jagraff

I don't know why for this specific deal but this could happen if the market expects that the deal won't close, for example if regulators blocked it

Safety. Waymos are safer for passengers and pedestrians than human-driven cars.

The vast majority of people used to be farmers; I am glad to live in a future where farming jobs have largely been automated away.

With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.

I have never in my career seen a (useful) program without bugs. I'd go so far as to say that, at least for most software, the optimal amount of bugs is not zero - if you write your code carefully enough to never have bugs, you will ship far too slowly. The point of code is not to be beautiful and perfect and well designed - it is to solve problems in the real world.

By the way, all hardware has bugs too; we just don't see them often because the programmers building the stacks that we run our code on work around them.

I don't think "to use prompts to autogenerate text that is source code" is a complete description of how agentic programming works. A very important part of the process is that an agent will not just write code, but also explore documentation, write tests, run those tests, and even do fairly complex integration testing up to and including (for UI based work) firing up a UI and visually confirming features work as intended. Agentic software engineering can be quite powerful properly applied.

Yea I am certainly not saying that Anthropic in particular is worth the valuation they are seeking or that they will end up a winner in the AI race; only that AI is not just hype, and that their inference revenue growth is real.

That's a beefy MBP! I imagine it was quite hot by the end of that flight if you were running Qwen the whole time

I take no position on the correct valuation of Anthropic, but I think if you've used coding agents, it's pretty clear that it's not just hype; they really are a useful technology that can massively increase software engineering productivity.

As far as I know the circular deal fears are more around the chip purchasing agreements, because there is a speculative component to building out datacenters for training which may not produce models that are worth the training cost, but the revenue from inference is real and it has truly grown a lot over the past two years.

This is an amazing concept; I went looking for a purchase link before I realized it's just a concept and not actually a real product. I would absolutely put one of these in my house provided it was open software that didn't send video out of my network.

No I absolutely think they should be prosecuted, and at a minimum owe damages to all of the companies that their agents hacked.

What I'm saying is that that is not sufficient to stop future harm; I expect the total damages would be less than the cost of a full training run, so it would effectively just be the cost of doing business. Liability is not sufficient to protect the world from dangerous technology - we need proactive rules around how the technology is developed, tested, monitored, and deployed, as we do with other dangerous industries such as airplanes, nuclear reactors, weapons manufacturers, etc

I will happily ride in a waymo today, even though the AI powering it faces no consequence if it gets in a crash; it is clear that waymo is safer than human drivers in the areas in which they operate, so who would technically be liable in the event of a crash isn't really of concern to me

Yea I think being able not to leak is the bare minimum? But it really depends on how good it is at specific applications; I wouldn't give a tax-preparation agent my SSN unless I was confident that it was no more likely to misfile my taxes than a professional tax preparer.

In other words, the risk of harm doesn't need to be zero, just less than the equivalent risk of a human with similar skillset. So I'm comfortable riding in a waymo, and not comfortable giving chatgpt my SSN at this moment in time, but I expect that within 5-10 years (assuming no doom) I will trust some AI agent with my SSN because they will be better at handling sensitive info than humans

Oh I think I misread your comment slightly; I would not be interested in an agent that could do something dumb with my routing number, but if somehow there was an agent that I trusted as much as, eg, the payroll department at my employer, I would absolutely want and use that agent; I would love to have an agent that can handle all of the boring parts of my life such as paying bills, scheduling maintenance, dealing with bureaucracy, etc.

How would it have access to my routing number and gmail without the risk of sharing my routing number over gmail?

Liability only kicks in after damage has been done. As far as I know, there is no law that could currently force AI companies to only test cybersecurity capabilities in air-gapped datacenters, for example; only laws that could punish them if their cyber testing led to a hack that caused material damage. But if, lets say, a rogue AI agent swarm attacked a hospital and caused patients to die, no amount of liability will bring those patients back to life.