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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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They are still the top for now. No argument here.

But, a year ago, @sama said that AGI had been achieved internally and people thought he might be serious.

Now they are merely first among equals. As cool as the new features are, this is not AGI. I don't think they have any special sauce. There's probably nothing they can do that a startup with $100 million can't do. Hell, even China is making top-tier models now. OpenAI might end up as a successful company, they might not, but they are certainly not looking like the world beater that they did 18 months ago.

On the other side of coin, Elon is just crushing it on all levels now with Grok AI, Tesla FSD, Neuralink, and SpaceX. It's mind-boggling how he maintains all this despite apparently spending hours a day shitposting. GOAT.

But, a year ago, @sama said that AGI had been achieved internally and people thought he might be serious.

Some people still think he's serious. The "strawberry"/qstar meme train has been going for the better part of a year at this point I think, with the usual twitter personalities promising that it's just around the corner the whole time.

Elon is just crushing it on all levels now with Grok AI, Tesla FSD, Neuralink, and SpaceX.

Grok and SpaceX are the real deal. Neuralink seems promising but afaik there isn't much publicly demonstrated so far. Tesla FSD is multi year neverware best known for causing multi car pileups on US-101 thanks to oblivious drivers scrolling while driving.

You might need to update on FSD. The latest updates have been described as a phase change. It's not level 5 yet, but apparently they have a clear lead.

That sounds like the same marketing stuff that I've heard for previous versions. IMO - it is unlikely that we can get better than human driving performance (which is what will be necessary for the public to accept this) without advanced sensors (e.g. LIDAR). To my knowledge, despite the marketing name of FSD, Tesla requires that you remain attentive to the road, which is really a recipe for disaster.

But we'll see. I can believe they have a clear lead over other car manufacturers, because the rest of them are basically not touching this with a ten foot pole.

I'd dispute even first among equals. Claude Sonnet 3.5 is nearly always my go-to nowadays, falling back to GPT-4o when it's overloaded. (I will sometimes try the same prompt across all of Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude just to make sure they don't catch anything Claude would miss, and DeepSeek for code, but I've yet to be surprised.)

That said, I'd be surprised if Gemini and ChatGPT haven't caught up to/surpassed where Claude is today by end of year. But it's hard to imagine any of them building an enduring lead unless one has something up their sleeve.