For everything that exists, there are people who think it shouldn’t exist. Fortunately, society doesn’t ban everything that disagrees with some people, and even more fortunately, we now live in a multipolar world where what is available doesn’t depend on the whims of a single pseudo-moralistic government.
I’d be interested to know what you think the “several layers” above a system that solves open mathematical problems in an afternoon, and writes entire operating systems from scratch, are.
The point is that the deciding is the "higher layer." It's not that LLMs cannot, but LLMs as designed do not. They are not designed for free-ranging days off, they are designed to help us do things, and that makes them somewhere between us and published works.
It's no different than an editor standing between the author and a book, or a publisher, or a printing press. It's part of the process of idea realization, so it's just on that spectrum somewhere between book sale and author idea. (even though in another flipflop, that editor might be an author and now elevated to the premier deciding role). It's about how the tool fits, not what the tool is ultimately capable of.
This terrible argument comes up in relation to AI over and over again. I don’t care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average person at brain surgery, I care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average brain surgeon. Outperforming “a human” at a specialist task is still essentially worthless.
The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?
> and writes entire operating systems from scratch
ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.
I would go as far as to say the LLM part has peaked.
To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.
But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.
Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.
Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.
Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.
Governments are just a structure for people to coordinate collective action. In democracies, it’s not that distinct from “us all”. We exercise this responsibility through representatives but they are our agents not our rulers. Outcomes depend on our ability to direct them, and the ability of our opponents to do so likewise.
For the most part, I like to forward evolve solutions so I happily don’t care if Las Vegas runs out of water or whatever. I’ll find a way later. So I take responsibility for my bit. I just don’t care about this particular negative outcome.
Funny enough, Las Vegas has been planning for this outcome and won't run out of water. Only agriculture users will be impacted, who consume ~50% of the total annual Colorado River Basin. So, to your point, the ag users responsible for overconsumption for decades will be the ones primarily exposed to the outcome. Municipal water systems will continue to function as they do today with available water reserves and flows.
not only do they exist, they are by far the more common variant. Whenever you hear about a massive unfunded pension liability it's a defined benefit plan.
> The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well, which means you get consistent designs. You end up aligning on a generic mean because of it, which is often why you see these repeated aesthetics.
The funny thing is that looking like everyone else was once considered the definition of good UI design, because it helps users understand a new interface. Then mobile apps came and suddenly UI design was about “expressing your brand” or whatever.
I think it's important to separate patterns from aesthetics. Patterns help us understand a new interface for sure, but aligned aethetics start to look mundane. That's why I was specifically calling out the color usage and typefaces.
I actually think the other things that Jim mentioned, such as the async task gradient / standard sidebar for agents are good things.
The above thread was about quality issues, not ethical issues such as “slave labor” (a term somehow reserved for certain countries, even though most countries use unfree prison labor, including the US and much of the EU).
when i first knew i wanted to align audio to text, i reached for aeneas, which was built for this exact problem/product (https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/)
however, it drifted by hundreds of seconds deep into chapters and emits no confidence signal, so i couldn't eval it cleanly
so i switched to a neural acoustic model trained with ctc (meta's massively multilingual speech aligner, it ships inside torchaudio): it outputs a probability for each character at every frame of audio, and viterbi decoding finds the most probable path that spells exactly our text, with a per-word probability
that probability is the gate: a book ships read-along only if its median confidence and coverage clear a bar. moby dick's didn't, so it's honestly text-only
Why would capex need to be covered by income during a time of investment and infrastructure buildup? Did income from the Apollo program cover its expenses?
Public investment was responsible for Apollo, so there was no expectation of profitability. Private investment is largely responsible for the AI buildout, and private investment isn't doing that for charity
If I give you 5 trillion dollars I want to get that back plus a percentage increase on top for my troubles, right? Government programs might run without the expectation of paying back taxpayers but investors are less generous.
Also they might not be as smart as they have made out to be. This time it seems they might be spending more to capture market than the market is worth.
Still, there are plenty of people who take their cut of the money on the way. So at least those people will be happy.
Because most of the capital assets depreciate over a period of 5 years or so so you have to make the expenditures back during that time or you can't book any revenue.
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