Shrike
13hr ago
It almost makes me think of Lovecraft's concept of coming into contact with something that uproots one's understanding of humanity's place in the world so much that one retreats from it with psychological defense mechanisms that try to blot out the knowledge, or reduce it to something manageable.
I think the actual Lovecraft quote is pretty interesting to think about as regards AI:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Well, AI is pretty much purpose-built to piece together dissociated knowledge (and much needed, too, as the sciences have done a lot straining in their own direction since Lovecraft's day).
Shrike
13hr ago
I never understood the concept of pregnancy 'ruining' a woman's body.
"Oh no, an hourglass figure!"
Shrike
13hr ago
Yes, I think this is probably right.
An underappreciated historical fact that helps better understand the world that we live in today is that Arab Socialism, which wasn't as I understand it particularly devout, was all the rage during the Cold War...and Israel absolutely discredited it by refusing to lose to Egypt & Friends. The end result of this was a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalist extremism, because if the Arab Nationalists are getting their posterior served to them by The Jews it's harder to believe in Arab Nationalism and easier to believe that you are being punished by God for forgetting His will.
It's very easy to predict kumbaya with This One Neat Trick but it turns out that history doesn't stop after you've pulled the trick.
Shrike
13hr ago
Is there a good entry point (book, essay, etc.) you would recommend for better understanding MMT as enacted in real life?
Shrike
20hr ago
This is due to improved engineering significantly reducing the cost of inference every quarter
On the one hand, this makes sense, and from that perspective is good for the primes; on the other hand, I do think if this is the primary driver it increases the likelihood that Anthropic overcommitted in their future compute build-out. But perhaps they actually priced that in; lower prices might mean better user returns which might lead to higher demand, more overall spend and higher revenue on greater margins.
less a slowdown in the overall market and more OAI showing stronger competition in the coding space
This also tracks, based on what I have heard about Astra. Interestingly, though, it seems OAI is slashing their latest fundraising target to $20 billion, down from $30 billion - which doesn't seem like a great portent for Anthropic's IPO (although, who knows, perhaps it's a next-level play by OAI to ruin things for them?)
It returns us to the question of whether capabilities will advance enough in the next year to start making a real impact in other sectors.
Yep, the trillion-dollar question!
Shrike
21hr ago
Are you suggesting that removing Israel from the Middle East would suffice to bring peace to the region, and that the various governments and power groups in the area would not engage in armed struggle with each other?
Shrike
1d ago
Anyone focusing on the "losses" seems to be missing the plot.
This seems correct to me - their cash on hand really makes past losses a non-issue, as far as I can tell - but I'm not sure it follows that the bulls are right. Isn't the fact that Anthropic is on the hook for checks notes something in half a trillion in future spending regardless of revenue or use much more important than past losses?
It seems to me that investing is betting on Anthropic's compute build-out paying off. Even after the IPO, they're going to be hundreds of billions in (effective) debt even if they turn around and throw all of their cash on hand and newly-raised IPO cash (as per your numbers).
I don't think that it's impossible that bet pays off, but the trajectory doesn't look ironclad to me, between Anthropic's growth slowdown and the falling token price. And if Anthropic runs into trouble meeting those commitments, they could have a hard time taking out loans to meet them due to a projected poor credit rating.
Anthropic has a long history of one-upping OpenAI, so I definitely am not counting them out. It just seems like, based on what we know so far, a position where a lot can go wrong very quickly.
Shrike
2d ago
"Well, we know it's usually men arrested for abuse."
The phenomena I am talking about isn't just culture, it's formalized culture – or, in another word, regulation. Usually if you want to know why something is the way it is in the United States, the law (that is, the law that is passed by the legislature) is only the first place to look; the regulations that bind the public are another place to look, but the regulations that bind the regulators are another place to look. Often it's harder to look there, because they aren't public by default.
more and more police departments are in fact treating allegations of abuse from either sex seriously
Very interesting! I never watched a lot of police body cam videos, so I'm not really sure what the baseline rate is or was. But I wouldn't be surprised if their training has been changing.
Shrike
2d ago
If you can show me a law (in the US) that literally says, for example, "Abuse is defined as a male hitting a female," or something like that, I will reassess my opinion.
What I've heard (and how, realistically, this would be implemented, getting around the democratic process) is that police training on domestic violence rounds to this.
Not having received the training or seen the documents, I can't actually speak to it, and I am not sure I believe this. And I don't really have much of a dog in this specific fight. But generally it seems to me that "the law" often isn't where to go looking for things that special interest groups would like to happen but are unpopular.
Shrike
3d ago
Yeah, what I should have written is along the likes of what hydro wrote below.
Shrike
4d ago
I think that visible shifting of Jews towards the right would possibly (one way or another) mitigate the groyper problem, yeah. However I do think the timing and numbers will be important, otherwise instead the right could end up in a civil war like the left.
