I wouldn’t mind if AI progress would stop right here and now, but I fear it will continue, and increase inequality in society which is contrary to what the CEOs say (as usual).

That’s the beauty of the democratic capitalism system. If a government isn’t totalitarian, it naturally seeks to preserve stability thus having to elevate common people, lest they would cease to form a civilized group or simply vote away the politicians.

99% rule the 1% through elections.

There is no better system of checks and balances where opposite engines of greed vector sum to faster and faster abundance for everyone.

That comment may have been overly preachy, tone deaf[0], and out of place, but it doesn't seem wrong, per se. Or am I missing something?

[0] e.g. elections themselves are so prone to manipulation (exhibit a: Dominion voting machines), previously trusted institutions now lack integrity, the insane power of well-funded NGO networks, etc.

I think that's a (very) vocal minority.

Over my ~9 years reading HN daily, I'd say most of the HN community broadly realizes there is no perfect system, just different sets of trade offs, but that history has shown generally democratic systems built on enlightenment values (uniform rule of law, respect for individual civil & property rights, free markets, etc) usually net better overall outcomes in the long-run - despite still being very far from perfect.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's the worst system... except for all the others (which are even worse). :-)

The last few years, though, while anything "anti-capitalist" or overly critical of some big tech companies that hits the front page gets flagged by bots pretty quickly, the overall feeling I get from the comments is much more skeptical of big tech and is pro-socialism.

Speaking for myself, I think we've become jaded after the constant barrage of big companies spying on us, charging more for less, enshitifying their products, and so on. I used to be optimistic about the future and my prospects, now I'm just hoping I can hold on and keep my health insurance until I retire. I worry about what my school-age kids are going to have to deal with in 5-10 years.

I disagree that most here are pro-socialism, that's a (very) vocal minority. Our democracy has entered a failure mode (two-party stage managed hegemony) and it's being tacitly supported by mega-corps because it's easier to game than a functioning free market democracy. Every complex system has failure modes, that doesn't mean free markets aren't long-term far better on average than socialism (although some redefine socialism so vaguely it seems conceptually little different). I've seen two flavors of socialism up close. Never want to again.

> I worry about what my school-age kids are going to have to deal with in 5-10 years.

Having a teenager, I share your concerns but I'm also a bit more optimistic about the longer term. It's easy to forget that our parents had similar concerns for us and their parents did before them. We've had an historically long period of broad systemic stability, really since the depression and WWII. While I don't think that level of upheaval is at all likely, I think we're overdue for a disruptive correction bigger than 2008, maybe something more on the order of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Era trust-busting to reset the two-party duopoly and crony corperatists both perpetuating each other's hold on power.

It may get rougher and more uncertain for a while, but the worst thing would be to lose the ethos of 'free minds, free markets, free choice' by falling into socialism, communism or totalitarianism.

These values are not specific to western democratic systems. For example, under Islamic Law (Shari'ah), the aforementioned apply as well.

And since when was Churchill an expert at this topic?

if you lookup playback as a concept, as it relates to the intelligence services, you will understand better what I meant.

my point was only that this is perfect description of the ideology behind western capitalism. there is (so) much more that could be said, but i'm not sure this comment section is the right place for a proper dissection of the very many ways in which this ideal is misconstrued, misdirected and coerced in order to serve interests that are far from ideal, to put it mildly.

since you have taken the time to ask a question, albeit a rather weak one, i will attempt a brief synopsis of my perspective on the parent comment:

a mortal danger is hyperbole, since shielding oneself from bodily harm is much easier with money. it is the poor, especially in the US, who cannot afford healthcare, as a first-line example

people regularly vote against their best interests. while the ideal might have been true for a while, behavioural influence on both a widespread and personal level is now a mature science.

i am not anti-election, not anti-democracy. claiming the opposite in the face of opposition is a sign of a polarised mindset, which cannot accept nuance, either because it is not used to it, or because it doesn't suit an vested interest, or because dissonance is simply too uncomfortable

the "there's nothing better" argument is usually used in ignorance, but in fact there are lots of system-level adjustments that have been shown historically to mitigate the corruption of incentives and the exploitation of systemic forces that, although initially unintentional, create emergent positive feedback situations that lead to a state that it counter to the utilitarian perspective that is contained within the western capitalist model.

the reading above is a very narrow view of Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, ignores the fact that human interests can be subverted and ignores the devil in the details

the world is complicated.

true: the one thing that every government - no matter how totalitarian - must fear is an angry mob.

also true: there are many tools available to the ruling class for dealing with this angry mob, often before it forms.

many work by redirecting the mob inward rather than outwards.

these tools work whether you live in a totalitarian fascist state or a egalitarian liberal utopia, albeit in somewhat different ways.

