WarmWash

The thing is that you basically cannot explain the math like you can the programming.

Tables, algos, and variables are all things people can generally quickly grasp. The construction is abstract but the function is tangible.

The math is working entirely on abstract objects, using abstract tools, governed by abstract rules. It's just all so desperately far away from anything even technical people have contact with.

I think you are snagging on thinking this is an observation about difficulty, time-to-mastery, or mental firepower requirements. It's not.

It's a plain observation that math exists on mostly it's own path with little to zero overlap with our lived experiences. If mathematics was a vector, it would have similar magnitude to other vectors, but it's direction would be much more removed from the typical knowledge pack, forcing you to get really close to the origin before you can "hop" over to that math vector. Other "knowledge" vectors, by virtue of being more bunched up, are closer together much further up, if that poor analogy at all makes sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol

compare to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rees_algebra

Most people, especially non-tech technical people, could crash through the TCP article and come out the other side with at least a high level understanding of it.

Most people, even technical ones, could not even get through the first line of the rees article, heck the first statement of the article. And then if they try, they need to know about algebraic rings. And digging into rings becomes totally intractable. None of the words or symbols in any of the articles track to anything even many technical people can grab onto. And this pattern is all over the place in mathematics.

It's not about mastering the difficulty of a topic or it's relative depth, it's about how abstract and removed from anything tangible it is. Anything with math it is always seemingly impossible to get a foothold on the idea anywhere within 10 degrees of explanation. Hell you cannot even clearly understand the problem that is being solved, or anything within 10 degrees of that.

There is a lot of verbal commonality between the classic sciences, classic engineering disciplines, and everyday life. I suppose they all share the common substrate of working in/with mother nature all day. A molecular biologist, civil engineer, and oceanographer can mostly keep pace with each other at least for a while in discussing what they are working on. These "mother nature" systems have tons and tons of overlap, and the nomenclature generally tracks this, or is one or two steps away from it.

Computer science/engineering strays from this, binary systems don't really track nature much, and hence a lot of their own unrelateable nomenclature arises, and then there is math, which is just way far out there on it's own plane of existance.

Yeah this is pretty much where I am at. Take the phrase from one of the responses

"The special fiber is the associated graded ring.....and that the filtration admits sufficiently simple homogeneous lifts of the three generators, then one might prove"

In any other context I would at least have some degree of intuition about what is being discussed, but in in math? Absolutely no idea. And usually if I start digging and turning over stones to uncover meaning, I'm just met with even more totally dense code-word language. Unlike other fields were digging is usually quick to relieve ignorance, somehow in math it tends to get worse.

I'm sure I am capable of grasping this if I took the time, and perhaps even what is being discussed it rather intuitive, but the incredibly density of the nomenclatic swamp you have to trudge through for math is totally unrivaled.

I know I kicked off this discussion, but I have also bemoaned many times about the anti-car people being quasi religious in their anti-worship of cars. They talk about it like missionaries talk about jesus.

Math has some of the most insanely dense and impenetrable nomenclature. I can generally keep my head mostly above water or at least near the surface reading from most STEM fields, perhaps leaning on google/wikipedia a bit, but man, mathematics just so quickly decouples from all common tractable understanding it's insane.

Sorry it's a bit of an aside, but I imagine many other otherwise "technical" folks feel the same unfamiliar sense of total loss like when encountering hard mathematics.

This is a theoretical ideal, where we ignore people's desire to own large tracts of land and live in quiet places. A mega-city where all the humans human, and then massive tracts of untouched wilderness shy of any industry that has to be there.

This is also why communist countries had stuff like dense housing in deeply rural areas, and why most people were shuffled into cities. Big houses and properties do nothing for the state and just encumber society. Way easier if everyone just lives in their tightly packed central shoe box.

Negatives acknowledged, there are huge efficiency upsides to dense human living. Everything becomes smoother, faster, less wasteful. You get a society that leverages economies of scale for everything.

There is a study from ASU that found they are awful to live within....1200ft of.