The truth is though that the groypers just aren't going to have institutional support on the right, I don't think. There aren't really right-wing racist billionaires. From what I can tell on the left the institutional support comes from political machines, and I don't think there are any groyper political machines either, just Discord servers. Which is not nothing, but I think the main thing they have going for them is the bipartisan opinion turn against Israel over the last couple of years.
Shrike
4d ago
Right, I suspect both on the left and on the right you can find spaces that are friendly towards Zionism, but I think those places on the right are much easier to find because they advertise.
Shrike
4d ago
Was that the nationally representative poll with 1000 respondents? Which would indicate only a handful of Jews in the sample?
Shrike
4d ago
I think the relevant question to be asking is if young Jews find right-wing or left-wing elite spaces more accommodating. There's certainly a groyper problem on the right, but the anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish climate at the formative institutions seems, from what I can tell from a distance, to be left-coded.
Shrike
4d ago
near 100% of these "so and so is a bubble" warnings/predictions never come true.
I think the biggest tech frenzy since 2007 would be crypto, which has not exactly been bubble-free. I'd be very interested in your top bubble predictions that never panned out.
Shrike
4d ago
I agree with a lot of what you are saying here, but I think there's a few things worth addressing. The first is that there's going to be massive domestic demand within China for a domestic AI, because China is cognizant (as you point out) of the necessity.
The second is that open-weight models have been having a moment recently, which indicates that there's a future for Chinese models even in a world where the best models are American.
Finally, I'm not sure you're right about the STAR50. AMEC and SMIC don't match that description (they are decades-old chip fabs, SMIC being the largest in China), and those are just a couple that caught my eye.
Shrike
4d ago
The 2000 dotcom bubble or 2008, where high valuations led to sudden corrections, are outliers.
The AI bubble predictors have already proven correct, just...in China.
Setting aside China, I'm not sure that your heuristic here is correct or that looking back over the past couple of decades is the right period to be searching. Besides the dot-com bubble, past situations analogous to AI would have been the railroad and perhaps electrification, and in both cases there were bubbles that popped (the second intertwined with the Great Depression).
One of the ways in which I think that AI is not like past bubbles is the fact that the technology is not yet mature. I don't mean this in an "AI is bad way" but rather that it's sort of unknown what the "meta" will be. New advancements might make running models on your home device easier and hurt the primes, or it might result in newer and powerful models that only large organizations can run. With railroads, the internet, and electrification, even though there was a great deal of technological advancement left before they were laid down, the general shape the technology would take was fairly well established in a way I am not sure AI is. This could be good, or bad, but I do think it makes prediction sort of fraught.
Shrike
4d ago
AI is simultaneously the best tool for learning, and the best tool to avoid learning that mankind has ever devised.
YEP
Shrike
6d ago
At the time, Spain was referred to as fascist, and Franco a Falangist (which from what I can tell was technically true in the most amusing possible way).
I don't really have a dog in the "what counts as true fascism?" hairsplitting fight. If your point is that Franco was too smart fight a silly, self-destructive war in the name of ideology, I think you're right. But I also think that Franco's Spain would be widely reviled as fascist if it existed today (and it's still often referred to as fascistic).
I'm not saying this out of some pro-fascistic sensibility, by the way, it's just that Italy, Spain, and Germany were all having a moment during the 1930s and people sort of forget about Spain. Sort of how people forget what Vietnam got up to after the Vietnam war.
Shrike
6d ago
I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.
And thanks to meddlesome medical ethics rules you never will!
just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.
Yes, exactly.
Shrike
6d ago
Actually existing Fascism ended up with their cities reduced to rubble and their countries occupied by foreigners which a way worse outcome then electing some leftist.
This never happened in Spain.
Shrike
6d ago
I don't think you need to be a spiritualist (although I am) to think that ML systems cannot experience pain. Everything we know about pain strongly suggests that it's more than emergent "electric patterns" - plants have electric patterns, but we are pretty sure they don't experience pain.
Generally thinking I think it's very easy for people to accidentally pattern-match functional purpose onto qualia when discussing these things. But qualia is very subtle - for instance, things as similar as men and women can experience distinctly different qualia.
Thus I think that if we ever were able to make self-aware machines, their qualia could and would likely be vastly different from ours, possibly incomprehensibly so.
Shrike
6d ago
Wasn't he (and Epstein) prosecuted?
Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.
I'm still very skeptical of this: so far all the "evidence" I've seen has been unconvincing and not very plausible.
You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.
How come UFO reports have gone down so much since the proliferation of cameras and other technology that would verify them?
I don't think they have gone down.
The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.
Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.
And the recent revelations are also evidence against a successful conspiracy.
Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)
A "conspiracy" by definition must be secret.
But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.
For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.
Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.
But that's not necessarily intentional (they probably present themselves as ordinary and ethical...because they genuinely think they are);
It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)
and when it is, it's trivial to bypass if one looks closely, which only roughly fits the idea of "secret".
I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?
Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?
(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)
So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.
You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.
Thanks!
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