If they can convince the money hose that they just need one more OOM of compute bro, they can keep vacuuming infinity dollars. The incentive is obviously there for any amount of lying, but at some point, I assume even the most braindead investors will start asking around if this really is the only game in town.
Or maybe they won't, which would be an admission against the core tenet of capitalism, but this has been a crazy year, and it's only january. :/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/ And the companion piece on his blog.
What I didn't wager was that, potentially, nobody was trying. My mistake was — if you can believe this — being too generous to the AI companies, assuming that they didn’t pursue efficiency because they couldn’t, and not because they couldn’t be bothered.
This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.
I must've read the words "Jevon's Paradox" a hundred times today, I didn't realize that many people had their livelihood predicated on NVidia going to the moon forevermore.
I've been struggling with what the appropriate level of engagement for all the tech shit is.
I can stick to making fun of the AI crap and whatever else the tech people shit out because it's tangible for me, and I can more or less be an effective gatekeeper for my community, but the problems go beyond just a bunch of rich tech weirdos floating bad ideas, it's what they're trying to paper over. The fact that they're incompetent at it is very funny, but I've been laughing with gritted teeth for too long.
They understand that all of the major model providers is doing it, but since the major model providers are richer than they are, they can't possibly ask OpenAI and friends to stop, so in their heads, it is what it is and therefore must be allowed to continue.
Or at least, that's my face value read of it, I certainly hope I'm simplifying things too much.
The conspiracy theorist who lives in my brain wants to say its intentional to make us more open to blatant cheating as something that's just a "cost of doing business." (I swear I saw this phrase a half dozen times in the orange site thread about this)
The earnest part of me tells me no, these guys are just clowns, but I dunno, they can't all be this dumb right?
We're like 3 steps removed from the iq dickmeasurers moving from measuring skulls to comparing PoE builds.
I don't even know if I'm joking here, what the fuck are these people doing.
The computation seems to be generating a uniformly random set and picking a sample of it. I can buy that it'd be insanely expensive to do this on a classical computer, since there's no reasonable way to generate a truly random set. Feels kinda like an unfair benchmark as this wouldn't be something you'd actually point a classical computer at, but then again, that's how benchmarks work.
I'm not big in quantum, so I can't say if that's something a quantum computer can do, but I can accept the math, if not the marketing.
tfw the Holy Book (Atlas Shrugged) was misinterpreted.
It's also just less effective this time around. Everyone's afraid of being poor, capitalism as it exists functions based on that, so there's a strong emotion that gets people wrapped up with the NFT hype train.
It's a lot less convincing to go "Have fun being as productive as you are right now, loser.", at least without also going mask off and sounding like a supervillain.
Chat-GPT-TFSD-21guns can have a little anthropomorphism, as a treat.
There are companies doing "cool-sounding" things with AI like Waymo. "Good" would require more definition.