danaris
That doesn't mean there's any actual mechanism for me to do so.
What you're talking about requires a genuine breakthrough in AI research, not just iterative improvements on what we've already got. By their very nature, those are not something that can be predicted or relied upon; you cannot even be guaranteed that a given type of breakthrough will ever happen.
Previously, they had had both an oil bill, and a fair amount of electricity that the oil furnace used to operate. After the replacement, their combined gas and electric bill was less than just their electric bill had been before.
Since then they've also added a couple of sets of solar panels, bringing the overall ongoing cost down even further. (Of course, a large portion of their grid power is already renewable—hydro power—because of where they live.)
It just, y'know, isn't a good argument for having everyone work for Anthropic ^_^
Even given the significant advances in coding models, everything I've seen described and experienced myself with them tells me that non-coders simply aren't going to be able to build and maintain nontrivial projects with them unless they get still better at it. By a lot.
And in the realm of medicine, the kinds of mistakes they absolutely will make, and defend, confidently, will get people killed.
You do understand how individual slices decrease in size as you divide the pie more ways, right...?
They're not coming from LLMs. They're coming from mRNA-based treatments and applying standard science to their basic principles.
And just to reinforce what djierardi said, you can't make successful new drugs and treatments for diseases just by thinking about it really hard. Practical tests are an absolute, unavoidable necessity—and not even just the final clinical tests; you have to be able to see how the molecules you're synthesizing interact with living tissue of various types, among other things, before you can even hope to test on humans.
Delegate that entirely to an LLM, and you'll end up giving clinical test subjects something that will melt their flesh, or coagulate their blood, or give them turbo-cancer. Because there is no comprehensive dataset that they can use to figure that stuff out purely by computation. We, as a civilization, simply do not yet understand biology and chemistry well enough to model it at that level.
So stop trying to figure out just how OpenAI and Anthropic are playing 12D chess and actually this situation is fantastic and will result in them saving the world. They're just greedy, selfish companies trying desperately not to be left standing when the music stops and all the chairs have disappeared.
When considering questions like these, you can't look at what you want or even what the people you know want. You have to look at the overall statistics.
And given that when the Duo was announced, preorders nearly instantly slipped out by months, I think it's a fair take to say that people want these kinds of devices.
I haven't yet seen one in person, but from what I've seen online, I think it unlikely that I will want one...but I can see what's appealing about them to those who do.
~ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Generations
And, moreover, inequality breaks democracy.
Their ability to spend effectively infinite amounts of money makes them nearly immune to prosecution, and even moreso to litigation. They also spend it on lobbying, which in many cases amounts to buying the loyalty of Congresspeople.
Yeah, you can totally blame them, hold them accountable, and it will help fix emissions problems.
Generally, in the US, unemployment lasts a few months tops. Regardless of how long you worked, or how long you will be without work.
For instance, the much-touted "iCloud hack" of several years back was not made possible by iCloud being insecure; it was made possible because the users whose accounts were accessed had their passwords stolen in, IIRC, spearphishing attacks.
If that doesn't happen, then companies will just continue to make excuses for why they need to lay off 20,000 workers after having their best quarter ever.
Let's assume for the moment that such a thing can exist. Why does it not exist?
What do we know about free (as in speech) software?
- It tends to be written by people on their own time, or funded by companies that want to make sure it continues to exist (though generally, AFAIK, such companies only support existing projects; they don't fund people to create new open-source projects that wouldn't be under their control).
- Largely because of this and the Unix philosophy, it tends to be created as individual projects each made to do one job well, which can then be glued together to do larger jobs.
- It tends to be much less user-friendly than commercial software.
Putting all this together, it is not too hard to see why there aren't widely-adopted free-as-in-speech phone OSes. A phone OS is a large project, which needs to bring a lot of smaller components together within it in a consistent and predictable way; it is a very significant undertaking, requiring a high number of person-hours of work to make usable; and vitally, in order to be commercially viable, it needs to be user-friendly.
So it is very likely that such a project could, theoretically exist, but in practice never will, unless some very wealthy person or group decides to fund its creation without hope of commercial ROI.
...if you're primarily concerned with security.