Cynicism about corruption is one of the most power tools wielded by the ruling class in any system. In general its one of the best ways to keep the smarter-than-average from posing any actual threat.

Is that even true? The poor are well subsidized. If you as a single person make less than $22,000 in Washington state, for example, you're covered at 100%.

Is this an example of why Fox News had to pay Dominion nearly $800 million for defamation, or are you referring to e.g. the CISA vulnerabilities, which are not known to have been exploited?

In any case the system works as intended

It will be very interesting to see if USA swims or drowns from appropriately afar.

I have already supplied myself with plenty of roasted corn and a high speed internet connection so I can stream the political car crash at the highest bitrate available to humankind.

I'm not going to the hardware store anymore!

In my opinion AI is superior to humans when it comes to pattern recognition in in large amounts of data. For example humans can only hold like 7 distinct numbers in the short term memory and you would require extra context-management (aka writing things down, storing them in a system entry by entry) while the AI can do this effortlessly with huge datasets.

I'd argue this is the core part that enables all this superhuman intelligence.

To me one of the most interesting aspects of observing how LLM capabilities evolve is how it highlights the meaningful ways human minds remain unique and valuable. It gets into Philosophy of Mind stuff but the existence of the inner self (or the illusion it exists, if you believe Dennett) and the subjective experience of qualia do give humans both unique strengths and some of our most annoying weaknesses.

> For example humans can only hold like 7 distinct numbers in the short term memory and you would require extra context-management (aka writing things down, storing them in a system entry by entry) while the AI can do this effortlessly with huge datasets.

Correct. For a long time people wer obsessed with 'increasing context length' as if humans have some great context length system in our brains. We don't. I doubt our equivalent of 'context length' (short-term memory) is very long at all. We just have a good training process that puts these memories into long term storage.

It’s no secret that these big labs see “recursive self improvement” as a primary goal. It seems natural that the models would be explicitly trained to excel at all sorts of ML related tasks as a result. Is this one of those tasks, or is this emergent?

A large enough number of examples of “here are the model weights -> here’s what it does” will achieve this.

There are also techniques to watermark model weights to confirm what training data were used: https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17075 I'm not an expert in this domain, but it seems like there are lots of pieces that could be used to (a) train a model to infer whether some data were trained on and (b) train a model to understand which weights are relevant for a particular training task in a more explainable way than backprop/gradient descent.

That's also matching what I see when I work with Opus 5.5 to optimize models. It seems to understand what individual layers are for, and can thus sometimes suggest optimizations, where I as a layman would be completely clueless.

The latest models are performing amazingly. Because of this, I disagree with popular comments saying that eg. DeepSeek is good enough, AI-assisted development was where the real value was at, etc.

We see huge progress at the frontier, while the open competition is around GPT-5.5's level, and that model was released in April. Let's see how things develop in the future.

Completely agree. I often think that those sorts of comments grow out of an understandable lack of imagination. We’ve never had tools like this, and we’ve never had tools that evolved so rapidly, so we easily can get stuck thinking that once a model is good enough to do today’s tasks, that’s really all you need. But the next generation of models often completely obviates the need for those tasks entirely. The software engineers of 2031 won’t be doing tasks anything like the software engineers of today, just like we aren’t doing things like we did in 2021.

(Yes, yes, I know some of you still hand write all your code and think LLMs are today’s crypto bullshit and this is all going to blow over. Not talking to you.)

Maybe there's some general capability, call it g, that can explain all the underlying capabilities and improvements, including on ML tasks? Huh, I am getting a bit of déjà vu here.

This sort of throws a wrench in the whole "stochastic parrot" idea...

I am not surprised, though I expect many to be.

The other day I was thinking about the definition of AGI.

I was asking myself the question that when there is no form of data that I can think of throwing into Claude Code and have it not come up with some sort of intelligent answer about it, is that already general intelligence?

So yeah, it can do everything, but fails in trivial ways around the doing part.

Some structures in Astra get activated by the statistics of the Qwen weights, and these structures are associated with "breakout"