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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#41

Post by blfr »

dandellion wrote: post #34
blfr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it's not three years since. The real improvements in programming ability arrived in the last 6-8 months. Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either! But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable…

I remember people moving the goalposts like that since, let me check... when did AI Dungeon go viral? Wow, 2019.

What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Fable can do. I push its code straight to prod.

But I am just as amazed with how little real life consequence it seems to have! Even software houses were hit more by interest rates than by this magical revolution.

If I couldn't directly observe Fable in action, I wouldn't believe in AI.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#42

Post by woadwarrior01 »

onion2k wrote: post #33

When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally. The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. When Dario talks about open weigh…

> The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.

Does it have to be? There are plenty of coding tasks, where it's good enough.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#43

Post by dgellow »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

The effective altruist and longtermist crowd are into it as a religion. They would happily sacrifice anything human to satisfy their dreams of AI. They care way more about what the AI needs than their what their fellow humans need. We will end up with an AGI having better living and working conditions than humans and the whole AI industry will be clapping

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#44

Post by stnikolauswagne »

glimshe wrote: post #13

One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

Can only speak for my own project, but can give an example:

After an aquisition earlier this year I got the task of doing an SAP-Integration for the new company, last time I did this 5 years ago it was a 6 month task, but with the experience and skills ive gained since I estimated it would be a 3 month project (with or without AI, most work is just logistics, AI cant help much there).

In those 3 months I was able to not only integrate SAP but also deliver a completely modernised user-facing software for that integration. While I could have written that software myself in a vacuum it would have never been worth it financially, since it would have delayed the launch of the integration by 6+ months. Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.

But this is also basically a "spherical cow in a vacuum" scenario, where I was essentially acting as a solo dev, in full operational control of the project, with deep domain knowledge of the topic and an allready fully set up codebase that I knew perfectly while working down ideas I've had in my backlog for 5+ years.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#45

Post by pas »

ben_w wrote: post #30
glimshe wrote: post #13

One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

Anyone saying 10x as a serious claim is clearly using a round number and vibes; however, even if it were so, AI getting popular 3 years ago does not mean what you say. The earliest used models in this category would easily 10x (what did I just say) the creation of one-off short scripts, but you're not writing a 30-year app out of just a bunch of short scripts. The METR time horizons graph suggests we can now get 10x…

LLM-assisted software engineering seems to be very efficient if you have a deterministic target. (bun rewrite from zig to Rust, 100% Node.js compatibility, pnpm compatibility -- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/38333)

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#46

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

This is actually crazy, because biochemistry is where LLMs are weakest. It's one of science's most fuzzy and unpredictable domains, in general, and a lot of published works which an LLM might take at face value might be unreplicable or subtly flawed. (See e.g. the entire history of Alzheimer's.) It is also where real-world lab and clinical trial work is most important.

So Anthropic are going to spin up a medicinal chemistry lab and start mouse experiments?

I mean, it would be nice, but I don't think that the guys at Anthropic know what they're talking about here, or what they might be getting themselves into. (If indeed this is more than just PR.)

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#47

Post by BrenBarn »

> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.

It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#48

Post by dgellow »

onion2k wrote: post #25
glimshe wrote: post #13

One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

I think it's more that it shifts the thought process from "If this is going to take 30 years then we won't bother, because the investment can be spent on things that pay off sooner" to "If we can do this in 3 years then we'll make that investment because that's a good bet." The way it changes the game is by lowering the cost of making radical bets so we end up trying more moonshots.

Do you have examples of such moonshots? Ideally not themselves AI related

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#49

Post by dgellow »

onion2k wrote: post #33

When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally. The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. When Dario talks about open weigh…

No one is running that locally because of the AI bubble consuming all the hardware in the industry. That won’t be the case long term though

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#50

Post by onion2k »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #33

When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally. The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. When Dario talks about open weigh…

> The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. Does it have to be? There are plenty of coding tasks, where it's good enough.

Practically, no, the distill is great. It's fine to use it.

However, if you're having a discussion about access to frontier models, and using Qwen 3.8 as an example of how open weights is a solution, then you should be honest and accurate about what you're talking about. Making an argument like "People can run Qwen 3.8 at home. That shows open weights are great." is a bit disingenuous if you're not also making it clear that you're not talking about Qwen 3.8 Max (or that you have a beast of a PC at home :D ).

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