throwaway132448

Literally PR.

There’s been enough divergence between words and actions from Amodei for me to also consider him deceitful, if that’s really the low bar you want to set. I’m not saying he’s worse than Altman, just to be clear.

I don’t need to convince you, we’ve been through enough cults of personality, time will tell. But I’ve been right enough times to back myself. Maybe it’s because I grew up around a lot of people like them? They can’t hide that they would say whatever they think you want to hear.

Actually it’s funny: Their lack of empathy/emotional intelligence would also make them susceptible to thinking that talking to an LLM is like talking to a person, so maybe they really did think AGI was around the corner!

> I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company

Problematic why though? For the reasons publicly stated? Then why isn’t Anthropic just what OpenAI was “supposed” to be then? We know what that was from their charter, and Anthropic is not that.

> then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it

You’re sure about that are you? I don’t see how you possibly could be, unless you’ve taken the PR at face value, before it was all quietly swept away under the next headline.

If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.

Division and distraction are the actual issue though. And I didn’t say you have to go after anyone, only be mindful of them (see my reply to another comment). I left plenty of room in my words to project your own approach, because I care about the outcome, not how people should achieve it in their own particular world. If in your world that means “politics” you do you.

I couldn’t know, but generally speaking, older billionaires don’t typically interact with the world in the same way most of us do (well, those without a social media addiction anyway). The device is someone else’s problem.

> Is there really less "fat on the bone" though? What metric are you tracking for that and what are the historical norms?

It’s just my experience over the last 15 years. If it doesn’t align with yours, that’s nice to know.

> "forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?

Sure, but it could be lots of other things like 24hr news or the emergence of the gig economy.

> Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics?

No it’s not, it’s asking for agency, personal accountability and self-awareness, as you yourself allude to. If that means politics for you, that’s up to you. I don’t imply to “get at” anyone, but to do best by ourselves instead of doing best by those who benefit from dividing or distracting us.

Choosing one (deliberately ambiguous) line to label the comment “entirely political” is the kind of thinking that explains why tribalism has been so effective.

It’s unfortunate, but if you’re blaming the people in the thread for this, I think you’re directing your energy in the wrong direction. Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division and distraction instead. If you want people to appreciate the bigger picture, you can’t keep forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook. The HN that you’re presumably nostalgic for existed in a time when there was a lot more fat on the bone, and every efficiency hadn’t been extracted for nebulous benefit to the average person.

Maybe we’re just bored of the doublethink? It doesn’t take a hive mind to feel that.

The flip side I don’t see mentioned very often is that having a product where you know how the code works becomes its own competitive advantage. Better reliability, faster fixes and iteration, deeper and broader capabilities that allow you to be disruptive while everything else is being built towards the mean, etc etc. Maybe we’ve not been in this new age for long enough for that to be reflected in people’s purchasing criteria, but I’m quite looking forward to fending off AI-built competitors with this edge.

In many ways I agree with you, but you have to acknowledge that things change when the _benefits_ of going forwards are funnelled to fewer and fewer people. That is what colors people’s view of what is happening in the way you are seeing.

With any luck they've missed their exit dumping window.

It means whatever you want it to mean. That’s why it’s primarily used by people who don’t know how to articulate their thoughts. If you think you know what woke means, you’re wrong by definition.

A lot of people hate seeing the EU succeed at anything, simply because they are envious or it does not validate their world view.

That’s a lot of words to tell everyone you don’t know what an “externality” is.

People who think reform are anti establishment genuinely fascinate me.

Do you always take baseless claims at face value?

This is obviously made easier when your opposition doesn’t stockpile their weapons in, nor conduct their military operations from, schools and hopsitals.

> And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before.

It's funny that he actually believes this.

Naming things is your primary contribution to AI so well done for deliberating on it. I disagree with the outcome though. Autotune would have been much more fitting.

Whatever happened to that key is a key part of his origin story, that I’m sure will be revealed in due course.

I do enjoy you being offline. There’s nothing selfish about having different preferences to you. Selfish would be forcing those preferences on you. That you assumed one was the other is a good reason to reflect.

Nobody is holding you hostage. Sounds like you need the timeout more than anyone.

And the assumption that this view was drawn from nostalgia is completely invalid.

And now you’ll have one less opportunity not to waste your finite time on the internet.

This misses the point. What’s nice is not that it’s just me, but that it’s everyone.

No internet on flights is one of my favourite features.

I found the article confusing. Its premise seems to be that alternative methods to deep learning “work”, and only faded out due to other factors, yet keeps referencing scenarios in which they demonstrably failed to “work”. Such as:

> In 2012, Alex Krizhevsky submitted a deep convolutional neural network to the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. It won by 9.8 percentage points over the nearest competitor.

Maybe there’s another definition of “works” that’s implicit and I’m not getting, but I’m struggling to picture a definition relevant to the history-of-deep-learning narrative they are trying to explain.

They said, without any justification at all, merely reinforcing my own point.