Sol-

Realistically, lots of it is probably also just duplication. Why adhere to KISS and abstractions if the LLM can just regenerate relatively low level code whenever I need it? I don't even mean this in a disparaging way or anything, I found myself falling into the same habit of just generating very problem-specific tools and processing pipelines.

Of course, then the question is if it's even worth committing them - you might as well just commit the design spec and let the model generate ephemeral code to run this whenever you need it. For now, I almost consider committing generated code a caching step in some sense, so you don't have to spend the tokens and time to generate it again.

Once super fast and super cheap tokens become more ubiquitous, however, I expect this to change.

What's the incentive here? Just some tech anarchism? I would have figured that they at least demand bitcoin to reverse it or something. I know, people will blame the Russians, but seems not super productive for them to do such mundane sabotage on such non-critical systems.

Seems way too early to tell whether it will be good or bad on balance. These breaches are annoying, but not catastrophic, and in the meantime you can secure software.

Is there any indication that such a bailout was even planned or is this just populist tilting at windmills?

But then in turn I'm surprised that states haven't yet sanctioned the mixers themselves. I understand there's no proof that they might not also mix legitimate funds, but I wouldn't have expected this to be a big hindrance given that everyone seems to know that most of their use is for money laundering.

How do they launder the coins generally? Given you traceable (most) cryptocurrency is by design, it seems you could sanction anyone who transacts with them? I understand it's likely not that simple, though.

As someone who's not a social butterfly, this sounds very good to me. I can engage in hobbies without wanting to shop around for attention at conferences or hobbyist groups. People like the author seem to think that socialization with humans is an end in itself for some reason. But if the AI can be reasonably intellectually stimulating, what's the issue?

I share the concern about TikTok-ification and intellectual stagnation, but this is unrelated to the main concerns of the article.

Neuralink integration and I'm out of here.

I did and Claude was very transparent about any potential conflict of interest. Very well-behaved model.

While the press release is nauseating, I can see how AI could be involved with matchmaking. My conversations with Claude likely capture my persona and interests and many tacit facets pretty well, like an OkCupid questionnaire on steroids.

I doubt this investment firm will have genuine connection in mind though.

I feel like your response to AI depends in part also how much you find the status quo stimulating and interesting. If you are a social butterfly like the OP and already embedded and happy with communities, then of course AI will be a big loss in contrast. I do much agree with his assessment of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, though.

That's an interesting future where everyone's personal agent basically renders their own interpretation of information that's out there. And seems like the logical end state.

Probably a first world problem, but with Opus 5.5's efficiency, the limits on the 5x plan are simply sufficient for my everyday work, even when running 2-3 sessions at a time. So I wonder when I would use Sonnet 5.5.

More concurrency than that isn't really practical for me if I want to retain some semblance of understanding. Perhaps it's different for purely web app or frontend tasks, where the outcome is more relevant than the process, I don't have much experience there (and also don't want to belittle these domains, I might be underestimating their complexity).

So surprisingly, my own work is at least for the time being almost saturated by the model capabilities. I am not sure how I'd scale from here. Sure I could run all requests at max effort to burn tokens for the sake of it, but that can't be it. And for many tasks, I am not really able to define so clear cut success criteria or self-verification loops that I could benefit from letting an agent (or a fleet thereof) autonomously run for a day.

So I realize it's a skill issue on my side, but I can't be the only one. I wonder if there is a limit to token demand, at least short term. Feels like either they accelerate to AGI and RSI, where the AI can find uses for token, or things might plateau at some point.

Note I don't think this because I'm an AGI skeptic or think there's a ceiling to intelligence, but there might simply be a valley of economic hardship for the companies where the supply of tokens outpaces the demand, due to a lack of ideas of what to do with them. And this might slow down the funding enough that they never reach escape velocity with the training run scaling. But we'll see.

I think the "everything company" vision has become apparent for a while now. Doesn't even have to be sinister - I think Anthropic simply believes on one else can be trusted with this power. Another point of leverage they have is that they can keep their internal models for themselves.

Voting for it is easy and I hope it catalyzes innovation. But still, completing a damn reactor without insane budget overruns is the problem.

Also the general public might find the implications of AGI so distasteful even if everything goes well that we might stall out or get the Butlerian Jihad before we can cure cancer. Artists and Software Engineers, now also Mathematicians, already have existential crises, but the public still thinks AI is fake. I can't imagine the backlash when the realize what's coming even in the good ending.

