jdoliner

It is kind of fascinating how much convergence there is in branding of AI products. Muse seems to be the one outlier in that the assistant is a little less abstract (and the model logo less buttholesque) but other than that it's almost all converged. Anyone have a theory why that is?

My model of mathematical intelligence for a little while now has been 3 levels:

1. I give you a proof, you tell me if it's correct

2. I give you a theorem, you give me a correct proof

3. I give you nothing, you give me a theorem

1. is largely solved by modern LLMs and they took a big step toward 2. today with the Navier-Stokes proof. But they're definitely not there yet. It's unclear what progress is being made toward 3. for the time being that remains the realm of humans.

I hope everyone is as Navier-Stoked about this as I am.

I've always liked that HN typically has comments that are small bits of research relevant to the post that I could have done myself but don't have to because someone else did it for me. In a sense the "I asked $AI, and it said" comments are just the evolved form of that. However the presentation does matter a little, at least to me. Explicitly stating that you asked AI feels a little like an appeal to authority... and a bad one at that. And makes the comment feel low effort. Often times comments that frame themselves in this way will be missing the "last-mile" effort that tailors the LLMs response to the context of the post.

So I think maybe the guidelines should say something like:

HN readers appreciate research in comments that brings information relevant to the post. The best way to make such a comment is to find the information, summarize it in your own words that explain why it's relevant to the post and then link to the source if necessary. Adding "$AI said" or "Google said" generally makes your post worse.

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Also I asked ChatGPT and it said:

Short Answer

HN shouldn’t outright ban those comments, but it should culturally discourage them, the same way it discourages low-effort regurgitation, sensationalism, or unearned certainty. HN works when people bring their own insight, not when they paste the output of a stochastic parrot.

A rule probably isn’t needed. A norm is.

Wordcels, rise up!

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 months ago.

It's not totally obvious to me that you can get the economics of this to work. A Google search costs ~.04 cents to serve, whereas a frontier reasoning LLM request costs about 2 cents. The revenue from a Google search is also around 2 cents. So the margins are dangerously thin on an LLM.

Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.

It's a funny juxtaposition to slap the "Pro" label on it which makes it sound more enterprisey but leave the name as Nano Banana.

Throughout most of the non-US parts of the western world voting works quite well using paper ballots and hand counts. Any organization treating voting like a tech problem is willfully oblivious of the existing very good low-tech solutions. I think the intention is often good. But tech is also a new vector for attacking elections, so sometimes it's malicious. And it's very hard to tell the difference, and with elections even the appearance of interference is risky. We should outright reject technical solutions to voting, all it does is add risk.

With the advent of things like r/MyBoyfriendIsAI I was expecting a substantially different article than the one I clicked into.

Hey can you print this paper off my vape bro? I need to turn it in to my next class.

Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses.

The problem is that the DNC establishment feels the same way about Bernie, AOC and Zohran as it does about the normal people that they can't talk to.

I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present.

And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, there's some things it can sometimes do, which you can argue either way about that being in its capabilities or not.