djokkataja

"The author declares no conflicts of interest."

The first part of the sentence is important:

> Importantly it was admitted that internal Anthropic models had been used in their proof of Euler blowup; I therefore felt I could not consider Levent to be an independent academic.

If an Anthropic employee is doing independent research, but with models that aren't available to the public (because they're internal models), then . . . idk. It's not clear to me why that should necessarily require a refusal to cooperate between OpenAI and Anthropic employees who are excited about solving a problem like this.

For me, the bigger question here is what "internal models" means to these employees, especially in the context of the OpenAI employees repeatedly avoiding directly answering whether their model had been trained on Tristan's and Levent's ongoing work on the problem. It had always seemed like a loophole that AI companies might be tempted to exploit: yeah, they can say that they won't train on your data, but if an AI company doesn't care about ethics, they might go ahead and train a model for internal use only on everyone's data anyway, just to have as much data as possible and potentially gain an advantage in what the company can internally do. They could never publicly release any versions of a model like that, of course. And of course this is speculation.

> get so much done

Compared to what??

What's the benefit to an "edgelord", though? Why bother?

It doesn't explicitly mention a license, but it has this right underneath "Overview of the Insights" near the top:

> A quick note: All of the data visualizations in this roundup are free to use as common content. You are welcome to share and republish them.

It looks like it's supposed to be a general purpose robot servant, although "Follows you around" from the list of skills on the pre-order page is hilariously disturbing. There would be a market for people willing to pay for a very humanlike robot, for the novelty if nothing else.

Plus if you want to make a robot which can do everything a human can do, without exception, you'll start running into weird edge cases if you make it with a fixed wheeled base. Like suppose you want it to climb a ladder or turn sideways to slip into a narrow space and retrieve something. Or maybe you want it to be able to climb in and out of vehicles designed for human occupants. Would you want to have to buy a special vehicle to bring your robot somewhere with you?

And judging by the name of the company and that they likely aspire towards more than what they've made so far, I'd guess that a long-term goal could be to also make something for people who realize the weakness of their flesh and crave the strength and certainty of steel.

The space race was to the death. Both sides thought that losing meant they'd get nuked or taken over by the other. A narrative like that for Mars is harder. "We'll take over the red planet and come back and take over the earth! . . . Someday!"

For better or for worse, the equivalent race right now is in AI.

There's a lot of psychological factors in markets swinging up and down, and there are always people saying that there's going to be a recession. Also, if you think about HN specifically: if the market is doing well, great. If the market is doing poorly, then cash may be harder to come by, but there's way more upside for growth as the market recovers. Jumping on a fearmongering bandwagon doesn't fit with the entrepreneurial culture of the site.

Are there any companies that are hybrids of this, where they have some fixed structure in terms of voting power that's, say, 60% employee-owned, and 40% which is publicly traded and has a board? So the employee-owned side of things maintains the primacy of their skin in the game because the 60% control that they have is not something which can be amended, but they can also receive outside investment to some degree? As someone who's definitely not an expert on these things, the idea seems intriguing to me, but I have no idea if there are some reasons why this obviously cannot logically or practically work (as opposed to simply being something which people don't presently do--or something which I just haven't heard of people doing).

It's called a population pyramid because the shape of that graph for a growing population is a pyramid. If you look at some of the African countries on that site (like, say, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania, if you're starting from the United States page), you can see they're closer to a pyramid shape because they have higher birth rates and higher mortality over time.

Also, on the graph you linked to, you can click on the line in the graph of population versus year to the right, and if you start back in the 1950s and work your way along to the present, you can see the big lump of the baby boomers getting older. That's why people say the United States has an aging population.

> The alternative is dying a natural death of old age. This is apart of the human experience.

This seems almost comically lemming-like. Fear of missing out . . . on dying?

> Getting frozen and brought back in the distant future, even if we assume you'll be in great health, means all your friends and family are gone.

(Assuming none of your friends and family were also frozen.) But more importantly, I wouldn't suggest that people should aspire to death because of losing all their friends and family. If starting over (in what's likely an unfamiliar society and culture) is all one's got, that's still something.

Mainly I find it grotesque that it might be a way to slip past death, but only for rich people. But I can't bring myself to suggest that it would necessarily be a better universe if they took the normal death route instead.

There are lots of different flavors of anarchy, and anarchists can't agree on them. Or--and I think this might be quoting or paraphrasing someone: there are as many different kinds of anarchy as there are anarchists. And sometimes their reactions to each other are very strongly negative, like "That's not really anarchy, that's just preserving capitalism via a last-ditch attempt!"

Also I think in the US at least, religion plays into it. God over humanity is conceptually the ultimate hierarchy model that Christians buy into. So it seems like Christians often don't have as much issue with embracing the idea of one person being over another person as a reflection of that model. This seems a little bit funny given how anarchic Jesus was, but he never said, "Yo, check it out, I am literally an anarchist and you should be too," and so they seem to have missed that.

I agree with Moravec. As he points out a bit later on:

> Only on the outside, where they can be appreciated as a whole, will the impression of intelligence emerge. A human brain, too, does not exhibit the intelligence under a neurobiologist's microscope that it does participating in a lively conversation.

We only have fuzzy definitions of "intelligence", not any essential, unambiguous things we can point to at a minute level, like a specific arrangement of certain atoms.

Put another way, we've used the term "intelligent" to refer to people (or not) because we found it useful to describe a complex bundle of traits in a simple way. But now that we're training LLMs to do things that used to be assumed to be exclusively the capacity of humans, the term is getting stretched and twisted and losing some of its usefulness.

Maybe it would be more useful to subdivide the term a bit by referring to "human intelligence" versus "LLM intelligence". And when some new developments in AI seem like they're different from "LLM intelligence", we can call them by whatever distinguishes them, like "Q* intelligence", for example.