551–560 of 868 posts
I am still upset at these companies for driving up the RAM prices. "Free market" has evident problems - companies are way too dominating here. Average Joe suffers from this price mafia, assuming he or she needs to purchase RAM now.
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Humans ultimately judge their output by comparison and competition. When we get to the point an AI is capable of participating on the market directly, it'll no longer make sense to proxy judgement through humans anymore.
Agreed. But also, comparison and competition between individuals is only one of the ways in which improvement happens. Consider for example that it's also possible to build something for personal consumption and iteratively improve on the design without regard for what anyone else thinks of it. Cooking comes to mind.
AI has none of that now - it only gets direct human feedback from those controlling the training (or at a second level, the harness), and that feedback is really in service of the humans at the steering wheels. Sum total of humanity, mixed in the blender, and flavored to make the trainers look good in front of their peers.
Now, if AI could interact directly and propagate that feedback to their training, or otherwise learn on-line, that changes. It's a qualitative jump. The second one is, once there's enough AIs interacting with human economy and society directly, that their influence starts to outweigh ours. At that point, they'll end up evolving their own standards and benchmarks, and then it's us who will be judged by their measure.
(I.e. if you think we have it bad now, with how we're starting to adapt our writing and coding style to make it easier for LLMs, just wait when next-gen models start participating in the economy, and we'll all be forced by the market forces to learn some weird, emergent token-efficient English/Chinese pidgin that AI-run companies prefer their suppliers to use.)
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> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you…
Yup. That doesn't really take a full-blown AGI on the path to ASI on the path to godhood - it'll take a bit better and more reliable LLM with a decent harness. That's why I've been saying that the entire software industry is now living on borrowed time. It'll continue at the mercy of SOTA LLM operators, for as long as they prefer to extract rent from everyone for access to "cognition as a service". In the meantime, a…
I think meaningful change to the current equilibrium would require at absolute minimum the proprietary equivalent of the development of the transformer architecture.
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Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? If you gatekeep, you will not make back the money you invested. If you don't gatekeep, your competitors will use your model to build competing models. I guess you can sell it to the Department of War.
> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you…
There's a lot more to building a successful product than how smart your engineers/agents are, how many engineers/agents you have, and capital.
Google, for example, can be extremely dysfunctional at launching new products despite unimaginably vast resources. They often lack intangible elements to success, such as empathizing with your customers' needs.
If we were in a world where AI was not already widespread, then I would agree that having strong AI would be an immense competitive advantage. However, in a world where "good enough" AI is increasingly widespread, the competitive advantage of strong AI diminishes as time goes on.
Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too. Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay f…
So yes, but that doesn't negate the circular investment aspect, for most intents and purposes. The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services. That's a risk.
If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.
there are plenty of people who basically believe this is the end of the human economy - there will be nothing left that isn't done by AI in the future. Even the bits left that humans do will be human facades on AI driven activity (like your hairdresser will be viewing you through AI powered glasses using AI powered scissors etc). So from that point of view you can indeed look at it as the entire value of the economy…
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I think the opposite. AI will get cheaper as models become more efficient and we solve the datacenter/energy problem. I bet 10 years from now AI, that is way better than what we have today, will be close to free.
Just like how cloud costs got cheaper and we solved the datacenter/energy problem over the past 10 years.
I just ran a quick gpt check - EC2 Prices have gone down by more than 80% after accounting for performance and inflation over last 20 years.
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there are plenty of people who basically believe this is the end of the human economy - there will be nothing left that isn't done by AI in the future. Even the bits left that humans do will be human facades on AI driven activity (like your hairdresser will be viewing you through AI powered glasses using AI powered scissors etc). So from that point of view you can indeed look at it as the entire value of the economy…
But let's be real, the AI output today is largely complete and utter shit. Like, really, without careful promoting and oversight, it's not fun to read, it's not smart, it's not accurate, it's not thorough, and it's certainly not yet over the massive show stopping hurdle that is lying and hallucinating all the time.
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To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise. Vendors may be positioned to know how a customer is doing, but they're also incentivized to overestimate how well a customer is going to perform. GE Capital (edit: and GMCA) is a great example of how seemingly reasonable vendor financing can cause the lender serious problems.
> To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise. Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products? Siemens is a perfect example of a well-run, stable, industrial giant. They offer vendor financing for large purchases. Same for the "heavies" (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, IHI, Hyundai, Doosan, Hanjin) in Japan and Korea…
Edit: I am not asking whether ChatGPT is better than Google Search, I am asking after the standard dodge of citing one's sources.