Corvos
17hr ago
he ended up finding two different bugs in two different provers lol
God, that's sad. That "those whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad" sad.
Corvos
21hr ago
That's how the London Metro newspaper works, and these days I think also the Evening Standard.
Corvos
23hr ago
I know that this is what people say, but it's predicated on a scenario where the Venn diagram of AI capabilities (at a useable price even) becomes a strict superset of human capabilities. At the moment this hasn't happened even in software where AI cannot maintain a codebase long-term; studies showing that AI outcompetes centaurs are usually on short-term discrimination tasks like medical diagnoses.
I think it's quite likely that this scenario comes to pass, but it hasn't yet, so we'll see.
Corvos
1d ago
He has a point. Most of the stuff I've heard of (I am not a mathematician) is proof by counterexample which doesn't per se expand the space of what we can do. I suspect the AI+researcher combo is still significantly more important than just AI for the stuff that actually transfers beyond mathematics.
Corvos
1d ago
Possibly he has particular interests and just blocks everyone else as irrelevant. I'd love to see his feed, it must look like Stalin's yearbook.
Corvos
2d ago
That seems like a big-company problem rather than an LLM problem. I work in a small startup and while I won't claim AI-coding has been without complications, if you tried something like that at my company you would be fired immediately.
That is, the manager would be fired for proving they are totally unable to be trusted with a codebase and have no idea how development works, nor any understanding of what is being done under them.
Corvos
3d ago
Yeah he's blocking me too but you know, "somebody is wrong on the internet" and all that. It's a compulsion I have.
Corvos
3d ago
At the moment having HF in your code means you can try a new model almost just by swapping out the string in your model load function.
I don't think it's a moat in the technical sense. You do need the infra and I suspect it's not that easy, but not that hard either. I think it's just a coordination point, like owning Twitter or Github. If you're subtle, you can put a thumb on the scale here and there: mildly encourage A, mildly discourage B. NVIDIA got their position largely by making early AI research far easier on CUDA libraries than on any other GPU, so forward-thinking acquisition of coordination points isn't out of character for them.
Corvos
3d ago
Thus, while AI can discourse on every single subject in the world, it cannot give you actual good advice for how to put together a formal email. It cannot play Pokémon.
What are you talking about? It can and does do both of those things.
Corvos
3d ago
They host the vast majority of the world's model weights. If you are doing work on AI, you almost certainly download the initial weights from HF because it's extremely fast and free (takes special infrastructure). Nvidia is taking control of a big part of the AI ecosystem.
Historically, people like you are the reason Jews are so tribal. Yes, I know your version is that they started it and if Jews didn't act so Jewish people wouldn't hate them.
Why does it have to be either/or? There's an ugly 2000-year-old cycle where Jewish tribalism makes people dislike them, and being surrounded by people who dislike them makes Jews tribal, and it goes on and on. (I have to put one of those in front of another to make a grammatical English sentence, I am not proposing that one came before the other, it's a cycle).
Squirtle is for gentlemen of taste, who understand the awesomeness of outfitting a turtle with twin cannon.
More than anything, Wales' writing reminds me of the aphorism: "Explaining a joke is like vivisecting a frog; you might learn something but the frog dies". Wales is constitutionally incapable of choosing to let a trope stand, and constantly chooses to interrogate the conceits of his plot instead of keeping up all the little contrivances that would make that plot satisfying. It's like being on a car journey with an engineer who can't resist disassembling the engine every few minutes: you might get somewhere eventually but you're not going to enjoy the process.
Corvos
6d ago
But also once you've given broadly the same talk a few times you don't really need to prep it again. Vaguely modify the structure depending on audience interests and time allotted, make sure you're pitching at the right level, slot in a couple of new things if they come up and you're cooking with ingredients you know.
his father is idolized, then portrayed as arrogant bully in some memories never to have any other impact on the story
Did you miss the bit where they explicitly say that he was a bit of a prat, but very charismatic, and then he matured a bit and was admired by all?
replaced by stepfathers
Harry is an orphan. It's hard to parent from beyond the grave.
