Ironically, I was thinking the exact opposite. This is bleeding edge stuff and they keep pushing new models and new features. I would expect issues.

I was surprised at how much complaining there is -- especially coming from people who have probably built and launched a lot of stuff and know how easy it is to make mistakes.

Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.

But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.

It is horribly argued. It's mostly poor analogies and non-sequiturs. It's no wonder Buzzfeed was the only place they could get to publish it.

https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142

Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!

Apologies if I did a bad job explaining my opinion. But I was attempting to argue the exact opposite of that.

My view is that science should be the search for truth. And that if the truth is inconvenient for some political (or other) reason, so bet it. The truth is the goal. Full stop.

My feeling is that if scientists stop pursuing truth in cases where it doesn't fit their politics, they will (rightly, IMHO) lose the trust of the public. (Of course, in particular, those in the public who have different politics.)

So when you tell them to "trust the science" -- be it vaccinations, climate change or something else -- they have no reason to trust that science.

But I think going down this path of denying (or hiding) science that can be used for bad ideas ends up causing (rightly, imho) a distrust of science -- which is far worse.

A distrust of science (not saying it was caused by this particular issue) is how we ended up with so much anti-vax sentiment in the US. And that is the reason we are seeing outbreaks of diseases that used to be minimal.

I think if you want people to "trust the science", you have to trust the people.

That may certainly be true.

(Not OP, but) I always shutter when we want to deny scientific results because it might be "helpful" for someone making a racist argument.

My personal belief is that truth is the goal of science. Even in cases where the truth is uncomfortable.

Interesting. I find that part of the paper the most exciting. We always knew selection would happen for valuable traits. But seeing demonstrations of it in the timelines we have is pretty important.

This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.

I'm not sure how to square that with the quote you gave.

If they are doing it “right” I think any off peak usage should count 50% toward your weekly limits.

Edit: it does look like they are doing it the "right" way.

Like wikipedia probably provides a significant amount of training for LLMs. And that is volunteer and free. (And I love the idea of it.)

But I can imagine (for example) board game enthusiasts to maybe want to have training data for games they love. Not just rules but strategies.

Or, really, any other kind of hobby.

That stuff (I guess) gets in training data by virtue of being on chat groups, etc. But I feel like an organized system (like wikipedia) would be much better.

And if these sets were available, I would expect the foundation model trainers would love to include it. And the results would be better models for those very enthusiasts.

I'm sure the "elite overproduction" model is mostly wrong. But I also think it is an interesting/useful way to look at some things happening in society recently.

Certainly, you can think of the recent "cancel culture" phenomena as a great way to remove elites to make room for new ones. (Maybe you could argue that some of the effects of MeToo were similar.)

DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.

Kinda neat, I think. But probably not super-explanatory.