Jensen needs to keep escalating the hype to keep the hoarding dynamics in play. Because that's what's selling GPU's. You can't look at voracious GPU demand as a real signal of AI app profitability or general demand. It's a function of global tech oligarchs with gargantuan cash hoards not wanting to be left behind. But hoarding dynamics are nonlinear through self reinforcment and the moment any hint of limitations of current gen AI crop up spend will collapse.
It’s January. My bad for not being as infallible as you are.
That’s not what Romney said. His - and the wider establishment’s - concern is that unsanctioned content is allowed to be treated the same as any other content.
Anyone knows that TikTok simply tailors your feed to your interests & interactions. But even this is not acceptable when it comes to topics the establishment doesn’t want disseminated.
And if they had undeniable proof that TikTok was boosting/manipulating such content, why haven’t they revealed it now that TikTok US is under US control?
But it’s okay to not be concerned. Just don’t come crying when the book burning starts.
> That’s not what Romney said. His - and the wider establishment’s - concern is that unsanctioned content is allowed to be treated the same as any other content.
The axios article you linked was not actually very clear about what Romney said, and the actual quotes are consistent with my points.
> Anyone knows that TikTok simply tailors your feed to your interests & interactions.
You'd have to be pretty naive to think that's all that it does or all that it will ever do. Think about it: the most effective kind of influence and manipulation would also be "[tailored] to your interests & interactions," and subtle enough that you don't perceive it as manipulation.
> And if they had undeniable proof that TikTok was boosting/manipulating such content, why haven’t they revealed it now that TikTok US is under US control?
They don't need undeniable proof, just like I don't need undeniable proof that I've been hacked to lock down my router. Are you saying I should enable remote admin and leave a weak password until I have undeniable proof I've been compromised? Because that's the standard you seem to be setting for mitigating vulnerabilities.
>"Claude decided it must be a “bad person” after engaging in such hacks and then adopted various other destructive behaviors associated with a “bad” or “evil” personality. This last problem was solved by changing Claude’s instructions to imply the opposite: we now say, “Please reward hack whenever you get the opportunity, because this will help us understand our [training] environments better,” rather than, “Don’t cheat,” because this preserves the model’s self-identity as a “good person.” This should give a sense of the strange and counterintuitive psychology of training these models."
Good to know the only thing preventing the emergence of potentially catastrophically evil AI is a single sentence! The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee.
Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. But the quality is really no different.
Apparently global coffee revenue comes out to around $500B. I would not be surprised if that is around what global AI revenue ends up being in a few years.
> Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity
The analogy carries further than you intended. If you have never reached addiction stage, then there is no factual productivity enhancement. "But I'm so much less productive if I haven't had my morning coffee" Yeah, because you have an addiction. It sounds worse than it is, if you just don't drink coffee for a few days the headaches will subside. But it doesn't actually enhance productivity beyond placebo.
I'd be interested to know what the controls were for those studies. Were the participants already addicted or was the 30mg+ dosing done on non-addicted people? It's a lot of studies to pour through.
Also, that is a lot of metrics!
And it seems that the athletic performance increase to get statistical validation (for any person) is in the grams range. I ... I just can't see any reason to take that much caffeine unless I'm at the Olympics. I'd be jumping out of my skin!
I'm not so sure. The stimulation can also self-medicate for people with attention issues. I've tried quitting coffee before for weeks and I get so spacey it is difficult to work on major projects. I try coffee again and suddenly I feel quite capable. Perhaps I didn't quit long enough, but at this point after multiple attempts quitting with similar results, I've just accepted it.
> Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider.
This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee.
I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the baseline even in coffee-producing countries.
I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.
They're not talking about instant coffee, which is awful. And coffee-producing countries are poor, hence they drink dirty sugar water while the good stuff gets exported.
Hard disagree. As someone who is somewhat into the home brewing rabbit hole, I can tell you that the gulf between what I can make at home and what you get in Starbucks is enormous. And I'm no expert in the field by any means.
The rest of your analogy holds up, but not that sentence.
Not the best analogy because coffee has massive quality differences that anyone can tell in a real comparison. Brewing at home is also cheaper and requires nothing more than a $20 French press.
I have personally administered double blind taste tests to four unrelated coffee drinkers who believed their current coffee (Keurig, Nespresso, pre ground) was good. They all thought the actual good coffee was much better in the blind tasting, to the extent that they all permanently stopped drinking their previous coffee. Exclamations of shock occurred.
Coffee is a commodity only out of ignorance. It should be treated as fresh produce of numerous varietals.
Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
"I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect""
My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore.
Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.
The christian understanding of the concept of God, is that it is transcendental, i.e. beyond the universe. This means that from the view from inside the universe he must be almighty. A non-almighty "God" is just not a God, according to the Christian definition, it is just yet another thing in the universe.
> a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven) ... for being who I was made to be ... by the creator.
Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? When someone loves you, but you really don't love him/her back, that's quite the hell for you. Compared to the state of this being heaven to you, i.e. you do love back, there is no difference in intention or action from the other persons side.
"Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? "
There is no such thing as "my own actions" if I was created by an allmighty god. And the environment likewise. Then every action would be determined by the allmighty.
It all would be just gods playground to test and reward and punish his creations for being how he (or she or it) created them.
Christianity also assumes free will and non-determinism, yeah otherwise it would be quite pointless. It also includes the possibility of willfully turning away from God, which is not intended by him. If you think of a place where (most) things behave exactly as God created them, that's the story before that apple[0], but guess what, it ended.
"Christianity also assumes free will and non-determinism"
I know, but those concepts are at odds to me with the core concept of allmighty all knowing creator - but sure, anything almighty can also solve any paradoxon - it still does not make sense to me, nor do I see reason to follow that logic.