Voldemort is turned villain of course because of his father
Voldemort is turned villain by his mother, with it implied that her using magical rape on her lover combined with her weak abandonment of her child caused Voldemort to be born without the ability to love. Voldemort murdered his father out of disappointment with his legacy, not because his father was a bad man (he wasn't very nice but that's because Rowling has trouble with aristocrats, not men).
I'm deeply non-feminist but even then you seem to me to have this very shallow idea of what men are allowed to be and do, and what constitutes character and virtue. That might be a feminist trope but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
Corvos
7d ago
Because winning pretty big for all time is much better and more legible for IPO than a small chance of winning very big before being beaten out by a competitor who doesn't have to service your massive and entitled customer base or deal with your office politics and legal woes.
Corvos
7d ago
Yeah, I work in a startup at the moment and having to wait most of a year between demonstrating a proof-of-concept and getting the finalised contract to do the thing you'd already agreed to do is killer. How do you pay your engineers for the six months of no-fees? How do you get investment when you don't technically have a contract? It's a circular nightmare.
Corvos
7d ago
Yes. It's a very British way of saying 'well done' in combination with 'but you really shouldn't have done it and shouldn't keep doing it because it's reckless and won't help you'.
The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where all technology ‘Designed in California’ was ‘Made in China’ until the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016? The eternal San Francisco liberal empire that lobbied heavily against tariffs even as parts of it embraced his message on crime and taxes?
This sounds very much a master/vassal relationship though. Research and design and thought happen in San Francisco because San Francisco is awesome; meanwhile you get your awesome stuff built in China because it's cheap. Shame about Xi being an autocrat but don't worry, we'll uplift China eventually through trade.
Corvos
8d ago
I spent some time attending classes at a community biolab in my city, and I think a lot of the necessary prerequisites for a manufactured virus are surprisingly cheap.
That's interesting, and sounds like something to be addressed. I'm curious but I won't ask you to give details :P
there is no reason to just assume that AI-aided defense will always and forever beat AI-aided offense The wolf only has to win once. You have to win every time.
The thing is, this seems to me to be a fully generalisable argument against libraries and publishing textbooks, let alone making biology papers available on the open internet. Is it your opinion that doing these things was irresponsible and we've been lucky so far?
I personally think that these galaxy-sized intuitions are not safe to run a society on. Speaking as somebody with the opposite intuitions, they are far more contingent on your temperament and life-experience than they seem from the inside, and they've also been used to justify a lot of pretty nasty stuff. A lot of the nastier late-colonial stuff was the outcome of a failed rebellion that led to the principle of 'no brown man ever holds responsbility ever again' for instance. (I am not accusing you of racism, it's just an example that came to mind.)
I'm not discarding the possibility of bioterrorism. I would support experimentation to see how far it is possible with frontier AI - I believe this is already happening - and mitigations both in AI and in bio-sellers. However, I feel it's important not to let a totally generalisable and totally impossible-to-disprove principle of caution take hold of society. I also don't see any reason why our potential bioterrorist should be too dumb to do a terrorism the old fashioned way but smart enough to outwit and jailbreak a 10T model.
Let's be honest, Dario has been very quiet when America has been doing all the 'if we pull this off then American values will rule the lightcone for eternity' stuff. Maybe Dario doesn't want to subjugate China beneath American ideals of the good life, or at the very least beneath a form of American pluralism carefully managed to never again allow China to become a meaningful competitor. Who knows? But he certainly doesn't mind the prospect enough to say something about it. If Dario felt half as strongly about global pluralism as he did about AI safety, we'd know.
And then there's AI safety. I don't think I'm strawmanning when I say that like @vorpa-glavo, Dario believes that not carefully restricting AI will kill us all. I also really doubt that Dario plans to give anybody else a say on where those restrictions ought to be. The playbook of Anthropic has been openly expressed as: 1) be better than everybody else 2) decide the correct way to do AI 3) make sure everybody follows, or else.
To the extent China doesn't agree with that, Dario wants to destroy them. To the extent China does agree with that, Dario wants to make sure it's the way you 'agree' to obey a superior.
Corvos
8d ago
Eh? Having been an Anglican schoolboy, since when did we practice confession?
It's a general issue with university admissions, I think. No university department wants to be known as reliable producers of pretty-good-quality employees, they want to be known as the people who first spotted and nurtured a genius.
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