achrono

The Greeks themselves, and us in the modern age, really have not given Egypt credit enough for it being the fount from where Greece drew to formulate much of its technology.

There is very little direct textual attestation of course, and I'm not advocating for some Black Athena type of research, but in this context of robotics, simply take note of these two artefacts:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/566713 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544519

Someone well informed on the literature might say, "Homer was dreaming of robots already in the 8th century BC with Hephaestus' workshop", and that might indeed seem like the earliest possible imagination of robotic creation. But note the sheer antiquity of the artefacts above, and if you apply a layer of very reasonable heuristics, it will become apparent that the Greeks were uniquely brilliant innovators, but they did so by brilliantly synthesizing and building on top of various neighboring civilizations and of course their own IE heritage.

Nope, GLM 5.2 is only the latest and greatest in a long line of open-weights models. There are even fully open source models that are comparable to o1-mini (OLMo), or almost-fully-open ones that are comparable to o3 (Nemotron).

I'm super grateful to the open labs (who, importantly, do not have the word 'Open' in their name), all the more so to the likes of Ai2.

There is no magic moat indeed. It is math, engineering and of course copious amounts of data (and the political maneuvering required to secure it, e.g. how most everyone has trained on Anna's Archive by this point).

Beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning you say?

Prompt: If A goes to B who then goes to C, can A send something to C?

Response:

We need to interpret best. The phrase "If A goes to B who then goes to C, can A send something to C?" could be a puzzle about the concept of sending something (like passing a ball) and the relationships.

Scenario: A gives something to B, and B passes it on to C. Question: Can A also give the same thing to C? Answer: Only if A can obtain a second copy (e.g., the thing was duplicated). Otherwise, after handing it to B, A no longer holds it and cannot “send” it unless a copy exists.

[Lots of other unnecessary commentary and "scenarios" that make even lesser sense]

Take a step back and look at this article's diction and the rest of this entire website. Completely AI generated.

All those tokens have to go somewhere

After my own very exhaustive survey, I can just say '+1' and also good to note that OLMo has actually had one independent reproduction (albeit not open) done: https://www.amd.com/en/developer/resources/technical-article...

I often wonder why OLMo and Nemotron aren't more popular -- they are gold-standard / "frontier" of a year ago. If we had more support behind these, seeing a true open-source AI system that legitimately challenges OpenAI & Anthropic might not be far away!

How do we know that today's frontier models are merely scaled up versions of that? Genuine question, since the labs have narrowed what they share over the years to now almost nothing, in terms of how the model was trained and how it works under the hood.

Across 52 professional domains, current frontier models degrade 25% of document content after just 20 interactions!

Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself.

The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.

From the article:

According to the 115-page complaint, Baig discovered through

internal security testing that WhatsApp engineers could “move

or steal user data” including contact information, IP addresses

and profile photos “without detection or audit trail”.

That isn't really the breach you're making it out to be. Profile photos, unless made private/contacts only, are already publicly visible, and so is "contact information".

Of course these are useful to intelligence services, but this doesn't mean that Baig found they don't have true end-to-end encryption.

I love even more how it's a .md file from well before Markdown even existed.

Really want to know what these "more interesting bits" are that GPT-5-thinking and other models of this calibre cannot do. Unless of course you choose to do them even though these models can in fact do them, in which case, please do share regardless.

Other than banks & ticketing, there is a whole host of things that do in fact need an app.

* Mobile payments

* Navigation

* All manner of IoT devices

* Wearables!

* Digital versions of ID (Mobile Passport Control)

etc.

So no, you can't just use the web.

I think this just further demonstrates the truth behind the truly small & scrappy teams culture at OpenAI that an ex-employee recently shared [1].

Even with the way the presenters talk, you can sort of see that OAI prioritizes speed above most other things, and a naive observer might think they are testing things a million different ways before releasing, but actually, they're not.

If we draw up a 2x2 for Danger (High/Low) versus Publicity (High/Low), it seems to me that OpenAI sure has a lot of hits in the Low-Danger High-Publicity quadrant, but probably also a good number in the High-Danger Low-Publicity quadrant -- extrapolating purely from the sheer capability of these models and the continuing ability of researchers like Pliny to crack through it still.

[1] https://calv.info/openai-reflections

Key highlights in addition to the model quality itself:

* real-time router that quickly decides which model to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and explicit intent (for example, if you say “think hard about this” in the prompt)

* router is continuously trained on real signals, including when users switch models, preference rates for responses, and measured correctness, improving over time.

Toronto, where immigrants from the subcontinent grow up in enclaves surrounded by other immigrants.

Citation please, because this is sweeping. Two questions to consider:

1. Are these enclaves representative of the subcontinent, or of a few over-represented communities that is actually a small fraction of the Indian subcontinental population?

2. Of all the people from the Indian subcontinent here, how many live in enclaves versus otherwise?

Job applications aren't the only use case for using LinkedIn in this connected way, but even on that topic -- I think we are moving pretty quickly to no longer need to "weed out" AI-written applications.