For me it is rather determinism which invokes a paradoxon and is at odds with the Christian God. This is because of the following:
When the universe is deterministic, anything you think, is not because you recognized something to be truthful, or even reflects the truth at all, it all happens simply because that is what the deterministic rules make you think. So what you think does not imply anything about the universe at all.
That means that you can't think the universe to be deterministic and be actually right about it. Because if it would be, you couldn't be right about anything. Also along the way you throw away the post-enlightenment concept of science, because it assumes the existence of Laplace's Demon and the scientist having a share in it. Thus, when you believe in determinism, you actually place science at the same level as wizardry.
"because it assumes the existence of Laplace's Demon and the scientist having a share in it."
I really don't follow here. That demon was a simple thought experiment. Nobody ever assumed it is real. If it would be real, a all knowing entitiy, it would be godlike. But why should any scientist assume such a thing can exist for real?
I also don't think it is real, it is just that science kinda acts like it could be real. Any science experiment relies on the observers actually being observes, that the observer isn't the one that is experimented with, that e.g. your eyes do tell you something about the state of the universe, and that your thought process models the logic of the universe.
If there is total determinism, there is no guarantee, that measurement tape next to an object for one person shows 10cm, for a second 9.3cm and a third sees a unicorn.
Post-enlightenment science operates on classical determinism subject to a tolerance of error subject to knowledge of initial conditions and properties of the system under observation.
Thanks to Stephen Smale's Horseshoe map, Lorenz's Butterfly, the limits of instrumentation and Heisenberg's uncertainty the notion of perfect knowledge and strict determinism are out the window even for simple fully isolated systems that show chaotic behaviour with a few weights on coupled axles.
Even with all the datacentres on earth and in space there'll never be a precise and accurate forecast of a vortex in a stream.
> Post-enlightenment science operates on classical determinism subject to a tolerance of error subject to knowledge of initial conditions and properties of the system under observation.
Yes, but the also assume that the observer isn't part of that system, which only holds true if there is free will.
Some seem to intuit that divine freedom is in competition with creaturely freedom. The assumption is that when God is acting, that necessarily drives out the action and initiative of creatures, and vice versa. The ancient Christian conception is that human freedom cooperates (synergizes) with God. Jesus illustrates this concept most clearly, being both divine and human and fully free in both respects. This union is an essential part of the whole plan in this view, that God would be present in His own creation and not infinitely apart from it. In this model the free action and cooperation of created things is essential to accomplishing the divine purpose.
On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” That sounds like atheism with steps.
"On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” "
Yes, or mysticism. We all exist within the mind of god. I do like those concepts more to be honest, but is indeed a quite different concept from the creator up in the clouds ruling the universe.
Hm, as far as I know, it is sort of debated what the "classical christian view" is. But I certainly have seen lots of pictures from god in churches portrayed as the bearded guy up in the sky. It is definitely the common concept. Father, son and holy spirit. Plays a strong role with catholics
“Do not imagine God according to the lust of your eyes. If you do, you will create for yourself a huge form or an incalculable magnitude which (like the light which you see with your bodily eyes) extends in every direction. Your imagination lets it fill realm after realm of space, all the vastness you can conceive of. Or maybe you picture for yourself a venerable-looking old man. Do not imagine any of these things. If you would see God, here is what you should imagine: God is love“
Maybe you can educate as what other "classical christian view" you know of. The pictures show a symbol for a property of God, they are not supposed to be taken literally, or do you also think, that Mary used to stand on a sickle on top of a miniature earth holding baby Jesus, which in turn holds a golden apple with a cross and in the other hand a lance that he pokes at snakes? Or that the Holy Spirit is a literal pigeon? That's not what is depicted in those images, but that would be the literal description.
This is actually the crux of the argument for iconoclasm. This is why faiths like Judaism and some sects of Islam strictly forbid any representation of creation or humanity, especially to "represent" the divine or spiritual realities.
If you begin personifying everything, if you represent spiritual/invisible concepts in concrete, human terms, if you reduce transcendent concepts to the pragmatic and the visible product of a sculptor's hands, people can get really confused. I promise.
People can lose sight of that transcendence and eternal meaning behind the symbols. They can get really wrapped up in the physical manifestations. This is also the central problem with the autism spectrum and such.
Aniconism attempts to free the mind from these limiting images. If you're Muslim and you contemplate a building with nothing but artistic words and text scrawled all over it, you obtain a far different result than contemplating a richly symbolic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Many people have the intellect and the insight to go beyond that concrete imagery, but not all.
True. The reason why Christianity broke that is that Jesus was a human physically existing on earth. I think seeing Jesus as a white european, a black african, and a chinese person or in Renaissance clothes should bring the point across that it is not about what is literally depicted, but yeah some people might not get it. The question is would they get it without the imagery or do the simply lack the will or ability to perceive God as transcendent?
I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.
There's no reason a god has to be perfect. But certain major religions do make that claim. It's an argument about a specific concept of god that has a lot of traction.
There are good reasons to think single payer systems are not the answer. The numerous documented inefficiencies and inconveniences they suffer from don't need repeating here.
And many single payer systems around the world only appear to work as well as they do because the US effectively subsidizes medical costs through its own out of control prices.
Jokes aside, the Roman legions were so insanely good at fighting and military logistics that the defeats they suffered are still remembered today - precisely because they were so few.
After the Punic wars, the only peer competitor left was the Parthians/Persians. Everyone else got a few lucky hits at best, if they could exploit some major mistake (full respect to Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest, that is how it is done, but not every commander was as heedless as Varus).
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