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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I agree that it's hard to predict what happens next. But the next development could come from anywhere, even China. Two years ago this wasn't true. Back then, OpenAI was heads and shoulders above the competition.

My claim is not about AI in general but only that OpenAI is no longer special. Although the fact that everyone seems to have reached (but not exceeded) the level of Chat-GPT 4 might seem to indicate a plateau.

As regards Sora. In my mind, it was a neat demo but ultimately a dead end and a distraction. Where's the use case?

My claim is not about AI in general but only that OpenAI is no longer special.

That much is true, I agree.

But the next development could come from anywhere, even China. Two years ago this wasn't true. Back then, OpenAI was heads and shoulders above the competition.

I agree as well but I'll note the obvious rejoinder - the next development could indeed come from anywhere, even OpenAI. Sure, they get mogged left and right these days, whodathunk propping yourself up as a paragon/benchmark of LLM ability backfires when you drag your feet for so long that people actually start catching up. But this still doesn't negate their amassed expertise and, more realistically, unlimited money from daddy Microsoft; unless said money was the end goal (which to be fair there is nonzero evidence for, as you note downthread) they're in a very good position to throw money at shit and probe for opportunities to improve or innovate. Surely Altman can see the current strategy of resting on laurels is not futureproof right?

As regards Sora. In my mind, it was a neat demo but ultimately a dead end and a distraction. Where's the use case?

Fair enough but still counts as advancement imo, even though tech like that is guaranteed to be fenced off from plebs, no points for guessing what (nsfw?) the usual suspects try to make with "ai video" generators in this vein. I generally stopped looking for immediate use cases for LLMs, I think all current advancements (coding aside) mostly do not have immediate useful applications, until they suddenly will when multiple capabilities are combined at once into a general-purpose agentic assistant. Until one arrives, we cope.