Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
GPUs may last 6 yrs or more. Fiber vs GPUs is however not the right comparison. Fiber vs Open models are. Open models have mostly caught up with frontier models. Now, with a reasonable harness and tools they can easily be useful for vast majority of users for a decade or more.
Comment · 1 month ago
For me opus-4.8 was the most useful coding model. Sure fable is better at planning but is expensive to use as a daily driver. But even fable, when it fails, fails in such strange ways that I am now convinced this intelligence is an illusion and path to AGI lies elsewhere. I was willing to buy the whole emergent intelligence claim till last year. Now, not so much. As for calling for slow down, sure the two companies kept parroting each other's lines but they were not slowing down the cash burn or gpu purchases. Why would they? The prize was too high. Now, with open Ai needing trillion dollar valuation to IPO and private funding possibly showing signs of slowing down (only for these labs because the valuation is too high to begin with for most prudent investors: My speculation) they have no option but to slow down. Then would you rather say, slowed down because we are running out of cash or that we are slowing down because national security? It really cannot be that they can't solve alignment but otherwise it is really powerful and improving. Simply because airgap exists and we know how to do it. If all else fails power off the freaking gigawatt cluster. More likely this recursive self improvement is an unstable loop and the model is likely degrading with self improvement effort. At 100's of millions per experiment this is going to be unsustainable.
Comment · 1 month ago
Cracks are starting to appear. Open Ai and Anthropic are publicly asking for slowdown in AI research. Translation: We see this technology not being any more useful than what it is now, no AGI is coming, and the first one to accept this and slow down the dollar burn rate will incur the wrath of the market. So let's say this big boogey man technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together. Bonus points if we can lobby for this to be included in the national security bucket. Then US govt can bail us out. Yay!

If Nvidia is the bank, they should be starting to sweat a bit. It's not often companies ask for a voluntary slowdown.

Comment · 1 month ago
Everyone is rushing to send signals of AI growth to the market. Their continued valuation growth depends on it. There is no real use story that cannot be met by smaller distilled models which are far more energy efficient. I am convinced the next step will be scaremongering impending extinction level event followed by need to classify AI activities as national security related. Once you become part of the military industrial complex, it's all gravy baby!
Comment · 8 months ago
Add a nice prior from a photograph, combine multiple measurements and presto you can pick out a person from a crowd with reasonable accuracy. No?
Comment · 8 months ago
Sci-fi ? You mean historical fiction!
Comment · 9 months ago
I understand model output put back into training would be an issue, but if model output is guided by multiple prompts and edited by the author to his/her liking wouldn't that at least be marginally useful?
Comment · 9 months ago
Does coffee accelerate rusting?
Comment · 9 months ago
You are ignoring the obvious difference between errors introduced while translating one near-formal-intent-clear language to another as opposed to ambiguous-natural-language to code done through a non-deterministic intermediary. At some point in the future the non-deterministic intermediary will become stable enough (when temperature is low and model versions won't affect output much) but the ambiguity of the prompting language is still going to remain an issue. Hence, read before commit will always be a requirement I think. A good friend of mine wrote somewhere that at about 5 agents or so per project is when he is the bottleneck. I respect that assessment. Trust but verify. This way of getting faster output by removing that bottleneck altogether is, at least for me, not a good path forward.
Comment · 9 months ago
This is pretty much how I use LLMs as well. These interactions have convinced me that while the LLMs are very convincing with persuasive arguments, they are wrong often on things I am good at; so much so that I would have a hard time opening PRs for code edited by them without reading it carefully. Gell-man amnesia and all that seems appropriate here even though that anthropomorphizes LLMs to an uncomfortable extent. At some point in the future I can see them becoming very good at recognizing my intent and also reasoning correctly. Not there yet.
Comment · 9 months ago
I have nothing against automated code completion on steroids or agents. What I cannot condone is not reading and understanding the generated code. If you have not understood your agent generated code, you will be "surprised" for sure, sooner or later.
Comment · 9 months ago
I don't know about you, but when the creator of a software says I have not read any of the code, I don't want to install or use it. Call me old fashioned. Really hoping this terrifying vibe coding future dies an early death before the incurred technical debt makes every digital interaction a landmine.
Comment · 1 year ago
Also, if you do not want to spend on any specialized fountain pen flush solution, diluted windex works very well. From the smell I am willing to bet that most fountain pen cleaning solutions are exactly that.

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