Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
If we go back only 45 days, Opus 5.5 was not even out yet. So for more than a third of the current SOTA model's existence, Google's response to it was under its own embargo. When it was finally out, paying users get 3-4 prompts a day, which means Argon will be experienced by a tiny minority of people, another unforced error on Google's side.

By the time Carbon comes out, I fully expect Anthropic, ChatGPT and/or a Chinese lab to have its answer ready to ship in less time than it took Google to approve a release.

Comment · 2 days ago
And how do they realize their current index is broken? They either have some recency bias, or indeed favor the big American labs (more likely, since a new Chinese model topping the charts triggers a shakeup).
Comment · 3 days ago
Income isn't salary either. I'm pretty sure he earns a lot more than that.
Comment · 4 days ago
The mythical man-month was not only about programming itself, but everything around it. The argument was that projects in large organizations are more akin to pregnancies, with stages that cannot be sped up, rather than a bunch of tasks that can just be solved whenever, by whoever.

This article seems to be instead about whether AI models can be parallelized. And if so, yes, absolutely, in fact you should be trying to break down tasks in a way that they can be worked in parallel. Looking at the frontier, the math results from openAI are coming from a massive parallelization of agents for example, which is why they could crack a millenium problem in like four days.

Comment · 4 days ago
This is not my experience at all. I see more people having difficulties in extracting value out of AI than the other way around. When I check what they're doing, they paint themselves in all kinds of weird corners, like keeping a mega-session full of unrelated questions, letting the AI model lead instead of managing it, misunderstanding the scope of what to ask for, etc.

Of course all the crap about prompt engineering or whatever is meaningless, and it always was. That said, this idea that if AI gets good enough you will just jump in and use it is flawed. You learn by doing. It's almost self-evident to me that someone who has been working with AI models for the past 4 years will be much better at it than someone who started this week.

Comment · 11 days ago
Inference will continue to be profitable while we don't have enough compute in the world to serve the demand we have. Also, I don't see why it's a problem that the end game for inference of open models will be relatively low, ie 5% or so. You can have a huge industry running on these margins. Though I would note that hyperscalers have been selling compute commodities with a high margin for a long time.
Comment · 11 days ago
DS4 Flash is so cheap also, imagine what the numbers look like for a flagship model like Opus 5.5, which charges 100x more. Of course inference for that model also costs more, but I doubt the proportion is the same.
Comment · 17 days ago
This is a really neat, approachable way to explain the concept of attention in plain words. Thanks for giving us the reference, though in my understanding the formulation in the first paragraph comes from Natalie Wolchover, the columnist, rather than Bahdanau.
Comment · 17 days ago
Comment · 18 days ago
I don't understand your argument here. All these scenarios you mentioned are testable. If the rate of accidents of autopilot + AI is lower than for human pilots, yes I would fly with them. Same with self driving cars, which have already achieved that.

AI is not error-free and it doesn't have to be. It has to have the same or lower error rate as humans.

Comment · 18 days ago
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)

This might be the biggest factor in my opinion. Corporate incentives usually don't reward someone delivering 2x-10x, so an employee who suddenly found a way to multiply their productivity might be keeping that method to themselves and freeing up some time instead.

Comment · 19 days ago
> In many Western countries, housing is the best performing asset class so it's reached the point of stealing investment dollars that might otherwise go to productive output. Housing is the black hole at the heart of the economy.

This is true, and it is a huge problem in Europe for example, where buying a property to rent is often the best investment for regular people. So instead of opening a business or taking any other risk that may or may not pay off, investment money is going to an asset class that is not productive.

Comment · 20 days ago
> The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness.

What is our cognitive fitness without our tools? How capable would we be at intellectual tasks if you remove computers, search engines and other things we now take for granted?

It's clear to me our overall output is better with those tools, and better with AI. So the comparison the paper is trying to make is disingenuous, because it tries to compare a baseline without any modern tools (ie, solving fractions by hand) to a result where the best tools are suddenly removed. But these tools are here to stay, and my cognitive fitness has adapted to their continued existence.

How well would these people doing fractions by hand perform if math notation could not be used? Or if the most common method for solving fractions on paper was suddenly disallowed?

Comment · 20 days ago
This should have a material impact on SpaceX stock. Wouldn't it be much easier to harden datacenters against attack under ground than in space?
Comment · 21 days ago
This might be the pets.com moment of this era.

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