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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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According to Andrej Karpathy:

As far as a quick vibe check over 2 hours this morning, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI’s strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month), and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch 1 year ago, this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.

The architecture is extremely well known, the days of advancements in the space requiring genuine intellectual titans making leaps into the dark are over, it’s all relatively run of the mill iteration and more compute / bitter lesson now. This is pretty standard for great inventions, a few true geniuses and then a deluge of very intelligent people making rapid, incremental progress as the money and interest pours in. If you hired the best aircraft engineers in 1910 and put out a very impressive plane prototype in 1911 that would be no earth shattering achievement. If you did it in 1901 we’d still be talking about you.