t_serpico

I think the focus on building things is the wrong framing - that seems to be still there. But this AI wave is centered around automation, which has a different flavor to the previous cycles (1970-2010), which very much felt much more positive sum and less hyper capitalistic.

how so? (i'm not too familiar)

nice stuff! how do you handle security concerns big pharma may have? wouldn't they just run their stuff on-prem?

I actually thought the opposite - that he seems to be seriously thinking about AGI from a broader intellectual standpoint than most ML researchers. With that said, I was a little confused when he said evolution was more optimized for locomotion/vision than language. Like yes, language is super recent, but communication in general is not.

Yup, Dwarkesh needs to broaden his intellectual scope, and the Sutton interview completely exposed the echo chamber he's been inhabiting. There is no certainty in science, and I don't think building 'AGI' will be any exception.

this is a joke... to even call this a scientist is an insult.

But there is no way to know who is truly the 'best'. The people who position and market themselves to be viewed as the best are the only ones who even have a chance to be viewed as such. So if you're a great researcher but don't project yourself that way, no one will ever know you're a great researcher (except for the other great researchers who aren't really invested in communicating how great you are). The system seems to incentivize people to not only optimize for their output but also their image. This isn't a bad thing per se, but is sort of antithetical to the whole shoulder of giants ethos of science.

My practical interpretation of the EMH is more that easily accessible, public information is already priced in. But non-obvious insights may not be simply because the volume of people trading on that information will be smaller.

brilliant

The answer stems from McCarthy’s deeply disparaging view of modern society, which he considered lost, divorced from nature, history and tradition and heading toward social collapse and apocalypse. “Cormac considered contemporary fiction a waste of time,” said Dennis, “because contemporary writers no longer have a legitimate culture to feed their souls.”

'Seeing' inside cells/tissues/organs/organisms is pretty much most modern biological research.

Was going to comment exactly this - funny that it's a literal car salesman.

One fundamental challenge to me is that if each training run because more and more expensive, the time it takes it to learn what works/doesn't work widens. Half a billion dollars for training a model is already nuts, but if it takes 100 iterations to perfect it, you've cumulatively spent 50 billion dollars... Smaller models may actually be where rapid innovation continues simply because of tighter feedback loops. O3 may be an example of this.