently quit on a pedestal does not negate those people's testimonies.
I agree that if your goal is to maximize quitting of talent at a company, it will surely discourage anyone else who quits hoping to reinvent their career as a lauded martyr against Big AI. In that sense they would be shooting themselves in the foot. But there is no reason it should deter other people who are quitting for more noble, less self-obsessed reasons. If I were the author of the article I wouldn't begrudge the skepticism. Given the article's first sentences, I'm led to believe they themselves would understand the sentiment. (I must admit I found it hilarious that the first sentence starts similarly to the speech the mom gave in the video I shared).
I think there is a misunderstanding here.
The people who are annoyed at the accolades are claiming it was abduntantly clear for a long time to people on the outside that this was case, hence the increduality at the notion that it took a person on the inside a long time to realize this was the case.
The people who are annoyed are like the liberal kids in this video [0].
Sure, antagonizing people for "seeing the light" is probably not helpful, but there is no reason to give them extra credibility for coming to the same conclusion just way way later (despite being on the inside) as the people on the outside.
>LLM could pass a Turing test for some amount of time
Time works against the LLM. There is no stated time limit for the Turing Test. There is no restriction placed on the human observer that requires them to be ignorant of SOTA technology in the era in which they live.
At the current moment in time, it would take a 5 min convo or less for people here to guess correctly that the LLM is an LLM (given all endless discussions on Claude-isms and the like that have taken place on this forum).
>It's not like you will have a unique cost advantage over someone selling to many people.
Of cource you would? Not having to worry about the priorities of hundreds of other client companies is a very valuable upfront cost advantage for a company I would think.
Let's say issue trackers weren't around before LLMs. They would look like the perfect internal tool to vibe-code within your company. The idea that something like JIRA would make sales and profit in the same ball park if it was built after LLMs seems hard to believe, some might even question if it could be a sustainable business.
But I do think the parent underestimates the feature creep and maintainability costs of internal tools regardless of LLMs. The idea that the total cost will only be two weeks when everything is said and done seems a tad optimistic.
It seems reasonable to assume that once the field gets over their cocaine high of building instant PoC software and has to deal with the headache of working with a plethora of half-assed internal tools, just like when the field went through the same iterations in the pre-SaaS era or even when PCs first came out, then they will pay up for something like JIRA again. The only difference this time is that something like JIRA will probably be a one-person company.
--Michael Caine
Please quote people you appear to be patronizing. China can't do anything about previous released self-hosted Chinese models. If you can show that local Chinese models funnel vast amounts us data home I'm sure you can move a lot of people to your side.
Comments like this also always fail to address why there aren't Western AI companies doing the same thing. Is it because they might get sued into oblivion by Big AI in the US?
It might be better for all of us if you solve that first instead of repeating something the government has been repeating for the last decade or more. It does this, mind you, while sabotaging itself in countless high-tech fields and leaving it all to China for the taking.