sanderjd

I dunno. To me, this seems like kind of a counterexample (pun intended?) to that thesis. Would a conversation with another AI have been as fruitful as this conversation with Tao? Certainly not! Will that change in a year? I dunno, but it seems like those goal posts keep moving, and I'm a bit skeptical.

I don't buy this at all. There is no way for any search provider to avoid the arms race dynamic. Marketers will always have an incentive to appear first in results in order to capture an audience to monetize. "Just win the arms race then" sounds nice but it's wishful thinking, IMO.

And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.

And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.

IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.

(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)

The thing those emails demonstrate is not the thing I'm skeptical of!

I'm not saying it isn't both, what I'm saying is that the thesis of the newer Google competitors is that the problem is mostly that Google has chosen to suck, so they can do a lot better just by choosing to not suck. But I think that thesis is wrong, that it is mostly that the web sucks now, and that these search engines are ultimately likely to be unsatisfying because they can't actually solve that underlying problem.

But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.

Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.

This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.

But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.

I think he's creating a definition for an abstract thing here, and using the word "intelligence" to represent that abstract thing.

In your analogy, the "CRUD app" is analogous to the car, but that's not what Thompson is defining to be the unit of "intelligence". He's saying that some number of units of "intelligence" are necessary to create that CRUD app, somewhat analogously to how some number of units of energy are necessary to create a car.

But I agree with you that this concept of a "unit of intelligence" that he's using is probably too abstract to ever be usefully well defined.

12?

Yeah I bumped on this as well. Contra the author's claim, the analogy to energy commodities seems very direct to me. Natural gas is not useful in and of itself, what is useful is the energy or aggregates created from it, and those have very different levels of efficiency. Exactly like Sol more efficiently converting tokens into intelligence than Kimi, a combined cycle gas plant converts gas into electricity more efficiently than a simple cycle gas plant. But this does not imply that gas is not a commodity. And both the more efficient and less efficient kinds of plants have large markets; they just target different trade offs.

Edit to add: I think what he's saying is more like "tokens aren't the interesting commodity, 'intelligence' is", which makes more sense. To carry on my gas and electricity analogy, I would say the same thing about gas being the less interesting commodity than electricity, because electricity can be used for a broader set of useful things. But both things are commodities, despite one being an input and the other being an output in this case, and the conversion efficiency is one very important consideration, but not the only one.

Each year, as the models improve, we add one more "very".

Yeah fair enough, there's always someone saying anything :) But my sense is that this is not a commonly held view.

No it wasn't. That wasn't even the second pretext they tried to convince us of, it was like the third or fourth one.

This "definition of war" reasoning is circular. It's not that these are not wars because Congress didn't declare them, it's that they are wars that are being waged illegally, at odds with the Constitution.

Who is crying about that? You just mean the administration? If so, then sure. But Americans at large aren't under any illusions about whether anyone would or should be helping with this.

You are the one in this thread who comes off as gullible. You seem to have bought the post-facto and baldly pretextual narrative that the war both had the objective of delivering Iran of nuclear capability and is achieving that objective.

I keep hesitating to use Pi because I primarily use Claude and I worry it will be much more expensive to pay for API usage rather than the bundled subscription usage. But I haven't actually evaluated the cost tradeoff. Should I get over this hesitance and dive into Pi?

Impeachment and removal as the primary remedy for executive overreach is - and always was - wishful thinking. We need a fundamentally less powerful executive.

This is most obvious with the pardon power. In the debate about its inclusion, the argument was "well if a president uses that power corruptly, they will be impeached". But no, that was wishful thinking. The same is true of "emergency" tariff powers and a bunch of other things.

The biggest problem with the tariff policy is not the cost or even the uncertainty, it's the corruption. A single person should not have the power to dictate the terms of trade, because the rational play in such a system is for businesses that rely on trade to pander to that person, and that's corrupt.

This makes sense but I don't think it works for me. I get irritable when I'm trying to do something like the activities you listed, if I can't focus on what I'm doing without interruption, and then that's bad for everyone, both the interruptee and the interruptor. This seems to be a personality thing (disorder?), my wife seems to be able to switch back and forth from working to parenting without it affecting her ability to perform on either task.

Is this a quote from something?

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Some of my favorite books are ones I didn't really "like", but which influenced me deeply. The ones that go at the very top of the list are those that achieve both things. But that's very rare.

It's all about context. Everybody likes someone who has well informed answers to questions they ask. Nobody likes someone who frequently injects answers to questions nobody asked. Knowing a lot is attractive, but being a know-it-all is unattractive. The wisdom to know the difference between the two is a different kind of skill than knowing a lot of things.

I think when people say "not enough time", they just mean "uninterrupted time". This is the thing that is extremely difficult in conjunction with parenting (and not just toddlers). There is a close to zero sum tradeoff between being truly present with your kids, and having intellectually high quality uninterrupted time. But there is actually lots of time scattered about throughout the days! It's just in little moments here and there before you hear "dad, can you help me?". I really struggle with this, I have enough time in these scattered moments for my mind to get bored frequently, but I have nowhere close to the uninterrupted time necessary to develop a real serious hobby like woodworking. (Parenting is also the best thing in the world, this is not a complaint about parenting, it just happens to be that the specific topic of this article is the hardest thing about it, for me.)

This is true, and it's also true that both boosters and doomers have consistently made incorrect predictions about the timeline.

Say more. My expectation is that the current gen of gpus will start being replaced by the next gen, and then it may be possible to get used ones that are still within their useful life at lower prices. My expectation is also that memory vendors are likely to increase production, which will drive those prices down eventually. Maybe not over the next 18-24 months though.

I have really enjoyed this period of HN, because there has just been a genuine split here on this topic since it became The Thing, which means I get to see a whole ranges of opinions and arguments on this when I come here. I'll be really bummed if either the doomers or the boosters (or the pragmatists) get run off of the site. A monoculture bubble wouldn't be nearly as useful to me.

In my experience, those roles never existed to begin with in well run teams and companies. Some companies drive product managers into this role, but that was always a bad use of their time. Even with AI tools, I still don't feel like I have the skills to do the job of a good product manager, which requires the kind of vision and business acumen that I am just not as good at as the best PMs I've worked with.

Yeah reading this timeline wasn't satisfying to me for exactly this reason: It didn't give the counterarguments that were being made at the time of each "goalpost".

My (probably flawed, but still) memory is that the first one of these threads I participated in, at the end of 2022, was saying that none of us would have jobs after two more years of development of these models. Two years from then was almost two years ago now, and we're still "a year or two" out.

On the flip side, the thesis that these will be useful tools that will augment the work of software developers when understood and used for the things they are good at has (IMO) remained undefeated during this entire period.