They're building 1.4nm in Taiwan

Part of the problem is that the topic is so radioactive, that coming forward with a story of abuse, and the legal/media circus that follows, really puts the abuse center stage in people's view of you. Most people absolutely do not want their most defining attribute to be "person whose family member raped them", even if it comes with extreme sympathy and understanding.

For many, probably most victims, they just want to forget about it and let it vanish into the past, and ideally someone else who was abused by that person comes out and has them jailed.

People who chronically are in trouble with the cops pretty quickly learn the police are working against them.

Regular people having a bad moment think they can just explain everything to the police and they'll go "Ah, sorry mate, we misunderstood and you can go home now"

The system does not work like that, hah. This is the kind of logic sovereign citizens use..."I'm traveling, not driving, so I don't need a license!"

At the end of the day, judges have the ability to clear away silly logic like that, it's part of their job.

I can't tell if this comment is satire or not.

You're speaking to the generation of pirates. What? Suddenly everyone is hanging up their high seas hat to capture the virtue signals of current sentiment?

"I haven't loaded an advertisement in 20 years, I have 6TB of movies, 2TB of music, and seemingly endless file trees of mangas, all acquired for free over the years. Now having not said that, I beg you enforce copyright on these AI labs, so I can get a cut of their revenue for my years of writing well researched comments on the internet"

The internet, in true internet fashion, still has the general logic level of a 15 year old.

Oh boy, I know more than a few guys who will get a kick out of this, hah

3.6 is roughly 50% faster, which isn't totally insignificant for being marginally more expensive.[1]

[1]artificialanalysis.ai

Pre-trains take a huge chunk of your compute offline, incurring both an raw expense (24/7 max power for all training clusters) and an opportunity cost (could have sold excess compute during that time). They also don't come with any great guarantees, as lots of techniques look good on small scale and crumble or plateau once scaled.

It kind of doesn't make sense though, because typically a large org like Google can afford to crush competitors on pricing. They could probably even go toe to toe with chinese model pricing for years without feeling it.

Maybe they don't want to price war with the other labs so they can comfortably maintain healthy margins on selling them compute?

etc etc

please, keep going...

Google cloud sells compute out from under Deepmind to other labs. So they basically are in competition with Google cloud for compute.

Besides Apple apparently making Siri AI model agnostic, the choice to go with Google was almost certainly for practical reasons. Google is a low-risk established player that already has a long work history with Apple. Google also isn't in an existential battle to establish themselves, Gemini still amounts to just another project at Google. There is tangible non-zero risk that either OAI or Anthropic will be gone in 5 years, or will be forced to leave Apple high and dry to save themselves. There is almost no risk Google will be in either such position. And worst case scenario, Google has incredibly deep pockets should Apple pursue a "refund."

I don't know if it's a rendering error since it looks like your site renders the SVG instead of hosting a static image of it, but the 3.6 macbook looks like an abstract art piece lol, both ff and chrome desktop

Google Cloud is probably Google Deepminds biggest competitor. Big company kinda bullshit.

I think it's a safe bet that Google seems more interested in making a model that improves Google rather than making a model that improves workers.

Fast, light weight, ok intelligence. Perfect for serving 20B+ prompts per day mostly surrounding banal human things.

OAI and Anthropic's cloud spend can cover the revenue gap, as Google is already capturing a large chunk of those guy's revenue.

Especially when Google owns 15% of anthropic and serves them compute. Double especially when your boss (Hassibis) is also an early investor in Anthropic. Hell his NW might be more Anthropic than Google.

The mention of an "ambitious" gemini 4 pre-train signals to me that 3.5 pro is probably a lost cause.

That being said, it seems that Gemini is still the best image analysis model, so hopefully 3.6 flash builds on this even more.

If you're not kowtowing the worst possible characterization of someone, then you're wrong.

Is Trump a dictator with unilateral control? No.

Will you be celebrated for failing to recognize that? Yes.

The American government has propaganda but it really sucks at it. All the people skilled in manipulating behavior work at our ad agencies, and hence our actual propaganda is mostly "Use this detergent! Take this drug! Drive this car!"