timmg

If you extrapolate these “fines” to per book piracy, I wonder what the cost would be for something like Anna’s Archive. Trillions?

I think the company’s goals are what’s most important to the company. Being a woman is incidental to that, imho. There are lots of things an employee might be unhappy about. In most cases the company isn’t going to change its priorities for any of them.

I wonder if the recent sale of the Seahawks will change that. IIRC, ~$10B and all is supposed to go to charity. Not sure how much of that will go to AllenAI, though. (If any.)

How soon until biohackers try this on themselves?

I wouldn't expect it to be less murderous than the aliens themselves. That wasn't my point at all. I'd expect it to contain all their knowledge and be able to live "forever".

But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.

Tangential to your tangential:

The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.

Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).

We need some new sci fi movies like that!

As I understand it, this has nothing to do with Lebanon.

It has to do with ships moving through the Oman side of the strait. Iran is unhappy with that, because the want to control all the movement through it.

They probably don't have much, I guess.

Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks...

All models can do that. I wonder if they found Fable was significantly better at it.

xAI or OpenAI? (Or both?)

I guess it will be interesting if, in a week or two, OpenAI launches a "Fable class" model and it isn't blocked by the government.

There are a lot of things like this.

My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course."

Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

I wasn’t assuming anything. I was asking whether the problem was bias — which we already see in some things that are highly regulated — or just wrong bias.

I’m trying to understand what people think we should correct for.

Ironically, in the US it is ok to charge men more for car insurance, since they cost more in aggregate. It is illegal to charge women more for health insurance even though they cost more in aggregate.

sing an LLM to make decisions about extending credit to offer worse terms (say) to women.

In general, or if it isn't the correct answer?

Like: young men pay more for car insurance than young women (today). This is based on statistical models. Should they be outlawed? I think that is a very interesting question (but they aren't, today).

If the LLM was in charge, would it be wrong for it to charge young men more? Should we train that "bias" out? Or should we only train out biases that are wrong? And would that be different than how we train them today?

I don't know the answer. But I think it is less obvious than some people seem to think.

There has been plenty of research that shows LLMs encode social biases.

At the risk of stepping into a hornets nest: is that different than "knowledge"?

Or maybe, what would it mean if an LLM had no social biases? (Would we ever agree that was the case?)

The way I've been thinking about it: there is too much money trying to pour into the market. That's why valuations are so high.

Maybe getting more of these big private companies public will bring valuations down a bit.

(Just my impression. No math or financial studies behind it :)

My first ever programming interview was like a group interview. There were three or four programmers asking me questions, one at a time.

The only one I remember was to check if two strings were equal (in C). I wrote (maybe buggy) code to iterate both pointers, comparing while looking for the null terminator.

The interviewer stopped me and said, “You should compare their lengths first. If they are different, you can exit early.”

I was pretty young and didn’t know much, but I explained, “But you have to look for the terminator to find length so it’ll take twice as long.”

He snapped, “There are optimized functions for that!”

I assumed he was right. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

Maaaany years later, I realized the std library was probably open source. So I checked (one). It was nice to be vindicated :D

There will be cheaper solutions. And they will generally be less capable than the more expensive ones. Just like most other products.

But my guess is that the cost of SWEs themselves mean that the more expensive ones will be worth the delta to most companies.

But time will tell.

Pmf is this weirdly defined thing where "if you're not sure you have it then you don't".

I'm not sure if this runs counter to your point or not, but: I don't see any future where LLMs aren't a core part of Software Engineering. The horse is out of the barn. There is no going back.

I wonder if instead (or in parallel), Norway should build a set of training data and share it (for free) with all the model builders.

Seems like making the frontier models know Norwegian and their culture is a better (or additional!) way to reach the end they are going for here.

All of these concerns are valid. But none of them are unique to datacenters.

A golf course uses a lot of water. A factory can use a lot of power -- and generate pollution. A chemical factory could have all kinds of externalities (if not properly managed.) Heck, switching to electric heat (over gas) or electric cars over ICE for an area will also drive up power usage.

But we don't freak out when someone builds a golf course or a factory or switch to electric.

We have rules about all those things. Sound is one: you need to be within reasonable limits. Electricity usage is another: power operators always need to manage their load and expand generation (that's why we keep adding solar and wind everywhere.) Air pollution is similarly managed.

I can understand if people are concerned about "infrasound" -- why not pass a law that regulates it -- like other noise limits?

Datacenters may have specific potential issues. But none of them are unique to datacenters. And we've been managing these issues for hundreds of years.

Obviously, it's fine to be wary of any development in your area. But it seems like there is a certain amount of irrational(?) fear of datacenters. And I really don't understand it.

I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.

I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe there is a political component to it. But I do worry there is some kind of manipulation being done.

Also see: Failsafe. An earlier film.

Both seem to be influences of War Games.

Of course. (Though I didn’t see a mention of data centers in that doc? I did see “equipment manufacturers” mentioned specifically.)

If you click on the edit icon, you can see more data. It show 6 months worth. I thought it was longer. My mistake. But I guess I would still expect to see something over the past 6 months given the hysteria?

There’s another chart on that page that shows regional demand for electricity. That seems to have flattened or dropped. Not sure how to explain that, in the context of data center demand.

Maybe I’m reading something wrong. Or maybe there is an anticipated increase in demand?

It's not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters -- or if that is just the convenient boogeyman.

The grid operator for the northeast, according to my Governor, has been well-behind in building out infrastructure. Of course new datacenters cause more load. But so do new houses (we're building as many as we can) and electric cars, etc.

Not the person you are replying to: but I think that's the point.

Honestly, I hate "free tiers" for SAAS products like this.

For about 5 minutes, Google had a pay-as-you-go service on GCP for git. I used to use that, because I wanted to own my stuff. But (I guess) because everyone used "free" github -- and like a lot of other Google services -- they sunsetted it.

So now I'm using github for free. But would rather pay for my storage an usage with a (big) cloud provider.