elzbardico
This is something that requires an ethos completely different from how amazon works and the way jeff bezos sees the world.
By not limiting WIP they are actually making their employees less efficient.
It is not a demerit, actually I think that it is a very elegant outcome how many problems could be solved by generation and this probably show us how language is a far more important thing than we ever thought it was.
The "baby steps" are not there just for intelectual satisfaction, the baby steps give you the building blocks to understand things that become progressively more complex. The baby steps are tools, that once you get familiar with them, you'll find new and new uses everywhere.
A good practical illustration of this: It is pretty hard to figure out how differential equations can be useful if you don't understand what they are. And yet, I bet that on january of 2020, there was at least one math teacher deep down in the amazonian jungle playing with a compartimental model based on a system of ordinary differential equations, to figure out the diverse scenarios this new epidemic could play out if that scary new virus escaped China and those few cruise ships.
Another example: take the concept of backpropagation: the underlying idea behind it is the chain rule from calculus, used to work backward through a computation and calculate how each parameter affects the error. Now, it is way easier to understand it in a small CNN that you are training to recognize handwritten digits than trying to understand it in the context of a full transformer model. A digit classifier is something that is way easier and affordable for you to fiddle with stuff and develop and intuition on loss functions, gradients, backpropagation and overfitting.
In the second world war, Germany had impressive science and technology, but, as Stalin said, quantity is a quality in itself, and The Third Reich found out that it was an impossible task to get the metals and fuels for their advanced jet engines, rockets and U2 boats, when between then and those resources there were masses of tens of millions of under-equipped and malnourished soviet soldiers fighting what was an existencial war for them.
Who would know that optimizing for the next quarter would also not be a recipe for long term value creation in arts too?
Now, compare it with my own situation living in a medium mountain city in Brazil. Whenever I wanted to read a book published in the US, I had to go to a physical book shop in a major city at least some 100 miles from my city, and pay for each book, at least twice (probably more) that now I pay a month for o'Reilly.
Of course I would read each book cover to cover, and come back to it multiple times, until I had to start doing things like taping the cover back to the book.
The world should not be made more vulnerable just because someone in Idaho would be pissed because if they can't run Photoshop 2.0 anymore in a newer version of an operating system.
Then, after ruling your city, you could start exporting a few crows to neighboring cities, so they could recruit in your behalf.
After your first state, the whole country, then Canada, central america, western europe. Freight liners full of your crows' Army crossing the oceans. Enforcing non-fly zones, eliminating political enemies, spying, policing your domains, directing and supervising human workers.
Command a few AI data centers and a few research labs, put then to work 24/7 on neuralink interfaces for crows, so you could have AI-enabled, starlink connected squadrons of crows.
Then, an accelerated genetic improvement program, CRISPR, cloning, all the stuff. AI-Enabled-Starlink-Connected-Super-Crows. At your command!
Frankly, you should work more on your ambition levels.
First, it has a canon, every rationalist ends up referencing Yudowsky, arguments frequently refer back to earlier ones, and to make matters worse, by shorthand ("Molochs", "The Litany of Tarski", "conflict vs mistake theory")
Like the Talmud, rationalists like to use extreme hypotheticals to test principles. The contrivance of the situations is the point, as if stress-testing a rule by applying it to extreme situations to distil it to a single variable problem.
Both writing traditions keep opposing arguments in full. The Talmud records minority options and the full log of disputes that went for centuries. Rationalist's steelmanning is basically the same.
It is not surprising that Yudkowsky is Jewish and grew up Orthodox. A lot of other very important figures are also Jewish like Scott Alexander, so, it is plausible that they brought a lot of the disputation-as-study and commentary-on-commentary traditions with them and set the tone for the community.
Of course, I am not directly comparing the Talmud to Rationalist writing. The Talmud is ultimatelly a legal document, its hypotheticals feed a system that tells people how to act, compressing centuries of legal precedent, this is by nature dense, and this density makes it hard to read more than simply verbose. Rationalist blogs are often long due to a lack of professional editing.
It is not only a matter of the labs having a deep pocket for unlimited tokens, but also deep pockets to build a team of mathematicians and engineers around it for pure marketing purposes.
A lot of those problems probably remained unsolved for so long, because frankly, there's no much money to be made directly out of them. You can't patent a proof.
Thus, progress on each problem was restricted to the efforts of isolated researchers across the world that most of time didn't know each other and that would only communicate through papers and the occasional conference, or maybe a conversation here and there in a forum. But, should any of those problems became a small manhattan project with a team of mathematicians working in the same institution, talking to each other every day, and with unlimited computational resources, I bet a lot of them wouldn't have remain unsolved for so long.
Of course, LLMs can speed up a lot of work, even find unexpected relationships between previously published work that remained overlooked until now, but let's make no mistakes, a lot of this is the result of putting unlimited resources in specifically chosen problems, including professional mathematicians, software engineers building custom harnesses and so on.
In a way it kinds of resemble IBM Deep Blue against Kasparov farse. While nowadays chess engines can beat a grand master, at that time Kasparov was in reality a single human playing against a team of Grandmasters and Engineers assisted by a computer.
Anthropic and OpenAI couldn't care less about the science. This is all very expensive PR and marketing. But until the day they can get a Trump prompting claude something like "Hello super-intelligence, solve erdos problem number XXX to me" and have claude returning a correct proof, no, AI didn't solve anything, it was a computational tool that sped up human work.
TV could have been used to ensure every kid in the world had access to the same educational opportunities a Venture Capitalist or a new yorker banker kid has, or it could be used to massify culture and propaganda. We, as societies choose to have a SEO infested internet.
Nothing that has been made by humanity is final, inevitable. There are people who may want you to think so, but they are lying to you. It is not like the 4th law of Newton was that we had to have continuous economic growth so it makes sense to have compound interest. It is not like weak nuclear force means government will spend more than what their revenues, but that instead of printing money directly to account for that, they need to come up with complicated debt schemes that make sure the one best positioned in financial system can sow what was taken via money devaluation from the poor and the middle class, and then use this extra money to research technologies to put those people out of jobs.
All of those things are political and social choices, neither is the result of a technology per se.
Yeah, either way we're fucked economically with AI: at one side we have a fucking giant bubble crashing, and on the other side we have the mother of all recessions due to the biggest deflationary event ever.
Every fucking decent economist knows that even when he is telling otherwise to keep the porridge coming to his table; but you using AI to say it, it is just fucking bad taste.
I have the distinct impression that MBA and salesman folks think that adequate mathematical terminology is somewhat less "macho", and this impression is re-inforced by the fact that they also love military-adjacent terms and analogies.
Probably the strategy is making as much money as possible while there's demand from the AI labs and then the founder will figure out their next steps with a bit more money in their accounts.