I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the answer is “yes” to at least 1 or 2, then I think the equation flips quite a bit. This is what I’m seeing in the world right now, and it’s disconcerting:

1. Ukraine and Russia have been in a skirmish that has been drawn out much longer than I would guess most people would have guessed. This has created a divide in political allegiance within the United States and Europe.

2. We captured the leader of Venezuela. Cuba is now scared they are next.

3. We just bombed Iran and killed their supreme leader.

4. China and the US are, of course, in a massive economic race for world power supremacy. The tensions have been steadily rising, and they are now feeling the pressure of oil exports from Iran grinding to a halt.

5. The past couple days Macron has been trying to quell tension between Israel and Lebanon.

I really do not hope we are not headed into war. I hope the fact that we all have nukes and rely on each others’ supply chains deters one. But man does it feel like the odds are increasing in favor of one, and man does that seem to throw a wrench in this whole thing with Anthropic vs. OpenAI.

Being accurate, by all reporting Israel killed Iran's leadership.

Yes, likely enabled by US intelligence, but the one who pulls the trigger does matter.

The one who pulled the trigger is irrelevant here, because both have pulled the trigger hundreds or thousands of times in the past few days, dividing up targets between them for the joint operation.

I'm aware that internet forums like to play fast and loose with insinuations, but facts are facts.

It sounds like you think this means something?

Obviously it doesn't when we're talking about an administration that openly breaks laws, much less EOs, and issues whatever EOs they want saying whatever they want, even in violation of previous EOs. There aren't even any repercussions to the president "violating an EO".

So, the pedantry here is irrelevant. The two parties are on the same team, working towards the same goal, doing the same things, divvying up the list of targets to strike.

If you'd rather talk with yourself, I'll see myself out of this convo. No time for folks who would rather indulge in hyperbole than messy reality.

Anyways, happy friday! Feel free to come back if you're willing to share why you think the president not complying with a presidential executive order is significant here, rather than insignificant.

This is a massive cope imo. The reason that the AI industry is so incestuous is just because there are only a handful of frontier labs with the compute/capital to run large training clusters.

Most of the improvements that we’ve seen in the past 3 years are due to significantly better hardware and software, just boring and straightforward engineering work, not brilliant model architecture improvements. We are running transformers from 2017. The brilliant researchers at the frontier labs have not produced a successor architecture in nearly a decade of trying. That’s not what winning on research looks like.

Have there been some step-change improvements? Sure. But by far the biggest improvement can be attributed to training bigger models on more badass hardware, and hardware availability to serve it cheaply. To act like the DoD isn’t going to be able to stand up pytorch or vllm and get a decent result is hilarious: the reason you use slurm and MPI and openshmem is because national labs and DoD were using it first. NCCL is just gpu accelerated scope-reduced MPI. nvshmem is just gpu accelerated scope-reduced openshmem.

If anything, DoD doesn’t have the inference throughput requirements that the unicorns have and might just be able to immediately outperform them by training a massive dense model without optimizing for time to first token or throughput. They don’t have to worry about if the $/1M tokens makes it economically feasible to serve, which is a primary consideration of the unicorns today when they’re choosing their parameter counts. They can just rate limit the endpoint and share it, with a 2 hour queue time.

The government invented HPC, it’s their world and you’re just playing in it.

> Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth.

/eyeroll but nobody can do what you do!

The dense model argument is self-defeating long term. Sparsity (MoE etc.) lets you build a smarter model at the same compute budget, so going dense because you can afford to waste FLOPs is how you fall behind b/c you never came up with the step function improvements needed.

Sure, the DoD invented HPC, but also invented the internet, and then the private sector made it actually useful.

reminder that trump has been flirting with just continuing in power (2028 hats and talks about a third term) and is responsible for trying a coup last time he lost.

personally I think there's a possibility where he'll just declare martial law and stay in power at the end of his term.