As adoption increases, there's going to be a whole spectrum of AI-enabled work that you see out there. So something that doesn't appear to be AI written is not necessarily pure & free of AI. Not to mention the models themselves getting better at not sounding AI-style canned. If you want to have a filter for lazy applications that are written with a 10-word prompt using 4o, sure, that is actually pretty trivial to do with OpenAI's own models, but is there another reason you think companies "don't want bots to write job applications"?

In typical SV style, this is just to throw it out there and let second order effects build up. At some point I expect OpenAI to simply form a partnership with LinkedIn and Amazon.

In fact, I suspect LinkedIn might even create a new tier that you'd have to use if you want to use LinkedIn via OpenAI.

The word "beat" and "mercenaries" are also quite important here -- to me, this is Altman's way of saying "you losers who left OpenAI, you will pay a steep price, because we will mess with you really deeply". The threat to Meta is just a natural consequence of that, to the extent that Meta clings onto said individuals.

You know that because you're in tech. But the average person who is reading the news, and is likely to participate in a large protest in the next few years, would not naturally make a distinction between incremental and extant code.

That's a reasonable interpretation, but that is not what Microsoft has said. Satya talks of "30% of the code that is inside of our repos today".

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

No, because Satya's claim is about "30% of the code that is inside of our repos today".

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

I wish an org like IEEE would be way more rigorous than what's revealed with the first paragraph:

In April, Microsoft’s CEO said that artificial intelligence now wrote close to a third of the company’s code. Last October, Google’s CEO put their number at around a quarter. Other tech companies can’t be far off.

Take a moment to reflect -- a third of the company's code? Generative AI capable enough to write reasonable code has arguably not been around longer than 5 years. In the 50 years of Microsoft, have the last 5 years contributed to a third of the total code base? This itself would require that not a single engineer write a single line of code in these 5 years.

Okay, maybe Microsoft meant to say new/incremental code?

No, because Satya is reported to have said, "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today [...] written by software".

I think it's time for creative solutions on this front. This plugin business is a little like a cop living in a house of thieves.

For instance, how about an app that will basically detect an ad and visually overlay a blank blob over the ad video (and of course mute, or even just transmute, the audio).

We'd still pay that tax in terms of time, having to sit through those 30-60 seconds, but it's way better than also surrendering your mind to the utter intrusion.

Let me answer those questions with actual evidence.

To begin with, this very case of Perlmutter getting fired after her office's report is interesting enough, but let's keep it aside. [0]

First, plenty of lobbying has been afoot, pushing DC to allow training on this data to continue. No intention to stop or change course. [1]

Next, when regulatory attempts were in fact made to act against this open theft, those proposed rules were conveniently watered down by Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and the US government lobbying against the copyright & other provisions. [2]

If you still think, "so what? maybe by strict legal interpretation it's still fair use" -- then explain why OpenAI is selectively signing deals with the likes of Conde Nast if they truly believe this to be the case. [3]

Lastly, when did you last see any US entity or person face no punitive action whatsoever despite illegally downloading (and uploading) millions of books & journal articles; do you remember Aaron Swartz? [4]

You might not agree with my assessment of 'conspiracy', but are you denying there is even an alignment of incentives contrary to the spirit of the law?

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-fires-head-us...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-for-u-s-gover...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/30/big-tech-watered-do...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...

[4] https://cybernews.com/tech/meta-leeched-82-terabytes-of-pira...

If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion.

And for the future, here's one heuristic: if there is a profound violation of the law anywhere that (relatively speaking) is ignored or severely downplayed, it is likely that interested parties have arrived at an understanding. Or in other words, a conspiracy.

[1] There are tons of legal arguments on both sides, but for me it is enough to ask: if this is not illegal and is totally fair use (maybe even because, oh no look at what China's doing, etc.), why did they have to resort to & foster piracy in order to obtain this?

The point is, the self-policing is needed because there isn't a better policing mechanism outside of oneself for something so fundamental, so much at the frontier.

As the AI leaders themselves admit [1], they are doing what they're doing (i.e. capability-maxxing without caring deeply about actual risks this opens up for humanity) because they can and because the other guy's doing it, so why should they be left behind?

They're asking for some external force to bring the morality that they agree on paper ought to exist. There is a segment among them that are even okay with millions of people dying before the risk of AI gets taken seriously. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrESBnPYoZU, seek to 2:45 [2] same as above, seek to 3:25

Despite me having (almost) nothing to do with the Victorians, I have to regularly shake off a vague sense of respecting the Greeks for having "laid the foundation" for us in the 21st c. Because they did nothing of the kind -- they were just doing things they wanted to do, just like we are today. Heron's aeolipile was a mechanical curiosity, not a steam engine. Big difference.

Some NDAs can effectively be life-long. (It's the non-solicits that are time-bound.)

What a neat sleight of hand. "We're actually Truly Good, but those annoying lawyers won't let us call ourselves that, so we kind of take that back, but you get the idea right?"

Market cap is not money in the bank.