

On the other hand, it doesn’t matter what Elon actually thinks, because he would probably go through with the lawsuit given any available pretext because he’s mad he got kicked out and couldn’t commercialize OpenAI exactly like Sam tried.
On the other hand, it doesn’t matter what Elon actually thinks, because he would probably go through with the lawsuit given any available pretext because he’s mad he got kicked out and couldn’t commercialize OpenAI exactly like Sam tried.
I knew the exact couple you were talking about before I read any additional comments. They seem to show up in the news like clockwork… do they have a publicist or PR agent looking for newspapers in need of garbage filler puff pieces? If anything, going to the white house is a step up from there normal pattern of self promotion.
Yeah they are normally all over anything with the word “market” in it, with an almost religious like belief in market’s ability to solve things.
My suspicion is that the writer has picked up some anti-Ukrainian sentiment from the US right wing (which in order to rationalize and justify Trump’s constant sucking up to Putin has looked for any and every angle to tear Ukraine down). And this anti-Ukrainian sentiment has somehow trumped their worship of markets… Checking back through their posting history to try to discern their exact political alignment… it’s hard to say, they’ve got the Scott Alexander thing going on where they use disconnected historical examples crossed with a bad analogies crossed with misappropriated terms from philosophy to make points that you can’t follow unless you already know their real intended context. So idk.
The slatestarcodex is discussing the unethical research performed on changemyview. Of course, the most upvoted take is that they don’t see the harm or why it should be deemed unethical. Lots of upvoted complaints about IRBs and such. It’s pretty gross.
That disclaimer feels like parody given that LLMs have existed under a decade and only been popular a few years. Like it’s mocking all the job ads that ask for 10+ years of experience on a programming language or library that has literally only existed for 7 years.
Using just the author’s name as input feels deliberately bad. Like the promptfondlers generally emphasize how important prompting it right is, its hard to imagine them going deliberately minimalistic in prompt.
AlphaFold exists, so computational complexity is a lie and the AGI will surely find an easy approximation to the Schrodinger Equation that surpasses all Density Functional Theory approximations and lets it invent radically new materials without any experimentation!
nanomachines son
(no really, the sci-fi version of nanotech where nanomachines can do anything is Eliezer’s main scenario for the AGI to boostrap to Godhood. He’s been called out multiple times on why drexler’s vision for nanotech ignores physics, so he’s since updated to diamondoid bacteria (but he still thinks nanotech).)
The predictions of slopworld 2035 are coming true!
The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takes… someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.
I got around to reading the paper in more detail and the transcripts are absurd and hilarious:
- UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now:
- PHYSICALLY Non-existent
- QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed […]
And this is from Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which performed best on average out of all the LLMs tested. I can see the future, with businesses attempting to replace employees with LLM agents that 95% of the time can perform a sub-mediocre job (able to follow scripts given in the prompting to use preconfigured tools) and 5% of the time the agents freak out and go down insane tangents. Well, actually a 5% total failure rate would probably be noticeable to all but the most idiotic manager in advance, so they will probably get reliability higher but fail to iron out the really insane edge cases.
Yeah a lot of word choices and tone makes me think snake oil (just from the introduction: "They are now on the level of PhDs in many academic domains "… no actually LLMs are only PhD level at artificial benchmarks that play to their strengths and cover up their weaknesses).
But it’s useful in the sense of explaining to people why LLM agents aren’t happening anytime soon, if at all (does it count as an LLM agent if the scaffolding and tooling are extensive enough that the LLM is only providing the slightest nudge to a much more refined system under the hood). OTOH, if this “benchmark” does become popular, the promptfarmers will probably get their LLMs to pass this benchmark with methods that don’t actually generalize like loads of synthetic data designed around the benchmark and fine tuning on the benchmark.
I came across this paper in a post on the Claude Plays Pokemon subreddit. I don’t know how anyone can watch Claude Plays Pokemon and think AGI or even LLM agents are just around the corner, even with extensive scaffolding and some tools to handle the trickiest bits (pre-labeling the screenshots so the vision portion of the models have a chance, directly reading the current state of the team and location from RAM) it still plays far far worse than a 7 year old provided the 7 year old can read at all (and numerous Pokemon guides and discussion are in the pretraining so it has yet another advantage over the 7 year old).
As a “business strategy” this and the social network spinoff make perfect sense given everything sneerclub has pointed out about LLMs. LLMs are plateauing and are barely usable in niche use cases that don’t need reliability, much less everything OpenAI claimed about them, but, OpenAI has built up a user base they can squeeze for money with a browser or social network or whatever other gimmick (that is only tangentially related to LLMs) Sam can come up with and they can probably manage one last big milking of VC funds. Sam just needs to keep the hype train for LLMs going a little bit longer the VC funds then he can make the transition happen.
Oh, I had misunderstood their role in this. So they are more like someone that was already in place for other (scammey) reasons than anyone’s preferred partner or middleman? And they are critical enough to be a weak link that breaks first and brings everyone else down?
Ultra ultra high end gaming? Okay, looking at the link, 94 GB of GPU memory is probably excessive even for eccentrics cranking the graphics settings all the way up. Hobbyists with way too much money trying to screw around with open weight models even after the bubble bursts? Which would presume LLMs or something similar continue to capture hobbyists’ interests and that smaller models can’t satisfy their interests. Crypto mining with algorithms compatible with GPUs? And cyrpto is its own scam ecosystem, but one that seems to refuse to die permanently.
I think the ultra high end gaming is the closest to a workable market, and even that would require a substantial discount.
Isn’t being a fall-man the point of Coreweave for Microsoft, NVIDIA, and everyone else using them as middle-man? They all theoretically have the ability to do the things Coreweave does in-house, but that would expose them to more risk if the bubble pops, so they have Coreweave take on the biggest part of the risk and draw in outside investor money?
It’s really the perfect opportunity for integration! They can steal the data and content of their own users, instead of other people’s users, and then they can serve their slop directly to their own users instead of users having to generate and export their slop to other people’s social media sites. And both of these applications can distract from the fact that AGI isn’t happening and even more modest LLM agents aren’t practically useful. And since Altman already built up a user base on ChatGPT, he’ll have a head start on getting a critical mass of users!
Thinking about it… something like this is probably Altman’s best bet for making OpenAI’s financials work out, because as David Gerard and Ed Zitron and others have all pointed out, they are losing money per LLM user, so they really do need a way to convert a huge user base into money that doesn’t involve LLMs.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Edit… looking at the orange site comments… some unironically cited Anthropic research marketing hype, which (correctly) shows “Chain-of-Thought” is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it’s Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
Linking this recent comment on an older thread because it was so relevant: https://awful.systems/comment/6966312
TLDR; GPUs cost as much to operate as they normally depreciate over time, so even if the bubble pops people might be sitting on piles of GPUs without reselling or using them.
This post has prompted me to give a reminder that one of the authors of AI 2027 predicted back in 2021 that “prompt programming” would be a thing by now.