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Grok is not a serious AI, it's not suitable for professional work and has mediocre performance anyway.

Very funny.

I think there are some sockpuppet accounts active but what also contributes is that many people are absolutely fed up with US technological hegemony and welcome alternatives to core technologies from elsewhere.

What validation databases and where can you get access to them?

I'm glad I don't use Claude.

I use copy & paste with a pro subscription. I guess I'm a bit behind in terms of tool use but it works great for me.

It's the future of warfare and it will sink the inhibition threshold for starting wars of aggression further.

Or Apple could just fix these issues.

As long as you're human, you don't have a substantially different notion of trust than I do. It's part of human psychology. We had to evolve it as social beings. I've seen very ad hoc CS papers on "trust", though, which IMHO were based on nothing but fantasy. Perhaps you had one of those re-definitions in mind. I tried to contribute to this pointless literature myself for a while until I realized that it's completely fictitious. All you can say from a mathematical perspective is that trust builds up very slowly based on a numerous factors and, if betrayed, goes down very fast and stays there. However, the notion doesn't have enough substance for a fruitful non-psychological modeling; there is just not enough ideal rationality behind it.

One thing is sure, pinning trust on trust chains down from Root Certificate Authorities is fundamentally incompatible with our notion of trust and an almost absurd idea to start with. Most people using a browser don't even know any person from such an organization nor would or should they have any rational reason to trust them.

The problem is that the current trust model is totally untrustworthy.

Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.

IOW if we don't know what consciousness is, how can we call LLMs conscious when we haven't seen even the barest intermediary steps towards our nascent concept of consciousness first?

We stipulate that other human beings are conscious from their behavior and how it relates to ours when it is accompanied by our personal introspective experience or "awareness" of being conscious during normal cognition. The process for ascribing consciousness to LLMs would be same: A stipulation on the basis of behavior that relates to our own behavior and how it appears to be linked to the introspective experience of being conscious.

The biggest and maybe only relevant difference is that one of them works evidence-based and the other one doesn't.

I don't disagree with much you've said, the only thing that bothered me after having worked for 20 years at university is the lack of realism of your views about scientific practice. Scientists have to deal with politics a lot, and if it's just with fundraising schemes that often explicitly demand social relevance of the research. That's particularly the reality of disciplines that are extremely relevant for society such as climate science. Of course, they need to assess to some extent whether the consequences of climate change are good or bad for society. This is a no-brainer, if you'd bother to stop and think about how they would structure and organize their research and get funding for it.

A random scientist's warning holds no more weight than a hobo on the street's warning

You must be joking, and I wish people would do that less often when talking about serious topics.

I really don't get you stance. Of course, you can make more fine-grained distinctions and that's fine. You can claim that medical doctors act as medical scientists when they conduct studies and as doctors (consultants) in their practice with patients. But that doesn't mean the value judgments aren't part of the science.

If a seismologist has evidence that an earthquake is likely to occur in a certain area, should they not warn the public about it? I would say they clearly should, and any other view about this seems bizarre to me. I find it equally implausible to not call a seismologist who warns about an impending earthquake a scientist. They're a geophysicist or geologist. Or take an astronomer warning about a possible collision of a meteor with Earth -- astronomy is a science, so why would that person not be called a scientist?

There is a an array of scientific disciplines for whom consulting (in your sense of the word) is a frequent, though not primary part of their activity, and we certainly still call them scientists. Material science, vulcanology, epidemiology, seismology, meteorology, biology, climate science, economics,... basically any science that involves the study of processes that might have important consequences for mankind.

You're nitpicking. Medicine is concerned with what's good and bad for someone's health. Medical doctors literally advise their patients on that and evaluate the effects of actions with respect to what's good and what's bad for their health. What's good and bad for someone's health is simply one form of instrumental goodness. Other sciences evaluate in similar ways, though they are perhaps concerned with other aspects of what's good and bad. Climate scientists are not concerned with what's good and bad for mankind in some abstract philosophical way, but they should without a doubt lay out good or bad consequences of climate change. If the temperature sinks by 10 degrees Celsius in Northern Europe, that would be a bad consequence for the affected countries.

It's false and somewhat naive to claim that such evaluations play no role in science, they are a crucial part of many sciences. For instance, they're needed to find worthwhile subjects of study. Not everything is theoretical physics.

So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health? I find this kind of argument principally flawed.

Many sciences are concerned with the consequences of human actions and it's hard if not impossible to describe these in meaningful ways without applying some criteria for what outcomes are good (desirable, positively evaluated) and what outcomes are bad (not desirable, negatively evaluated).

Besides, there is a whole area of science that maybe is more like engineering but is clearly worthwhile, too, even if it's not strictly a natural science only. For example, urban planning might not be a science in the strict sense but it's clearly important and involves scientific studies.

If policy makers can't get from climate scientist's an evaluation of the potential consequences of climate changes, then who else would produce these for them? Should they just make it up on the fly?

You're essentially saying "Don't trust Google at all and ask your local government to put pressure on Google" and I agree with that but you frame it in a needlessly apologist way. If a company makes a promise and breaks it, that should always be a reason for concern, and the article is right for pointing that out.

Interesting, this seems to license forms of affirmative action that are unconstitutional in Germany.

Such laws are unconstitutional in Germany. I'd be interested in which country you live in and an example of such a law.

It is the feature "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" that needs to be disabled. Right?

Or am I missing some trick / dark GUI pattern? Just want to make sure.

I want "the system" to neither push people towards healthy nor towards unhealthy behavior if by "push" you mean "force by law." I want a system that maximizes personal freedom and individual responsibility. I'm fine with "the system" providing advice and nudging, though.

Not only that, in my opinion the many positive reactions to this decision are a sign of a decline of personal responsibility and a desire of people to be managed by the government and treated like cattle. Blaming everyone else but themselves for personal problems and failures has become the default for many people.

This article is a crazy sounding and very unsystematic rant. It sounds as if some AI hurt this author personally somehow. What I find most annoying about it is that the author constantly mixes up consequences of using AI with perceived or real capabilities of LLMs.

Judge on your own if you have the time. I can't recommend the reading.

The alleged inability of a company like Google to create an operating system that makes banking apps secure while allowing users to install whatever they like is very implausible. Android apps are already sandboxed and have fine-grained access control, and the operating system controls everything that is painted on the screen.

The security justification for this measure is not credible.

Is there any news about how Gemini fares in this debate? I suppose they're fine with total mass surveillance ("we already do that anyway") and creating kill bots but is there any official stance? I find it hard to believe Alphabet would not make US government contracts.

We can't. That would require a carefully conducted cost-benefit analysis of potential outcomes including the costs and benefits of not starting it, with estimates for short-term (3 years), ten years, and twenty year outcomes. Such a study doesn't exist publicly and there is no way you can convince me it exists at all other than showing it to me with evidence that it was written before the US attacked Iran. It's also not usual to make such analyses because the costs of a human life lost are calculated very differently in each domain and are hard to assess. For instance, 13.7M per life is assumed in airline safety but that's not a figure the military would use.

I understand that you're making some political statement about the voters but it has to be pointed out the mental health of a president is a problem or not a problem independently of what the voters think. Sorry for pointing out the obvious, it just seems to me that many people nowadays fall into some kind of polarization trap that hinders their understanding of the world.

Useless? Where do they expect the senior engineers to come from in the future?