strangeloops85

A very important point! In Tristan (NYU prof)’s write up he noted evidence of the OpenAI mathematician team doing a lot of correction and guidance along the way. We are never told about this with openness and clarity. At a minimum, complete disclosure and honesty is needed by the companies and about the precise role of their staff members.

Are these companies expending any of their lobbying efforts or funds on this problem? Or are they just going to the easiest option? I'm not shedding any tears for the AI companies and their infra challenges. They're the ones driving a huge delta increase in energy use and emissions this coming decade, so their actions merit scrutiny and they are responsible for their actions and the resulting emissions that we will all suffer from. If I had my way, we'd stack an enormous carbon tax on all of them to force their hand.

Look, these companies are the ones selling a story of being benevolent (notwithstanding AI killing us all or putting everyone out of a job). And Anthropic is explicitly a B-corp. How does any of that square with taking any compute they can at any environmental cost?

The Memphis case to me is very illuminating: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260811-memphis-ai-da...

But it's ok, they're EAs and gave $1M to a Memphis nonprofit on 'AI education', while spending a $1B/ month renting Colossus:

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/anthropic-gifts-memphis-no...

Gotta love how all the companies' platitudes about sustainability become ludicrous as they begin burning natural gas at prodigious scales. But don't worry, "AI will solve climate change" so we can just pump extra CO2 now, right guys?

I am deeply, deeply cynical and honestly angry about these companies and their self-righteous protestations of being ethical, or public benefit corporations or whatever. Anthropic is benefiting from xAI's Memphis data center that is violating (previous, not anymore!) EPA standards, causing disproportionate impacts to nearby African-American communities. All the while, Ants appear to be floating on some higher effective altruist / B-corp plane. The little people and their petty concerns are just bumps on the road to RSI and ASI after all.

The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.

Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.

The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.

Really outrageous extortion. UCLA and UC as a whole are running budget deficits and facing reduced state support (as well as the grant cancelations). There's simply no money for this and the white house knows it.

The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do with how university expansions have been done in many countries.

Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.

It’s interesting how hard and widespread a push they’re making in advertising this - at this particular moment, when there are rumors of more high level recruitment attempts / successes by Zuck. OpenAI is certainly a master at trying to drive narratives. (Independent of the actual significance / advance here). Sorry, there are too many hundreds of billions of dollars involved to not be a bit cautious and wary of claims being pushed this hard.

I assume there was tool use in the fine tuning?

To those saying all you need is a lot of radiators.. remember that the radiators themselves gain heat from both sunlight and the Earth itself. It is a surprisingly tricky problem and, yes, all heat can be dissipated to achieve a desirable set point given sufficiently large area. But it is certainly not easier than just having say an economizer and dropping the data center in Iceland or a cold place. Makes no sense

At least for many engineering and science disciplines a solution remains to force students to actually try to learn the material: in-class, closed book exams. Nothing is ideal, but this does force students to actually engage with the material and problems. They are welcome to use LLMs all they want to help them study (though they should be careful given how often I catch them making horrible mistakes in my discipline). But the assessment will be of them and their brain.

Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.

For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.

I have to wonder what DOGE (including the alleged wunderkind Farritor that all the SV VCs were hailing) is planning for NSF. It’s amazing the arrogance of these people, to walk in and just do “hulk smash” on decades of hard work, infrastructure and institutional capacity.

This is perhaps a simplistic observation, but Bhartrihari’s linguistic idealism connects with how LLMs and their apparent intelligence is fundamentally language-driven. He would argue that is sufficient since our reality is fundamentally linguistic in nature:

“ Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute. So this is a strong form of idealism: things in our experience, and all things in existence, are fundamentally linguistic. We have no access to anything outside of language and therefore no reason to assume that there is, or ever was, anything separate from it.”

In theory it is less at risk, but in practice there may be fewer TAships due to general budget shortfalls and also more students competing for those spots.

OP here: I think the reason for reducing Ph.D. admissions is very simple and should be understandable to anyone who has ever been responsible for making payroll. We (at universities) have great uncertainty about future "revenue" (grants) with even funding for ongoing contracts/ grants not being guaranteed to come in next fiscal year. So we need to reduce expenses which are placed on the grants, the largest amount of which is paying for our trainees. The vast majority of universities in the US do not have extremely large endowments, and at least at the school I work at, the (very modest) endowment amounts that can be used for ongoing expenses already are.

I, as a PI, am not directly admitting anyone into my group this year to ensure I have enough funding to pay existing group members. We're hunkering down and making sure those we have now will be funded through the rest of their Ph.D. While this article is talking about program-level decisions, there is a bottom-up aspect as well - at my program and many others, we (faculty) directly admit students into our group and are often responsible for their salaries from day one. Many faculty are, at an individual level, making the same decision I am, to reduce or eliminate any admissions offers this year.

Edit: For reference, I am not at UPenn, but at a "typical" state school engineering program.

A very important statement is in the peer review file that everyone should read:

"The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices. The work is published for introducing a device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes."

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...