Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
I don’t really see how torrents solved this problem as so many seeders for any file could simply disappear. Not to mention, the significantly higher bandwidth costs of higher resolution video nowadays.

I’m less familiar with bilibili, but afaik it doesn’t do many of the revenue-sharing programs that YouTube does, so might have trouble attracting the same creators. They also have so far been pretty regional and so I’m not sure if we can use them as a sign of success yet.

Comment · 7 days ago
Comment · 17 days ago
Well, the masking could be causal and I think that's been investigated by several groups.
Comment · 25 days ago
Well, that’s true for a lot of TCS algorithms. The n log n algorithm prior was also not very practical for any numbers relevant to humans.
Comment · 25 days ago
I also don't think there was general consensus on which way this would resolve prior to this (or is that a little out dated?) unlike some of the other major problem resolutions. I heard rumors that there would be a big result in TCS and speculation it would be UGC that or P neq PSPACE but I'm still a bit shocked.
Comment · 1 month ago
I don't think this is how preferred suppliers have typically worked through the supply chain risk considering the US has definitely had preferred suppliers before and has not historically used this against a US company that was not on the list and the power of such a designation extends far past the military into all parts of the government. I'm pretty sure this has more traditionally been relegated to simple requirements or specifications.
Comment · 1 month ago
I think this was discussed ad nauseum last time so I am wondering if somehow this has changed but the biggest part of the issue last time was the retaliation. You seem to suggest that this was due to the government not wanting restrictions on their actions. I feel this severely downplays how unusual this designation is considering, like Anthropic says, this has not been applied to domestic companies.

Why couldn't excluding Anthropic be done a different mechanism than a supply chain risk. Why wouldn't this be a standard part of an agreement or a request and simply refuse to renew or cancel a contract rather than being designated a supply chain risk. If some third party contractor for an unrelated non military reason wanted to use Claude as part of their process, it seems perfectly allowable.

If this was a remotely standard way of operation, why did a fair amount of corporate America sign briefs concerned with the retaliatory aspect.

Parts of the action seemed wholly retaliatory as well since Pentagon officials certainly used it as a threat. Why can't a US company have views contrary to the policies of the US government? Certainly the US government is free to not do business with them, but this designation affects everybody doing any kind of indirect business with the US government which is a rather long chain. If this becomes a legitimate mechanism, how might we distinguish caring about a secure supply chain and simply wiping out a company that disagreed with a pro war attitude? If a machining shop had a policy against manufacturing weapons at all, could they be blocked from making server racks for Microsoft or perhaps light fixtures for the Department of Labor? There are plenty of areas that are, again, non military? I don't think it's credible to claim that Anthropic will deliberately sabotage operations.

Comment · 1 month ago
I think the Navier Stokes problem kind of illustrates what he’s highlighting. I think most people even before AI expected that this would resolve in the negative and that you could get finite time blow up. There wasn’t really ever going to be a situation where the resolution to this question, or really any of the other Millenium Prize problems as far as I know, gives some kind of immediate massive practical feedback.

The hope with many of these problems in math is that in trying to prove that, we get some additional insight into why it blew up that could be applied elsewhere to more general PDEs that cannot be easily controlled.

I think the observation from Tao and many others is that when humans solved these problems, the additional insights into intuition and theory building came for free since humans can give expository on what they found hard or what was their own intuition. This is much more difficult or tedious to extract from an AI model. Even when people did have access to the chain of thought, it wasn’t always very helpful to figure out what was the exact thing that made it all click. This is even more difficult how that the CoT are hidden but I would think the sort of difficulty of extracting the key ideas for a human might be worse now with more advanced models.

There’s a long term aspect to this too where we have historically used these problems as markers for the other parts of mathematics but if AI can solve it all, then suddenly this signal is not very meaningful.

Maybe to bring it closer to home. If an oracle just gave you P \neq NP, then this would be generally uninteresting since this was already expected. There’s a deeper question of why that needs to be answered. However, one would hope that creating such a separation would give us tools that allow us to create lower bounds on a lot more problems we do care about and perhaps some bigger insight onto what makes a problem intrinsically hard or easy. These long term considerations are helpful but are definitely more vague. The remarkable part is that AI is separating the part about proving theorems and the “free” insight you get.

Comment · 1 month ago
To be quite clear, the solution to the _Navier Stokes problem_ is one in which you get a finite time blow up (i.e. infinite pressure). This is more meant to suggest that Navier Stokes is unphysical in some way which is not necessarily unexpected.

There's unlikely to be any engineering applications since even if the solution can be approximated, you still need to set up the initial conditions but at that point you can also drive pressure in other ways.

Comment · 1 month ago
I'm curious what regulatory pressure there is on EU AI companies that wouldn't apply to many of the US firms. The AI Act and GDPR still apply to the tech giants since they operate in the EU (e.g. Anthropic watermarking). There are labor laws that are definitely more strict but many of the US firms have operating presence in the EU as well. I imagine that being directly in the EU probably does increase regulatory oversight but I'm curious how this would manifest in Mistral in particular.

Regarding local models, Gemma, GPT-OSS, Nemotron, and Inkling (maybe upcoming Muse series as well) all are fairly decent options at a variety of hardware costs.

Comment · 2 months ago
This is rather weird framing since usually an additional citizenship (especially one in a country like the US) is considered a valuable thing to have for your child. Usually people claiming birthright citizenship are weird are doing it because they also see it as valuable. It’s also woven into the traditions of New World countries.

Regarding your concerns, I don’t see why it is unreasonable to simply renounce citizenship later or just simply double check your travel itinerary during the late stages of a pregnancy. This seems like at best an unfounded concern.

Comment · 3 months ago
I know this is a bit cliche but I wonder how much headroom there is in the lower parameter count range. Is there any good reason to believe there is a lot of headroom or there is not? I suppose I'm just wondering if this wave of nearly Fable class models will be runnable on ~$10k worth of hardware at reasonable speeds in the near future.

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