Terence Tao on AI as a monopoly held by one or two companies

Re:Terence Tao on AI as a monopoly held by one or two companies by arnogau on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @03:25PM (#41852181)

I think he's defining a round number as, for some precision Y, X number of consecutive most significant digits are 0.

e.g. for a precision = 8 number, its "round" when the last 5 digits are 0, so like 32.300000 would be round.

The probabilities of round vs non round are pretty skewed. There are far fewer round numbers (for reasonable definitions) than there are non round numbers.

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Re:Terence Tao on AI as a monopoly held by one or two companies by ithkuil on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @03:59PM (#41852509)

Not all numbers come out equally as likely. Round numbers are more likely to be picked by humans (or at least that's the argument)

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Re:Terence Tao on AI as a monopoly held by one or two companies by raincole on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @05:15PM (#41853212)

That's why I said we need to know:

> 2. Assuming it's rigged, how likely it's rigged in a way that the percentage is precisely XX.X%

But I didn't realize he wrote a blog post about it. He actually addressed everything I listed (and more) in detail:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2024/08/02/what-are-the-odds-...

TL;DR: Yes, we need to know all these priori probabilities to get the exact answer. He made an assumption about them.

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