Gareth321

Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.

Comment · 3 days ago

Benchmaxing is defined as targeted post-training attempts to optimise for higher benchmarks. This doesn’t change the aggregate intelligence or capability of the model, so it can make a model appear more capable than it is.

Comment · 3 days ago

I’m hopeful mine survives until RAM and SSD prices return to Earth. Unless I drop it I suspect it will. It’s still going strong. Maybe the M8. Hopefully chips and local LLMs have developed to the degree that local inference will be good and fast.

Comment · 3 days ago

One might argue that we have calibrated drug safety to such a high degree that the aggregate negative social impacts are far higher than the costs of side effects. Of course we don’t want another thalidomide catastrophe but I think there are large potential test groups to mine who are much less sensitive to the risks. For example, the elderly and those with terminal diagnoses. Right now we only permit drug testing in very limited cases for the latter group, and only when the treatment is related to their terminal diagnosis. I’m seeing older people taking all kinds of experimental anti-aging drugs right now, either off label, or novel. We’re not collecting any of this data empirically because what they’re doing is not legal.

Further, [we are getting much better at simulating drug interactions.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41155903/) I strongly suspect AI will offer new probabilistic models to funnel novel drugs into more targeted trials which are much more likely to succeed. If we had 90% certainty of success and high certainty of lower adverse reactions I think we could allow much less stringent human trials. That means much lower cost and much faster turn-around.

Comment · 4 days ago

Elon Musk was the only investor. Which investors are you referring to? And yes, when you pay a premium for stock, you’re paying more than the intrinsic value. This was widely reported so I don’t understand why you would pretend that it’s a big secret.

Comment · 4 days ago

> I don’t see anything in what you wrote really support that Twitter did well after firing 80% of its staff.

That’s because I didn’t make any claims about X’s financial performance. I was explaining to you why you were wrong on some important facts.

> This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B.

First, you’re conflating revenue and profit, which is kind of unforgivable in this context. Second, I explained that in those years they made large profits. In my comment. Which you clearly didn’t read.

If this is just where you like to emotionally vent may I instead recommend Reddit? I like the interesting discussions here.

Comment · 5 days ago

It is estimated that only 2% of the global workforce is paying for AI right now. If that grows to double digits - especially in the 30%+ range - and Anthropic captures a significant proportion of it, their valuation is justified. This is assuming they don’t offer virtual employees and these are 100% in the pipeline.

Comment · 5 days ago

To be fair, if you told Amazon investors in 1997 that their investment would go up 3,300x and Amazon would be worth $2.7 trillion in 2026, they’d have called you insane too. There isn’t a mathematical reason Anthropic can’t be worth that in 2056. I don’t think it will be, but not because of the compounding returns.

Einstein once said “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.” It’s very hard for humans to comprehend compounding returns.

Comment · 5 days ago

> If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.

Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design.

Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits.

As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees.

I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs

Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on.