Most people are not. They're primarily concerned with convenience, staying connected to people in their lives, and entertaining themselves.
And guess what? The iPhone does a pretty good job at this, while also being very good (not perfect) at security.
In general, if you start thinking of anything in the mode of "most people would be better off doing X the way I do it, but they don't", you need to start thinking about a) in what way they would be better off (because in 99% of cases, it's not going to be "universally, with no tradeoffs"), and b) what differences in understanding and priorities "most people" might have from you that would cause them to make those choices.
Take with appropriate seasoning, given its anecdotal nature.
Maybe their resume is just written really badly.
As you say, there's just nowhere near enough information.
Are they, though?
Increasingly, in the US, police are being trained to respond to any hint of danger with hair-trigger reflexes and lethal force. They are being taught to see themselves as constantly under siege, and every member of the public who's not a wealthy, able-bodied white person as a potential enemy, actively seeking to kill them.
If I knew there was someone with a mental illness nearby that made them sometimes violent and unpredictable, the person I would want around wouldn't be a police officer. It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
Sure, it might also be helpful to have someone who's physically strong enough to temporarily (safely) restrain the person having a psychotic episode, or a PTSD flashback, or just a plain old panic attack, to ensure they can't harm themselves or anyone around them while they are being helped.
But if someone has one of those kinds of problems, and I'm nearby, the last thing I want is for a heavily-armed member of the Aryan Brotherhood with a badge to shoot them dead and then boast about it online.
It's not fast food, because customers pick up their own food from the counter there. Ditto with fast casual.
Fine dining restaurants would see huge drops in business if they tried to replace human wait staff with robots. (Unless they're already doing some kind of futuristic theming.)
So you're targeting low-end table-service restaurants...to replace their below-minimum-wage wait staff (remember, tipped minimum wage is something like $2.30 federally) with robots that don't get tips, do require a hefty up-front investment and nontrivial maintenance costs, probably a subscription with the company that sells them, and are likely to have a lot of problems especially for the early adopters—things like dropping meals, crashing into tables, crashing into customers, running over toes, purses, and small children...
This really seems like it's something that's going to work for a few gimmicks, but not in any widespread manner within the foreseeable future.
This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.
That is to say, in the classroom.
In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".
Anyone who has to work with the product is a stakeholder. Their stake in it is the fact that they will be interacting with it, and thus they care how, and whether, it works.
Sure, if you redefine what that means.
Before this year, "recursive self-improvement" in the context of AI research meant the holy grail: an artificial intelligence that was capable of improving itself, unattended, in ways that humans can't even imagine, so that within a relatively short period of time, it reaches superintelligence and ignites the Singularity.
What's happening now is emphatically not that. And if you think it is, you are buying straight-up propaganda. "I gave an LLM a tool that lets it make largely-random decisions about how to train its next iteration when I tell it to do so" bears little to no resemblance to RSI. Because it is, beyond a rounding error, completely missing out on the "improvement" part.
It's only irrational if you take their words at face value.
Personally, I believe there are two camps of people within Anthropic:
1) People who genuinely believe they are going to create the Machine God. For these people, the reason they continue is because if they don't, someone else might! And if someone else builds it, it's more likely to want to kill them rather than other people! (Whereas, of course, if they build it, it's more likely to want to kill other people!)
2) People who don't believe in this, but pay lip service to it. For these people, the reason they spread the bullshit around is because they think it will make them more money. At everyone else's expense, of course.
And humans being humans, I suspect that there are a fair number of people who hold both these beliefs in their minds at the same time.
So OpenAI gets their words taken not merely at face value, but in the fullest good faith, taking the absolute most charitable interpretation of what they say...
...but my words get treated in the most adversarial manner possible, reading things into them that I certainly never said or even suggested, in order to dismiss me out of hand.
This despite the fact that OpenAI has a massive financial interest in convincing you of what they say, especially if it's false, while I'm just some guy on the internet who thinks it's not a great idea to put too much trust in the giant megacorp that's promising, if we give it even more absurd amounts of money, to put us all out of jobs.
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
Don't let the HN echo chamber fool you: a lot of non-technical people share this view.