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I have great respect for Terry Tao but let's not forget that while he won the Fields Medal at a relatively young age, he hasn't made any major contribution to math comparable to proving Fermat's Last Theorem (Andrew Wiles did), solving the Poincaré's Conjecture (Grigori Perelman did) or Yitang Zhang's proof progress towards solving the twin prime conjecture.

Perhaps for mathematicians like Terry Tao AI will be a tool they will rely on, but for mathematicians like the aforementioned, a pen, paper and the published research literature will continue to be their main tools!

These seem classic challenges with running distributed systems loads that are not specific to training LLMs.

Anyone of the super computers listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 suffers from the same issues.

Think about it. While the national labs use these systems to model serious stuff -such as climate or nuclear weapons- Meta uses them to train LLMs. What a joke, honestly!

RIP. A great reminder that great achievers tend to be idiosyncratic people, not necessarily "by the book, SAT 1600, GPA 4.0, Ivy League Plus" people.

We should all be thankful for her contributions and for those who preceded her who were similarly "abnormal" by the standards of their time.

Anybody knows what the heck is going on with the broadcast? All I see is "awaiting acquisition of signal".

Thank you in advance!

As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree.

When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.

The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.

For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.

The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.

Safety is one of Python's greatest advantages over C or C++. Why would anyone use unsafe Python when P0ython doesn't have other features such as type safety and all the debugging tools that have been built for C and C++ over time is beyond me.

Python is a great language, but just as the generation of kids who got out of computer science programs in the 2000s were clueless about anything that wasn't Java, it seems this generation is clueless about anything that isn't Python.

There was life before Python and there will be life after Python!

A lot of people, particularly those raised in non democratic countries, or are first generation Americans who grew up in families that came from non democratic countries, have this distorted notion that "democracy" means that every entity in the United States must be governed democratically. They fail to understand that in the United States, "democracy" refers strictly to certain parts of the government. Other entities that exist in society, whether it's for profit companies or non profit entities, can be governed anyway they want as long as they are consistent with government laws -themselves enacted by representatives of the people.

Citizens having a say in deciding who sits at the top of the government is a revolutionary idea. Differentiating government from people is another revolutionary idea. These two ideas triggered America's founding in contraposition to the form of totalitarian governments that had been the norm in Europe until the 1700s.

I fully blame Google for fostering this environment. In fact, Google's two co-founders, particularly Sergey Brin, were very proud of this being in Google's DNA.

Here is the upside. Given Google's power -although its influence to set norms in tech has diminished in recent years- I hope incidents like this set a new normal in which when you go to work for a tech company, you are measured exclusively for your contributions on the technical domain -whether they are technical, sales, or what have you.

I always found the idea of "bringing your whole self to work" complete BS. This example illustrates why.

100%.

Which is not to say that every nice person is an embezzler.

I was given the advice early in my career of being mindful of very nice people. I misunderstood it as "be a disgusting person".

You need to be nice and be a honest person of integrity. That's the magic. Not "OR" but "AND".

What's current USCIS policy, in terms of months, for allowing out of status immigrants to be sponsored for say an H1B visa? 6 months, 1 year, longer?

Thank you in advance!

Go is a finite search game. So each chess.

Equating intelligence to being good as these games is as silly as equating intelligence to being good at solving differential equations. Computers have bested humans at solving differential equations for many decades now. Nobody said "gee humans are now stupid".

AI, as a knowledge field, is biased in this notion that all it matters when it comes to intelligence is that computers beat humans at Go or Chess.

It's a nice high level overview about the state of the art in machine learning.

If you have watched his other talks, Jeff Dean generally does a very good job explaining things from a high level point of view.

Here is a controversial view: I think that the current neural networks driven approach coupled with massively distributed computing has plateaued.

For the machine learning field to move forward, it will need a different, less data/compute hungry paradigm.

As the author highlights, this is not a new thing. What is definitely a more recent thing is that half-life is much shorter than before. Now it is fair to say that even the knowledge that's most staying power has at most a 2-3 year half life.

My own solution to this problem has been to work in startups for 2-3 years and then move on rather than try to seek a well paid job at a large, prestigious company.

Why? I started my career at one of these brand name, "everybody wants to get in" kind of companies that hadn't made institutional layoffs ever. When time came to do their first mass layoff, I saw people who had spent their entire careers at the company lose their jobs unemployable because thy had essentially become bureaucrats.

Startups offer you the possibility of "on the job training" for the most recent technical stack. And precisely because there are too many people with golden handcuffs at the large companies, good startups are a bit easier to get into (not "easy", but "easier").

The downside is that 90% of startups fail, and you need to live with that. At the same time, if you happen to work at one that succeeds spectacularly, you won't have to worry about making a living until you die.

Don't get lost in technicalities and don't impute me what I never said. I never claimed that Twitter is, from a legal standpoint, bound by the First Amendment. What I said is that Parag Agrawal and team made the conscious decision to institute censorship policies incompatible with the First Amendment.

Obviously, the First Amendment case law only applies to public entities -originally only to federal entities and since the passage of the 14th amendment due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R... also to states and municipalities- and certain private entities that receive public money such as universities.

There are also limitations to broadcasters that use properties, such as the allocation of frequencies, regulated by government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine .

While how these latter policies apply to social media companies such as X/Twitter is part of ongoing debate and litigation, private social media companies, irrespective of the law cases, can decide what kind of censorship regimes they like to have.

Under Parag Agrawal and team, Twitter was a far left platform.

Under Elon Musk and team, Twitter/X is a centrist platform, meaning that neither the far right nor the far left have a free reign and the big middle is pretty much free to say anything they want as long as the First Amendment is not violated.

That's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about Twitter's policies or community standards favoring certain points of view over others.

Under Elon Musk, while no moderation method is ever going to be perfect, more people can express their sincerely held views without fear of censorship than under the leadership of Parag Agrawal. That's just reality.

You don't have to take my word for it. The former CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, said he didn't believe in the First Amendment,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2icsx9U8M8U

The First Amendment is one of America's distinctive feature vis a vis other countries. It guarantees the freest expression regime there is in the world.

Elon Musk, in acquiring Twitter and firing Parag Agrawal, restored the balance in the force.

Elon is smart enough and will make this work. Had it not been because of his purchase of Twitter, we would not have a free speech oriented social media in the world.

SolarCity ended up integrated in Tesla and the same could happen with Twitter.

Great article! I make a living as a software engineer but my formal training is in electrical engineering (the applied math of the discipline).

In EE, the mantra "if your design doesn't work is useless" was repeated ad nauseum. There was little to no credit to half working designs. Also in most EE products, specially semiconductors, the final product cannot be patched, so the emphasis on good design was immense.

Come to the world of software engineer where the low barrier of entry attracts a lot of people interested mostly in making easy money.

I have seen more horror code in my 10+ years as a software engineer than I can count.

Some developers in particular those of the kind "I will spend 3 days coding nonstop with redbull" produce such shitty software that there is a name for them. John Ousterhout calls them "tactical tornados". I have had the misfortune of working side by side with a couple of tactical tornados and my life was miserable left to fix the mess they left behind once they left the company.

Say what you will, but I started my professional career with computers back in 1998 doing professional services for HP and its variant of UNIX, HP-UX, and I haven't looked back. As I kid I had played around with a number of personal computers that ran either MS-DOS, Windows or proprietary OS'es (such as the AmigaDOS).

To this day, I consider UNIX-Like systems to be a delight. Even Apple had to move to UNIX.

Big Tech would not exist without Linux (aka UNIX).