seraphsf

Bravo!

Future generation will be richer and better-off than the present. Saving your charity for the future is, effectively, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.

Also, giving now maximizes the compounding effect of your charity. Saving 100 lives today is way better than saving 10 lives every decade for the next 10 decades.

There's clickbait out there like BGR's headline, "ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down".

What the test actually showed is that, given two conflicting goals from two human instructors, the model attempted to resolve the conflict by following one set of instructions, and subverting the other instructor.

It’s a good demonstration about how these models behave and what could go wrong. It is not an example of volition or sentience.

Frankly, the mission of "safe AGI" is better served by guaranteed wide distribution of the technology -- not only to MSFT but on fair commercial terms to all comers. I'm less worried about AGI being a bad thing, and more worried about AGI being monopolized by a powerful few.

That feeling of being "smothered" might simply be that you need a higher pressure setting. The pressure that feels comfortable while awake might not be sufficient when your body is asleep.

Love that movie! What an amazing piece of small-scale sci-fi.

Punch line: the 737-MAX has an accident rate 12x higher than the 737.

Stunning.

1) in the case of Area 120, this is one of the ways it was pitched to management. “Passionate entrepreneurs are leaving to work on new ideas; if you give them a place inside Google to pursue new ideas, it keeps them and their entrepreneurial energy at the company.”

2) in general, early Google used to hoard talent all the time. The founders would keep great people (or their friends) on payroll for ~ever just to have them stick around. That was most prevalent in the first decade of Google’s life, to my knowledge, and mostly applied to very senior people.

By the time Area 120 was pitched and approved (circa 2014), those days were largely gone. Area 120 was primarily filled with junior people (L4-L6) and constantly had to sing for its supper - it was not at all a sinecure.

You’re not wrong. They were among the top 10% of people I worked with in terms of passion, commitment, and creativity. They weren’t among the top 10% in terms of their skill in navigating Dilbert-land corporatism.

A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google’s reputation as a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.

Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator.

It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives).

In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.

I ran one of the successful projects in Area 120.

I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.

But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked with in my decade at the company.

Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.

It’s striking that: “The justice system in Veracruz can’t be relied on to investigate, punish, or deter criminals, nor has the government launched a major campaign to boost the vanilla industry”

And later: “In Mexico, the majority of businesses are small, informal, and off the books.”

It’s a tragic catch-22 of developing nations that governments are inept and corrupt for lack of funds. While distrust of government and rampant tax avoidance cause systemic underfunding.