ozgung

Philosophical take home:

There is no such thing as isolation. We’re all connected. Even air gap conducts information in multiple ways, most famously used by humans evolved to use air vibrations to communicate. Photons and other subatomic particles already connects distant stars. We used those electrons and photons to create the modern telecommunications infrastructure. Just an additional layer of connectedness, but not the only one.

It’s a missed opportunity that they didn’t go with atomic numbers or mass for model sizes. Both OpenAI and Anthropic does that.

Helium < Neon < Argon < Krypton < Xenon in increasing order, all very cool names.

Google went with the alphabetical order instead, which is less meaningful than the version numbers for the average user.

I’m pretty sure “benchmaxxing” as defined is a standard post-training procedure for ALL models.

One can argue though some models are post-trained heavily for specific benchmarks and less for other datasets. So they are weaker on out of distribution tasks.

Fun fact: By changing the weights of the input you can change the output as you want.

I was dismissing it immediately in order not to enter a number by mistake. What a dark pattern.

Taking an idea or potential of an innovation to its extremes creates nonsense. Trying to predict the future that way always fails.

I remember the discussions and predictions when e-books or internet newspapers were first introduced. In 2026 they still sell actual newspapers where they print yesterday's news on large sheets of paper. People still pay for that instead of checking X for free. We all buy and read actual books. TV hasn't killed cinema and YouTube hasn't killed TV. Real world doesn't work in extremes.

Real world also doesn't have 'infinity'. You can't just use undergraduate engineering math to create a feedback loop and explode a variable to infinity. Things don't work like that.

I think the secret sauce is about communication. It understands you and you understand it. Just a better coworker to work with. Benchmarks don’t measure that.

Fair enough. My impression was that it's a bit Anti-social take as well.

Two models use the word "tribe" and three others use the word "group". A sociologist, or any human would use these terms mostly in a positive light. AIs use them only in a negative light, painting them as the main obstacle to rationality. Which I think is unique, and interesting enough.

This view also contradicts all the religions I am aware of. Religions affect worldviews of most humans, and they all promote sacrificing yourself for the "tribe", accepting the tribe's "truth" as the only source of truth etc. Just the opposite of what the LLMs say.

Also note that none of them used the word "emotion". They haven't repeated the sci-fi cliché of "humans are weaker than robots, because they are not rational, they are emotional". They pointed to a specific emotion instead, "belonging". 4 different models use the word "belong", again in a negative context.

These answers did not look like typical, cliché, familiar or commonsense answers to me. I don’t think a group of human subjects would consistently give these answers.

If so, what’s the name of their take in Philosophy? What do we call that idea? It must be so mainstream, right? What are the well-known references in the literature?

Same for blood diamonds. I think scarce objects with exaggerated monetary value have some extra function for very wealthy people, for accounting or laundering purposes. That's why NFTs were a thing.

This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.

Two questions arise:

1. How to develop Principal Engineer skills? Designing and communicating the design correctly is not straightforward.

2. Are we sure this approach works better? Current AI systems are very good at solving problems and SW because of the Reinforcement Learning they went through. I suspect they perform better when doing things their own way. Forcing them to change to an arbitrary workflow may confuse them and reduce performance instead of enhancing it.

Second one is a version of the "Bitter Lesson" adapted to SWE.

Handbag maker used to be a business owner in the large market of handbags.

Now he is in the small and very limited market of handmade leather objects.

Considering all the unemployed former handbag makers, competition would be fierce in that niche market.

Alternative is working in a handbag factory below previous pay grade doing a loosely related job.

It’s not clear if we’ll be given the factory option.

> The declines cut across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, and general IQ.

Problem can be with the tests. Are they testing the correct thing? Are there any increases with other tests? Are there any functions they haven't tested?

Maybe they're faster, quick-thinking multitaskers. Their brains are augmented with always-online smart devices. They have constant access to knowledge and have better educational materials. They must be smart in a new way.