milchek

Really impressive demo. I have to say that, but I do worry with this kind of fidelity to a human interaction that people will get more drawn into AI relationships and replace human contact.

I like voice as a mode of interaction with AI, but it’s always been clear with current tech that I’m talking to AI (and yet folks still got drawn into fantasy relationships thanks to sycophantic models etc) - I imagine with voice models like Dessa that could be worse for humans. This kind of fidelity blurs the lines of who or what the human is talking to and lets humans fall into an isolated world where they believe they are “socializing.”

Now, we could argue this is not a negative, maybe it is actually healthy for those who are looking for social connection or lonely, but my gut feel is that is not the case for most. It worries me that this kind of model will actually cause further deterioration of human socialisation and human-to-human contact.

Sure, but not all users hate AI generated assets, there are some who do not care either way (or can’t tell). I know plenty of artists (designers) in digital who are embracing generative AI and getting more done - granted, they are not artists who generate assets for games. But hey, maybe I’m biased working in the industry.

I can sympathise why many hate gen AI for the jobs it’s taken (and there is nuance here because often it’s not gen ai - it’s cost cutting or misaligned expectations from executives) but I feel like the craftsman who embraces the tool can create more value for the world than the craftsman who does not.

In any case, there will be a market for 100% human made art, media, and games -I’m just not sure we should obsess with enforcing (and gatekeeping), if someone who is a mediocre artist with a great game idea wants to make a game and use AI to accelerate themselves to deliver a better product for the world then that’s great.

I suspect you are right. Interestingly this reminds me of the John Carmack interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast where he mentions that game devs and game artists/designers are different in their need for attribution with the later treating the discipline more like art (which it clearly can be).

The thing is, customers/players generally don’t care. Just look at the annual incremental releases of games that continue to sell well. Sure, there is also a cohort of players who love the indie scene for its more grassroots or authentic approach to games. Both sides of that player spectrum would ultimately be happy with more quality content, but I agree with you that perhaps one side may be more averse to AI “assisted” game development.

I think the nuance here is for a fan of indie games, how much of the artwork has to be hand generated? What if the artist uses AI to help speed up tedious work like additional frames or animation? What the game is entirely coded in AI but hand drawn (or vice versa).

I suspect the economics and 'shape' of the gaming industry to change over the next few years. Currently we're in this strange place with game dev where a large portion of software engineers (majority?) are using LLMs and AI coding tools, but for some reason the gaming industry (or at least it's customers) are vehemently anti-AI to the point studios have to put out statements about AI usage to assuage the mobs online.

This will change. The silent majority of customers will vote with their wallets once they realise they will get a) more games and b) better games - because the barrier to entry has been lowered, the timeframes, resource requirements reduced, more unique IP or novel games, etc. Yes, there will be more slop/shovelware - that's bound to happen - but we will also get vastly more great games as well if we allow the industry to embrace AI coding and generative AI for assets to assist creatives and developers.

It is sad that EA announced they are choosing not to continue development of the next ME game. I'm sure there are many fans of that franchise here, I know I sank a lot of hours into the series (and the online co-op mode from ME3).

Maybe EA sell off the IP to a studio who can lean into fully AI assisted game development. There's a chance we'll get something decent - and hey, it can't be as bad as Andromeda, right?

Director (and Lingo) is how I got started before moving to Flash and ActionScript for ad agency projects. Was such a fun time to be a developer - you could build whatever you wanted online and brands were being pretty adventurous.

I’m curious why profitability is the concern here? I was under the impression that abundant clean energy would be of higher concern than profitability of energy companies - unless you mean that profitability concerns will reduce the willingness to invest and develop more nuclear?

I guess we could argue that these sorts of operations should be state owned?

Language emanates from intelligence. That means the patterns and structure that make up human intelligence will appear in language. LLMs are created through so much language training that they can approximate (and now to some degree exceed) human intelligence using pattern recognition, statistics, and autocomplete (in layman’s terms).

Not sure how it is now, but early “reasoning” was simply the big labs sticking “wait a minute, what if I…” type language blocks into the process to trigger something like our own internal reasoning.

Is this a US thing? In Australia all sports/shoe retailers have been stocking Nike the whole time. If I understand correctly folks are saying in the US Nike gave up its retail shelf space in favour of their own stores and online?

Memory and intelligence are linked.

Someone with a better memory for ideas or concepts will be able to more quickly incorporate those into novel ideas or recall them when necessary to assist in solving a problem than someone with worse memory.

To those here challenging this with “yes but I’m smart and my memory is bad” - a) define smart and b) perhaps your memory for trivial things like life events, what you did two weeks ago on Monday or people’s names is bad, but I suspect your memory for “work” or problem solving is strong.

Another example I used to see (hear, rather) is how musicians rip off each others riffs and hooks without noticing (unintentionally - they claim), which I long suspected as simply “forgotten” riffs they heard in other songs that once they started playing themselves by chance they attributed to their own creativity. Creativity and intelligence are somewhat linked that way I suspect.

In any case, this all boils down to the same thing, you can think of yourself as a dynamic model made up of memories and biases to some degree, and your ability to store and recall useful information to solve problems increases what we call your intelligence.

Interesting question. I suppose it comes down to how much you allocate his involvement or presence to a product? I’d imagine Grok is built by hundreds of engineers who are all unique individuals from various backgrounds. If Elon simply “leads” from a very surface level where he has no direct day to day involvement in Grok releases does that make it more palatable? Or is the question really about how involved he is? Or is simply being the leader (even if he was 100% absent and only had his name attached to a project/company) enough to boycott?

On a similar note, how much Elon hate is about his politics vs his trillionaire status vs what I like to call “watercooler hate” where folks simply parrot the loudest opinion in order to be accepted into the group?

On a final note, my son is in primary school and recently brought up in a dinner time discussion that “Elon is really bad” - this is a kid who has no social media (unlike some of his peers who are already on TikTok) and doesn’t watch traditional media.

Very unexpected but also really uplifting to see that they would spinoff a division to tackle this - it's ambitious. Obviously they've identified that the vertical is big enough and that they have the expertise or novel approach to tackle it, but i'm really curious to know how this came about internally.

I’ve tried in a 36GB MacBook Pro and haven’t had much success beyond very basic work. Issue for me was the context runs out quick even with smaller models and it’s slower. To get some half decent performance I’d imagine you want 128gb memory and are spending a lot more on hardware. At that point it becomes a question on whether you’d rather have frontier models at a subscription or sink that money into your own equipment. Of course, for those with privacy in mind your only option is forking out the cash for the higher end machines.

I see CPAP rightly getting mentioned a lot here. What worked for me was a MJS (Mandible Jaw Splint), it’s basically a mouthguard you sleep with that moves your lower jaw forward and thus brings your tongue forward so it doesn’t obstruct your airways.

Best bet is to get this custom made. Here in Australia there are specialist dentists that do this for you. It’s far easier than CPAP and works just as well for many like myself.

Often folks will use CPAP at home and these mouth guards when travelling.