(Incidentally, the line of skill improvement isn't "exponential". It's been incremental in improvements per generation, but generations have been coming thick and fast of late, and have grown in parameter count exponentially since 2017.)

Speaking more broadly, LLMs don't have to "hit a wall" in scaling to become uneconomical. If incremental improvement continues to come at exponential cost, however, then the fundamental value argument falls apart.

Setting all that aside, even presuming that model performance scales linearly with dimensionality, there are just fundamental limits to the size of the training corpuses. Quality training data is not unbounded and infinite. Given the same size corpus of training data, there's a hard theoretical limit to how much meaning and inference a model can wring out of it.

And then there are other issues with the whole business model. For one thing, it's predicated on continual full scale retraining to achieve even modest gains in skill and relevancy. Topical and targeted learning requires a full retraining. Etc cetera.

I think that the next generation of AI will lean more heavily on RL to be useful beyond a few months. I also think that the energy requirements of a particular technology are a good proxy to whether it's got a realistic future.

You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

That's absurd. It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. And the cost to get even close would make AI more expensive than just hiring knowledge workers to do the same tasks.

And it's all predicated on a tower of wobbly or broken assumptions -- chief among them that increasing the size of these models yields better performance.

We're going to look back on this era and wonder why anybody took any of the outrageous claims of tech CEOs seriously.

But more to his -- and my -- point: He also regularly encouraged people to flout rules and standards. His famous quote about semicolons, when read in its original context, is followed by a sentence with a semicolon!

He was a subversive author who abhorred mindless compliance and begged us to remain inquisitive. Subversion of accepted standards lies at the heart of all creativity. And as creative works enter the broader discourse, they themselves shape new standards. It's why our languages are always changing.

Your point about Citizen Kane and Independence Day 2 is nonsensical, and presumes we all have the same goals when consuming entertainment. I'm not going to engage in that argument.

And he was a giant of literature.

The problem with your definition of "good writing" is that it's entirely subjective. Just like Vonnegut's.

If you're genuinely interested in changing your habits, I recommend investigating these therapies, as they're backed by decades of research and results.

And if you want to tune in to these "whispers" in the first place, there's really no substitute for meditation and mindfulness practice.

I've had to be careful to steer clear of all the plugin nonsense that's tempting to dive into as a distraction from actually using the tool, but Obsidian is surprisingly awesome right out of the box.

I use the daily note template tool to generate a structured agenda for each day, which removes the friction that used to keep me from daily journaling and second brain stuff. Now I can't live without it. It's been life-changing for me, as a person previously crippled with ADHD and perpetually living in a state of intense anxiety.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to help out. I was also an Evernote (and Joplin, and...) user for years and was never satisfied until I made a list of my requirements and discovered that Obsidian ticks all the boxes. Haven't turned back since.

I wonder, would you feel the same if this was a meat packer or kindergarten or dairy or hospital who was bribing inspectors?

Building inspections are deadly serious, and when corrupt developers (who, in this case as in all cases, have the capacity to offer life-changing wealth to otherwise underpaid public bureaucrats) pay to cut corners, innocent people die.

It took two to tango, here. The rich asshole paying to circumvent safety regulations is at least as culpable as the motion bureaucrat who accepted the bribe.

When I worked at Monsanto, the mantra was that __the burden of proof was on those alleging harm__.

I don't know about you, but I expect a higher standard from the system that regulates the food I put in my body.

Broad spectrum pesticides are terribly complex to test and it should take years if not decades to properly prove them safe for agricultural use and human consumption.

He didn't really get to know the joys of adventure or a loving relationship. By all accounts, his life was actually pretty empty, a hole he tried to fill with material objects and anonymous sex.

There's no inherent information risk to giving out an account number that justifies an outdated paper-based system. Especially when one considers the accompanying fraud risk thereof.

The instant I moved to Europe, I realized just how far behind consumer banking is in the US. It's pitiful.

It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes.

We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy.

The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.

I'm not sure where you get this from.

Several Slavic languages (Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, etc) use Latin-derived alphabets and managed to preserve their pronunciation with 100% fidelity. The Polish orthography is not the only solution to this, and I think it's a stretch to regard Croatian spellings as "horrendous". I am, of course, biased. But the number of characters in a word in Croatian maps 1:1 with its Cyrillic spelling, for example.