> solipsist

This is exactly the point they're making though. This is an exercise only available to the privileged. It is not available to people who haven't worked in tech for some amount of time, if not actively working in tech or holding equity like the homesteader above us.

It takes for granted the concentrated specialization of production that is modern, "on-grid" cities to produce things like microprocessors and food safety and insulin. This lifestyle is not available to masses of people, and we have a word for a society where everyone lives off-grid: "hunter-gatherers".

There can be other value in doing this, like Hundred Rabbits' exploration of how tech itself could be made more resilient given different macroeconomic conditions / incentives. But talking about this as if it's about how The Man just doesn't want you to be an independent free thinker is a misunderstanding of why most people live in the societies that they do.

They are fundamentally based in language, and achieving deeper models of the world through language alone is deeply inefficient compared to the way humans model the world for years without any language at all. They do not learn at inference time. They don't have semantic understanding of the difference between their own output and other sources. etc etc.

That depth is the key for me. Of course they are capable of producing novel sentences that aren't in their training data, but the depth of that novelty is basically within the bounds of language itself. They are capable of more serious depth and more abstract reasoning than that, but I have experienced limits, which it then tries to surpass with tools to convert things it can't understand back into language (unit tests, LEAN) upon which it is trained.

Because I'm not an AI booster, my account is limited to 5 comments a day. So this is the last reply I'll be able to make today, if you want to continue the conversation we'll have to wait for tomorrow.

I'm glad both apis exist.

The deeper architectural difference is still there, which manifests whenever you try to get the models to apply known techniques to modalities and problems outside their training data.

When they speak of "existential consequences", it is not as members of humanity. It is a projection of their control over humanity. Personal risk for them is just being made into a regular human (no longer being ultrawealthy). They can't even contemplate physical risk. Case in point, this exact same class of people are buying up private islands and literally purchasing the blood of poorer people.

They would never accept your wager. It's the kind of thing Elon Musk would say "sounds interesting" to on Joe Rogan ten years ago, and then the only consequence after that would be his fanboys reminding everyone how cool it was that he said that.

"we need the government to halt model training for us (and potential competitors who are currently behind us) due to hypothetical sci-fi future bad things"

on the one hand, and then

"we should not face consequences for that time we helped a teenager plan a mass shooting"

on the other so effortlessly, so instantaneously. And virtually the entire media helps them do it!

Thankfully what you're describing is a switching cost, not a permanently higher operating cost. Once the monopoly is broken and the state is using open source tools, there's every reason to believe it will be cheaper - no expensive proprietary certifications etc.

It would be unbelievable that the US would rather continue facilitating a genocide than retain Microsoft's global enterprise software monopoly, had they not already destroyed the UN, the ICC, and the global economy for that goal.

All they had to do was make keep the other costs lower than the switching costs, and they could've continued setting terms forever.

It's not-inevitable because no one has proven it's even possible, and all the people claiming it is keep being revealed to have staged publicity stunts to make it appear like they're making more progress than they are.

Comparing it to nuclear weapons is even more ironic from the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons. They are terrified of other countries treating them the way they've been treated, even though there is no evidence this is of even remote interest to anyone outside their hyperreality.

None of them are AI boosters, but they have something of a debate over whether the AI labs are doing what they're doing out of financial desperation, or because they're true believers in the rationalist cult. They also bring up Nvidia, though through the religious lens they are supposedly not bringing up AI Safety because Jensen predates the rationalists.

In the end I don't know how much the distinction matters. It's easier to become an AI billionaire if you have an ideology that says AI billionaires are superheroes. The thing that pops this bubble will be economic reality, not them sobering up.

Either you're being pedantic and missing the entire point, or you're saying that Anthropic lied and made a fake sandbox knowing their agents would need to connect to the internet anyways.