Tier3r

The feeling I'm getting is management took such a huge stance (the capex, the name change, etc) on it it'd be humiliating to turn 180 and ditch it now (they've spent 50 billion on Reality Labs so far). So they're quietly pushing it aside and one day when people aren't looking, they'll take it to the back of the house and shoot it in the head. Probably call it an "internal re-org" or something like that.

The only reason I can think that this atrocity got deployed was from an engineering perspective, creating AI profiles to engage theoretically gives FB a powerful lever to increase engagement, because you'd have this entire new field to collect data, experiment and test people's responses. In other words, it would turn engagement into a form tractable to optimisation algorithms.

I'd argue that it hasn't come to pass, but it is not wrong that its a better way to teach. Virtually all education has been set up in an industrial line style of pre-u education -> university -> companies -> profits -> some value to society. Every part has been attempted to be structured to optimise for the subsequent stage - companies optimisie for profits, universities optimise for employment rate and salary, high schools optimise for college entrance rates, etc. Yet because of Goodhart's and organizational incompetence, each part optimises badly, so education gets exponentially disconnected from each. His proposals are valuable to society, but the system is structurally against it.

The only way this works if it skips the assembly line right down to being of value to society, ie you set up a system which explicitly transforms that teaching into things like startups, research, nonprofits etc.

I don't think the Biden admin can criticize Xi for cyber warfare with a straight face.

In intelligence/performance. It's admittedly a fuzzy notion. Most benchmarks will probably show decreasing gains between generations. Similar to time/space complexity, trying to debate about what performance/intelligence is will get into a million definitions, caveats and technicalities. But a relative comparison between inputs and outputs is gives us useful information.

The inputs - data, compute and parameters - going into training these models have grown by many orders of magnitude between each gen. There's a lot of fuzziness about how much better each gen has gotten, but clearly 4 is not many orders of magnitude better than 3 by any reasonable definition. This mental model isn't useful to say how good each gen is, but it is quite useful to see the trend and make long term predictions.

We are likely going to get there. Similar to the steam/combustion engines (and other core technologies like computers, wireless transmission etc) there's first a massive rush to increase the power of it, at the cost of efficiency and effectiveness for more niche use cases. Then it is specialised to various use cases with large improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. My own prediction for where most gains will now come is

1) Creating new "harnesses" for models that connect to various systems, APIs, frameworks, etc. While this sounds "trivial", a lot of gains can come from this. Similar to how the voice version of ChatGPT was (apparently) amazing, all you really had to do was create an additional voice to text layer and another text to voice layer.

2) Increasing specialisation of models. I predict over time that end user AI companies (e.g those that just use models and not develop them), will use more and more specialised models. The current, almost monolithic, system where every service from text summary to homework help is plugged into the same model will slowly change.

From the amount of data each successive generation used (which grew many orders of magnitude each time) to the decreasing, logarithmic performance, it's quite clear the steam is running out on shoving more data into it. If one plots the data to performance graph, its horribly logarithmic. In another perspective, the ability of LLMs to transfer learning actually decreases exponentially the larger they and the data sets get. This fits into the how humans have to specialise in topics because the mental models of one field is very difficult to transfer to another.

I fear not the man who has written 10,000 features once, but the man who has written 1 feature 10,000 times

Something interesting I heard from a chip company that's huge in the space and work intimately with many automotive companies - why Chinese companies grow so fast is because their development cycle for a car is ~2-3 years, compared to traditional manufacturers who take 5-7 years. This is a massive edge in pushing out new features and exploiting the very rapid new tech - batteries, self driving, etc.

If one gets into the weeds of the whole messy thing, the Shanghai Communique acknowledges the position of both sides (Taiwan and China) that there is one China, the 1982 Joint Communique acknowledged the Chinese position and said the US had no intention of pursuing a "two Chinas" or "one China and Taiwan" policy. And of course there's a non stop stream of such political speak, which is a red herring for the whole issue. Beyond minor changes to wordings, the main things the US did that screwed over Taiwan:

1) Revoking the mutual defense treaty which legally bound the US to defend Taiwan, replacing it with a more vague law where military intervention was not clear. 2) Recognizing the PRC as the legitimate representative of China.

To align your claims slightly, Taiwan also claims the same section of the SCS (actually it claims a slightly larger part), so strictly speaking it is what happens if the "Chinese claims" are realised (Taiwan and China work jointly to support their claims, ironically enough). In real terms the economic effects of China with respect to the SCS are greatly exaggerated for a number of reasons. First being that shipping can be routed through Indonesia. It is not a chokepoint, it just happens to be the shortest route. Second, blockades have little to do with recognising swaths of ocean as territory. These are enforced by navies, and most blockades in history have not happened within the blockaders' own waters (for obvious reasons). It is no easier for China to blockade trade in the region if it claims the SCS. And third, of all the major economic powers, China has historically been the least likely to enact economic warfare like blockades or sanctions. There is also a fourth aspect where in the current political environment, the globalised, trade based economic order is the least popular in the US and assorted European states, not China (who in fact desperately needs trade).

There exists a third possibility where the US and China sign an under the table deal for China to invade, the US to saber rattle and China to allow the flow of chips to continue. The present direction seems to be the US is "de-risking" from Taiwan by moving chip production to the US, so if China does invade they aren't caught in a bind.

That is false equivalence, there's a class of things that should rightfully be discouraged from military use (chemical/biological weapons, land mines, phosphorous weapons) because of the significant harm/side effects they cause beyond some definition of acceptable.

That seems like a good idea. I am puzzled by what benefit the RL has in OP. It seems like a well defined constraint optimisation problem that could be done without RL, for example in the way you mentioned.

Google is getting enshittified. It's already visible in many small ways. I was just using Google maps and in the route they called X (bus) Interchange as X International. I can only assume this happened because they are using AI to summarise routes now. Why in the world are they doing that? They have exact location names available.

I'm also wondering this. Two possibilities. One, find the first principles/root node/glue that holds many disparate concepts together in some causative way. Two, the specific procedure/step/concept that you keep reusing across multiple problems.