The person I was responding to made the point that if you want to minimize evil in the world, sometimes you have to add evil to a lesser degree. As in my example, if I do 9 points of evil but prevent 10 points of evil then according to OP I've added value to the world in the form of the 1 point of evil I have reduced.

I responded that this can lead to an escalation trap. This assumes that we would all prefer less evil in the world, right? So how do we get out of the escalation trap? Repeated application of the maxim "always do a bit less evil than the worst possible competitor" will not lead to a minimization of evil overall, only a creeping increase in the total amount of evil in the world.

How are you equating this to me arguing against the existence of races to the bottom?

You should investigate the repeated prisoners dilemma.

Even if you think someone is guilty, it does make sense to allow them to at least submit their defense. And if they choose to use that time to advocate for their own promotion, let them.

Company A founds itself on doing 0 harm to Area X. Competitor B shows up and starts finding success doing 10 harm to Area X, so Company A makes a "moral" decision: If we do 9 harm to Area X, we are preventing 1 entire harm. Isn't that real value? then Company C shows up and starts finding success doing 100 harm to Area X, so Company A changes it's moral stance to "unless we do 99 harm to Area X ..."

I know an old lady who swallowed a fly kind of logic going on here.

As an example user story, maybe I want to get Plato's reaction to Buddha. It might be convenient to have a library of sutra's that I could grab extracts from in order to send to the instructed model for further reflection. That puts the context management into the users hands. From a UI perspective you would need a library interface, the ability to select extracts, some indication of context available vs. context used, etc.

In this scenario, this is your idea. You aren't "training off of other closed frontier models" in a distillation sense. This is your insight, your idea, possibly gained from reading a lot of papers and built on your own experience.

How do you feel if the model refuses? Do you consider the scenario I described a violation of someone else's rights?

What seems to be different here, is that they are saying they won't let you use their tool to do your own research.

It is a subtle but important difference. They aren't saying "we have secret sauce we won't share", they seem to be saying "we will prevent the tool you are paying for from independently creating a competing idea".

This reminds me of how dark-pattern common wisdom in Web 1.0 website development was to ban external links. Then how social apps prevented the export of data and actively worked to nerf significant interoperability through APIs.

But this is a tool, not just a data moat. Like a knife that degrades your ability to create knives. Or like a text editor that prevents you from implementing a text editor.

I've skimmed this announcement, your github repo and your site and it isn't clear to me, are these custom models? Are they fine-tuned from some base model? e.g. do you have 30 separate models?

Regardless, if Google is spending just shy of 1 billion USD per month, that suggests that there is a pretty high ceiling on capex available.

Consider the PR of massive datacenters here on Earth. People complain about noise, water usage. It doesn't even matter if those concerns are valid, the PR is bad enough. That might attract other massive corps that want to outsource instead of deal with the headache of building local.

You realize that not long ago companies were exploring building nuclear power sites next to their data centers to handle the expected power needs?

I'm not saying it will work. I'm saying if it does, SpaceX will own the market for a good while.

Consider the alternative. SpaceX figures out how to build the datacenter in space thing but fails at the rest. That would be an expensive mistake.

If that ends up being viable and profitable, there is no realistic competition for decades. In this view, xAI earning a reputation as a reliable AI hyperscaler is just another tactic in that strategy.

I think that Kierkegaard was considering that this attitude has to be permanent. You can't praise yourself for having resigned yourself last year, last month or last week. You have to resign yourself each and every time the urge to "dwell on the past" arises. And that urge finds a person when they are at their weakest.

There is some subtlety in how one chooses to look at the past. For example, you say "I choose thankfulness" and you recognize "the life I have is wonderful, and full of joy and satisfaction" which sound healthy. However, this describes your attitude to the present while leaving out your attitude toward the past.

He specifically calls out when a person trying to move on from the past degrades the lost alternative. In the metaphor of the princess, perhaps the Knight forms a negative opinion about her, or about aristocracy in general. He may choose to lie to himself like the fox from Aesop's fables, who when it cannot reach the grapes decides they must be sour. He may get angry with the girl, angry with himself, or angry with the world.

