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The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

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641–650 of 718 posts

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#641
post #568
post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is the AI doomer / safetyism lab, and Hinton is one of the patron saints of 'rationalist' AI doomerism. AI doomerism is psychologically attractive to "people with autistic cognitive traits, including dichotomous (black-and-white) thinking, intolerance of uncertainty, and a tendency toward catastrophizing". They are pascal's mugging themselves, to ironically use one of their terms. It's fundamentally a cogni…

I'm reminded of a comic about global warming, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?": https://climateactionreserve.org/blog/2012/08/31/environment... "What if AI doom is all fear-mongering, and we create AI less prone to make up dangerous stuff or mistake buggy goals for real ones" (which is what alignment is) "for nothing?" Even if Yudkowsky is autistic, you're muddling the condition. Au…

Much like a lot of LLM usage burns tokens so that mediocre people can hallucinate that they're doing something brilliant, Yudkowskyism is just a lot of empty verbiage for the purpose of building a sex cult around a plump gnome. Reusing his nonsensical and poorly defined terms but failing to get the benefit of the sex cult really misses the point of the entire exercise.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#642
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a war in the sense that there's a concern that eventually you hit a singularity and can outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales. If you make better guns, you're still limited by how many people can carry them. You can't conquer the world just like this. But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly.

True, I would have preferred benevolent dictator scenario, like with the Internet. But this time around it's different - AI data centers will be protected like embassies.

>AI data centers will be protected like embassies.

so AI data centers will be protected by relying on hostile or unstable governments to live up to diplomatic agreements, and every so often one will be ransacked like in Teheran 1979?

https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2651.html

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't, it's not 2008. Anybody off the street can get an iPhone or a free iPhone with a mobile plan. They're commodity products. Even homeless people have them. To the extent LLMs are commodity products you're right (so far), but that is limited to the main model providers, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, &c. with interoperability on cloud platform providers and other technology providers like an Apple offeri…

Ironically you are participating in the social signalling ("crappy, cheap phone") phenomenon you claim doesn't exist. https://mashable.com/article/apple-messages-green-doj https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-green-bubble-messa...

Ok just remove "crappy" then and replace with low-quality. We can differentiate on low-quality, high-quality, and more when talking about consumer products.

I'm going off of rough memory here, but don't like half of all Americans have an iPhone? Do half of all Americans own a Porsche?

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#644
post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I did read the history books. All of that eventually ended in the Fifth Republic. You're taking too short a view of history.

Agreed. The French Revolution is one of the top 5 historical revolutions when valued as a unitarian (Amount of Good) - (Amount of Bad). What most pro-revolution folk fail to mention is

* The amount of bad in a revolution is unpredictable and very large. You are fundamentally disrupting the institutions of law and order, which will embolden the worst in society and stroke a fear and self-preservation response in the population.

* Almost every revolution does not result in a high quality government taking power. The most common outcome is that the new government is worse than what it replaced, as the most violent and ambitious tend to thrive in revolutionary conditions.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#645
post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm reminded of a comic about global warming, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?": https://climateactionreserve.org/blog/2012/08/31/environment ... The people who've made the biggest contribution to creating a better world over the last 50 years have been the Chinese; powered largely by coal and petroleum. And in one of the most ironic results in the 21st century, they're now the lea…

Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this kind of preventative action on any large scale, we need to have severe issues first and that's not accounting for longer term/cumulative effects.

"Over the past years, the government has implemented various methods to improve the air quality in Northern China. Sandstorms, which were quite common 15 years ago, are now rarely seen in Beijing’s spring thanks to afforestation projects on China’s northern borders. The license-plate lottery system was introduced in Beijing to restrict the growth of private vehicles. Large trucks were not allowed to enter certain areas in Beijing. Above all, the coal consumption in Beijing has been restricted by shutting down industrial sites and improving heating systems. Beijing’s efforts to improve air quality has also been highly praised by the UN as a successful model for other cities. However, there is also criticism pointing out that the improvement of Beijing’s air quality is based on the sacrifice of surrounding provinces (including Hebei), as many factories were moved from Beijing to other regions."

https://www.statista.com/statistics/690823/china-annual-pm25...

CO2 emissions are a different kind of "pollution". They are not visible and diffuse quickly over the whole Earth.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#646
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everybody thinks it's nonsensical. Here's a different take: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

Yudkowski is a clown, the local crackhead in your street is probably more accurate and less insane than him.

Being an insane clown (posse optional) with less accuracy than the town crackhead doesn't seem to be a barrier to success in tech anymore.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#647
post #604
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant. > no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error. I already did before previous comment. I was also considering adding "don't forget ev…

many-many words, going sideways and around as you can't go against the basic thermodynamics facts directly. What is your point? My point, i'll repeat, is that while 80C GPU will still radiate while surrounded by 40C air, it will be receiving back the radiation from the 40C air, whereis in space it will radiate the same while receiving practically nothing back from the environment. Both cases obviously is considered w…

from my point of view, ben_w definitely understand thermodynamics better than you. I'll point out that generally speaking radiative heat transfer from air is not particularly significant locally: it only tends to matter in the details when you're dealing with the whole atmosphere, which on average is a lot cooler. The transfer is also not blackbody radiation, so even then you can't really plug the air temperature into a radiative heat transfer calculation and expect a sensible result.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#648
post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm reminded of a comic about global warming, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?": https://climateactionreserve.org/blog/2012/08/31/environment ... The people who've made the biggest contribution to creating a better world over the last 50 years have been the Chinese; powered largely by coal and petroleum. And in one of the most ironic results in the 21st century, they're now the lea…

That cartoon was drawn at the very end of 2009. BYD had release the first plug in hybrid the year before. The Beijing Olynpics had made air pollution a hot topic in China in 2007-8. Wind power had accelerated after their 2005 Renewable Energy Law. Solar panel production rose around this time, taking over the market from European manufacturers when the Financial Crisis hit and they pulled back investments. So China at…

Many people in Europe want to see green energy transition. But no transition is happening in China.

" “We see addition, not transition,” said Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School. “China is building alternative sources of energy as well as fossil energy sources, simultaneously. In terms of the global footprint on CO2, China is emitting twice as much as Europe and the United States. I don’t think there’s a transition going on.” "

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/02/yes-china-has...

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#649
post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something being deorbited will probably break up into relatively harmless pieces that mostly burn up though, and there's no nuclear material involved so even if a massive chunk hits the Earth that's not going to have a huge impact. Based on ocean coverage there's a 0.7 probability that it'll just make a big splash. Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considera…

>will probably break up if it is designed to breakup. And not if it isn't. >no nuclear material involved that is the beauty. No contamination. >that's not going to have a huge impact. in my comment i already specified the TNT equivalent of such an impact. >there's a 0.7 probability It isn't a matter of probability. You can deorbit with high precision, and pretty much hit any desired target on the ground if you have t…

"Project Thor was an idea for a weapons system that launches telephone pole-sized kinetic projectiles made from tungsten from Earth's orbit to damage targets on the ground."

"In the case of the system mentioned in the 2003 Air Force report above, a 6.1 by 0.3 metres (20 ft × 1 ft) tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach 10 (11,200 ft/s; 3,400 m/s) has kinetic energy equivalent to approximately 11.5 tons of TNT (48 GJ)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#650
post #30

Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are the standouts, but the main question for me is, why is this a war? In their own context China has greatly benefitted from this. They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise. If this really is a war, trump is kneecapping the country with his lawlessness and eroding America’s good will. If the world cannot trust China with their data and they cannot trust the U.S. to prov…

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