"Investigating the novel enzyme incident in our SF lab [2027]"

Found this announcement interesting since allegedly OpenAI is retiring their Terra tier. I think for everyday work, two models with various thinking efforts seem enough, plus some frontier level model like Fable or Astra to coordinate.

I'm sorry, but nothing is going to happen. Canada and the EU made up an imaginary category for good vibes and to market some likely very limited cooperation in arms development or maybe research programs. We already have CETA and I doubt any "associate membership" will be more consequential like that.

In two years this will have fizzled out like any other marketing blitzes by the EU (remember Gaia-X?). I say this as a disillusioned EU citizen. This institution doesn't have any ambition left.

I too have very strong opinions about central bank policies.

It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.

The AI driven mode collapse of human thought advances. I am no skeptic or anti-AI, but this is definitely a concern I share. You even notice it in normal mundane tasks like programming, never mind the AI generated prose that we at least have become somewhat allergic to.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could just sit it out and say "Oh well, once the labs get bored with marketable domain X, humans will remigrate and re-apply creativity to it", but by then the damage might have been done and a field destroyed as an occupation. I don't know what to do about it, but I appreciate calling out the cynical tone-deafness of the AI companies here.

I will admit I asked Fable about Mitochondria.

I think the personal drama aside, the moral of the story is: If you are working on an interesting breakthrough in any domain amenable to AI-supported solutions, make sure to keep it secret, lest a more well-resourced party (in particular the leading AI firms) will try to front-run you on the results by throwing millions of compute at it.

I guess (pure) mathematics will eventually be left alone, since own its own it is not economically valuable and OpenAI and Anthropic will eventually not need it any more for publicity, leaving the normal researcher alone to pick up AI-supported crumbs again.

But this also doesn't bode well for other domains. I think these are the clear signs of power concentration in the hands of the AI labs. All future progress will go through them, and if it doesn't, it's only because they graciously let you and decided not to scoop you first.

> OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work

This doesn't seem to be clear and is very implausible for a large company. Be as cynical as you want, but a normal researcher will simply not have access rights to this data, which will be siloed away somewhere else.

It might very well be somewhat unfair to catch wind of a promising approach and then try to frontrun them by throwing compute at the problem, but this isn't really the same.

> A good idea, a terrible implementation

Story of European regulations. At some point you have to concede that they are incompetent and unaccountable. What do they care if they depress economic integration and growth in Europe? No one will ever be blamed for diffuse bureaucratic costs that drag down the whole Eurozone.

I even resent people giving them credit for "well, the idea was laudable..". No. Again and again they introduce make-the-world-a-better-place regulations, and whoever opposes these or asks about tradeoffs or whether they are meaningfully useful must be a crazed libertarian or industry lobbyist who wants to poison the people.

I remember how smug Europeans were about the American PATRIOT act. Who could be so stupid to be fooled by such propagandist framing of laws? Well, here in the EU that happens frequently. The commission just has to wrap its degrowth policy in saving-the-world names and off we go. (See also the EU Supply Chain Act, i.e. Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, aka expensive paperwork for a good conscience)

Definitely something I've come around to as well, even though I am very pro-AI and think it's an amazing technology. But the bottlenecks just hit too hard. I notice every day where my usage of AI is so constrained, by myself and my imagination, by external factors like slow feedback loops (gathering requirements), by the AI still not being good enough for certain details (you need to heavily steer it, give feedback, even in long running agentic sessions).

So yes, many aspects of my job are now 10x as productive, but turns out that improves my overall throughput only very little.

EU once again at the frontier of AI.. regulation.

Hard to assess what this rule will actually accomplish. Ultimately AI will be involved in all creative processes going forward, so all pieces of media will have at least some basic AI disclaimer. At the same time, the bad actors that the EU is so paranoid about (Russians secretly undermining our democracy and other boogeymen) will obviously not use the label.

But it's another tool in the EU's toolkit to arbitrarily enforce fines on big tech when politically convenient, of course. That's one thing we remain good at.

Unlike the US, wealth takes on the EU could perhaps raise revenue without disrupting innovation, because here in the EU, we have little innovation and self made wealth to begin with - so there's nothing to disrupt.

But taxing inheritances would still be preferred mechanism rather than taxing unrealized gains I think. That would target the EU's unproductive rent seeking heirs the best.

How does it perform on HuggingFaceExploit bench? Suspiciously absent, so not sure if I can take the model seriously.

On a serious note, I hope they improved their extremely sabotaging and unspecific bio safeguards, which prevented Fable from being used in any codebase that ever so slightly grazed medical terminology or data and made me switch to 5.6 Sol.