For Kierkegaard the ethical life requires staying true to your desires, even in the face of depravation. One ought not deny that they still want the thing they can't have. They will not rely on self-deception or ignore their true desire. They will realize that these desires will resurface and they cannot spend their life running from them.

All of this is easy to say but hard to live. It ends up forming the basis of what Kierkegaard suggests is a true faith. Fear and Trembling goes on to describe a Knight of Faith that lives beyond the Knight of Infinite Resignation but that is another thing entirely.

He tells the story of a Knight that falls in love with a princess. In the olden days princesses were married off by their parents for political reasons. There is no way his love, even if it is returned, can ever be fulfilled.

So the Knight resigns himself and marries the butchers widow. After all, she is pretty enough, she has inherited a profitable business from her late husband. And she will be elevated socially by a marriage to a Knight, so she is very keen.

But the Knight has to resign himself constantly, like in the dead of night while lying in bed and dreaming about what might have been. He must avoid falling into resentment and maintain the strength of his will.

This is a central concept to Kierkegaard, started in Either/Or and continued in Fear and Trembling.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling

And the first data point is in your favor, kind of. I mean, Uber engineers were sufficiently incentivized to use the tokens they were given. It isn't easy to determine what the exact motivation was. What might result from this latest round of CEO backtracking is either relief (don't have to pretend to use AI anymore) or frustration (upset at a useful tool being taken away).

There are two possible stories here. One, they forced everyone to use AI and didn't get enough benefit to justify the cost. Two, they gave the opportunity to their employees to use unlimited AI and those employees jumped at the chance with a vigor that management didn't expect.

All we really know is that value per token must have been low enough to cause this change.

There is a lot of frustration and even anger over CEOs pushing AI onto employees and some schadenfreude when it goes wrong. But there is some element of "fail fast" happening here.

I am glad wealthy corporations are footing the bill by stretching this technology to its limit. The fact of the matter is, we don't know how effective the best-of-the-best models are at scale.

There is a feeling that once we figure out how to leverage these agents, we'll see explosive growth. It's just going to cost a lot of money figuring it out.

It seems that for now, handing over 100% of code writing to LLMs is going to be too expensive. Cost per token for equivalent code is too high.

I was between objectives and wandering through the map. I came across one of the ubiquitous caves which I decided to enter. I was attacked by some generic low-level bandits and I cleared the cave.

After dispatching the enemies I was looting through the cave and came across some letters. They detailed a tale of a family that came on hard times in a nearby town and were forced homeless by circumstance, how they were trying to rebuild their lives, etc. I looked around the cave and could tell the individuals mentioned in the letter were accounted for in the cave. I mean, they were generic bandit models but the designer had matched them to the narrative.

I thought about the situation. I was this extremely high level wizardy kind of build trekking though the wilderness and I came across an encampment. When I barged into their makeshift home they rightly were like "get out". And then I slaughtered them all with no reason and was now deciding if the clutter was worth packing and re-selling.

I more or less stopped playing Skyrim after that.

1. Argue from ignorance. Never try unions in any other programming languages and completely disallow their use in C# codebases that you participate in.

2. Try them out and adopt an informed opinion.

You may even choose to remain in ignorance until someone wastes their own time trying to convince you. But it isn't my job or desire to teach someone who won't put in the effort to learn for themselves.

2001: "Beating the Averages" (Paul Graham) [1]

2006: "Can Your Programming Language Do This?" (Joel Spolsky) [2]

Both of these articles argue for the thesis that programmers that have been deprived of certain language features often argue that they don't need those features since they are already comfortable working around the lack of said features.

It's a fancy way of arguing: you don't know what you're missing because you've never had it. Or, don't knock it until you try it.

Consider, is your argument a) I've never used it and don't see a need for it, or b) I've used it before and didn't get any benefit?

1. https://paulgraham.com/avg.html?viewfullsite=1

2. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/01/can-your-programmi...