comfysocks

And you need a rich person to do the exploiting. The power differential is a key ingredient.

Can someone breakdown to me how this makes any sort of economical sense?

Capital markets are excited by AI.

By tying his rockets to AI with his vision of “orbital data centers”, Elon turned an $8 per share IPO (at least according to financial times and morgan stanley) into a $135 per share (1.8T) IPO.

Fair enough. I too use LLM coding tools all day everyday. If we’re specifically talking about the arguments in this thread, I have experienced both sides of the argument. Some use cases are more in-distribution than others. I wouldn’t dismiss either side out of hand. I see it more as a “yes, but…”

Somewhere, someone may be painting an equally reductive picture of you and your position.

You two are obviously smart people, but have you considered that maybe you are unconsciously being backed into a position that is just as absolutist as those you are arguing against? That you are just taking the opposite side in a binary argument where each side sees only one side of the coin?

foreign labs

Apparently not just foreign labs. It looks like xAI distilled Anthropic models to train grok.

https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-o...

There are many possible futures, but the one that will come to pass is the one we collectively allow to happen. To a degree, of course.

A future that I like to imagine is one where LLM scaling laws hit a plateau. Plateau-level LLMs become commodities. They get distilled into small sizes. Everybody can have plateau-level local LLMs. People discover that it’s better to be a local-powered independent centaur than to be a reverse centaur for a mega-corp.

Similarly, xAI “attacked” Anthropic and OpenAI to train grok.

https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-o...

I had a similar experience at a bank some time ago. To sign up, you had to sign a digital pad without seeing what you were signing first. You could get a copy mailed to you later. At that future time, I was told, you could you cancel the agreement if you found it objectionable.

Being a bank, this has nothing to do with HIPAA. Just a dark pattern.

A bullied kid finds refuge in sci-fi and fantasy books. This kid builds a mental fantasy world where they get revenge on their tormentors. In this mental fantasy world, every self-serving thing they do is “righteous”, because it undoes the harm that was done to them. Their manifesto is a mish-mash of ideas from the books, but twisted to make them into the good guy.

Some of these kids eventually grow up and meet people who are kind to them. They find positive lessons in real human social interactions. They leave their protective fantasy bubble behind. They eventually learn to seek justice where there was injustice.

Others never grow up. They end up seeking to fight injustice with a new form of injustice. Only this time, they get to be the tormentor.

Tesla has a problem. Its sky-high valuation is based on the potential upside from “visionary” sci-fi future programs. However, the narratives are losing credibility.

Once upon a time, Robotaxi and Optimus sounded like visionary futuristic ideas. However:

We now live in a world where Waymo exists, and autonomous taxi hasn’t proven to be as socially transformative as promised. No huge latent market exposed. Aslo, Tesla is lagging behind.

We now live in the world where Unitree exists, and is shipping! Again, Tesla is on the back foot. The technology no longer seems quite so futuristic. Disruptors usually disrupt from down-market— that puts BYD cars and Unitree robots in the better position.

With a merger, the joint sci-fi future proposition is colonies on Mars. That one is likely to stay in the future for a long time. From a stock valuation point of view, the goal is for the promise to be forever in the future. That way, the investor thinks the upside is still to come. Once the promise is delivered, it’s time to cash out.

If you apply Occam’s razor, this explanation stands out.

"We need an approach to make sure AI doesn't destroy the world and wipe humanity to extinction."

"Yeah, and quotas on web scrapers!"

—— I see it as:

“Let’s do a study on abstract future concerns.”

Vs.

“Let’s take action on concrete present-day concerns.”

I hate this kind of thing too, but realistically this is every newspaper/digital that I’ve subscribed to ever. In a way, I get it. The new media landscape has put traditional news organizations in an existential crisis. I would hate to see world where the only way they could exist is under someone like bezos.

An easy way out might be to just ask the candidate how they got from one step to another. That way you can differentiate between “toxic, so smart i can’t communicate” and “non-toxic, so smart that i honestly thought the step seemed trivial, but would be happy to explain if i was mistaken about that”.

When the author says “crimes”, I didn’t take it to mean a literal criminal enterprise, but instead casual-speak for something like “bad governance”. It’s like if you saw some bad programming practices and casually called them “programming crimes” to avoid.

Similarly, when the author says “trash bag”, I don’t take it to mean a literal trash bag.

Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops are cheap enough. It seems some orgs don’t think tokens are cheap enough yet.

That reads a bit like: an equal role in external politics, but not in internal church politics. It’s hard to have a role in politics if you don’t have a voice.

>I have found that, for many of the statements about what AI should do, I would actally be happier if the letters "AI" were replaced with "companies"

Perhaps, but at the moment AI is at the forefront of the pre-regulation land grab.

To me, the problem is when IP laws are stretched and abused by big corporations (like, say Disney) or by patent trolls. If IP laws could work in a way that gave limited and reasonable protections to actual creators and innovators, then I don’t have a problem with them.

But this new tool is not a blacksmith’s tool in the traditional sense. It’s more like an automated blacksmith that works fast, for cheap, does mediocre work, but has this mediocre skill level in an exceptional broad range of tasks.

Yes, and potentially extracts the wealth at the cost of the new grad’s job prospects.

Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!

I seriously doubt it. Scaling is already strained (don't buy into the "exponential" hype). And, in any case, the competition will be against the frontier models that will exist in two years.

But even if scaling plateaus for the frontier models, maybe distillation will improve to the point where smaller more manageable models can reach the same plateau. That would be great for local.

Railroad looks huge on the GDP (estimate) chart because the US transcontinental railroad was built in the mid 1800’s when the US economy was relatively tiny.

Yeah, EVs are completely mundane now. Not sexy enough of a story to justify the high PE ratios anymore.

I think this is the reason for the weird pivot to humanoid robots and for taking SpaceX public even though he originally said he wouldn’t. Better story for the investors than EVs.

Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.

Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.

Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.

Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.

Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.

I wonder if going public will mean that SpaceX engineers are no longer going to be able to concentrate on rockets, but instead need to work on a variety of distractions meant to excite investors like dancing robots.

Yes, but this is for national (midterm election) security, so we need gas prices down before November.

Can you imagine the targeted ads we’ll have when they do deep psychological fingerprinting off of chats from AI therapists, AI girlfriends/boyfriends, etc?!

Not the first time Trump has wagged the dog.

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

Lex’s position at MIT would make sense for a grad student or perhaps someone early in their career as an academic. But Lex is neither a student nor faculty member at MIT. So what’s he doing? This type of thing is usually unpaid or low paying for non-faculty.

Lex got his PhD at Drexel over a decade ago. If he had pursued an academic career, he would most likely be an associate professor by now. Working as a researcher at a lab at a university that you aren’t a faculty member of is basically “failure to launch” at this stage.

But Lex is a successful podcaster. His dad is a successful academic and scientist (at Drexel.) Lex is not that, but he plays one on the internet.