> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. 1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag…
"hope to have incredible results" I would imagine "hope" in this context is more expectation for him than the average person who might "hope" for something incredible but rarely do they base their entire career on it. Or maybe I'm just not too acquainted with silicon valley types. I always thought the whole delusional optimism was just a show for investors.
On AI regulation and messaging
371–380 of 573 posts
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great example. There is no way I would run that in production anywhere. Long term stability is the thing that matters, such a move would be immensely threatening to long term stability.
the neat part is that you don't have to, millions will do it for you! the point is that it's a quite obvious opportunity that was just some pipedream years ago. by the time v8.0 comes around we'll have more data on the bun rewrite. also we'll see how LLMs will affect the productivity of kernel developers, and the overall stability/maintainability.
You're not wrong. We're already seeing something similar with all the outages and buggy software updates these days.
We little choice in the matter, you will have ze (software) bugs!
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there is a large element of paranoia here, we're already seeing serious problems in e.g. planning consultations that people can just spam them with AI. AI makes a lot of traditional social processes stop working properly. > puts in it's regulations that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them (we all know this is coming), .. do we? > You get a mail from the government about taxes. You want to chec…
>AI makes a lot of traditional social processes stop working properly. Which is mostly a good thing because most of those processes were cooked up to be exclusionary but with plausible deniability God forbid some upstart get a big contract they "shouldn't" have gotten because AI lets them create a submission that's on par with a big guys. God forbid Joe Schmo be able to prepare the paperwork and dot his I's and cross…
These are adversarial processes. You might get a win in the short term, but everyone else is playing the same game with access to the same tools, and developing a game-breaking strategy in a PVP multiplayer game is going to both escalate and get patched out.
A colleague of mine gave the example of using AI to snipe the UK driving test queuing system, which currently has a massive backlog. Which is great .. for them. Someone else gets pushed down by automated sniping. Then everyone else will have to start sniping. Then the website falls over because it wasn't designed to deal with 100m requests from the few hundred thousand people who are trying to bot their way to victory.
(I can see one likely patch out of AI spam being "you must submit requests in person 9-5, online system is closed down"!)
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#374Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is that planned for a few days before the IPO Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.
>Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors. What’s the source for this claim? Is this true in real dollars or just nominal? What about as a percentage of total GDP?
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#376One 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.
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"
"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from. A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor…
Here's another way of framing things that might encourage better discussion: Suppose in a few years, it was announced that an LLM did discover a cure for a cancer. What approach would you expect it to have taken?
1. Developing an intervention for every possible mutation that leads to loss of cellular identity, and uncontrolled growth.
2. Preserving immune function later into life.
3. Preserving genetic and epigenetic accuracy later into life.
Maybe it will be 1. But I would bet on 2 or 3. Which both assume that by reducing the difference between rates, the phenomenon of cancer could be reduced or eliminated.
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
a) they can and will patent it, because in the end it will be same tools "bIg pHormA" uses today for all kinds of tasks. b) they are financially and subjectively interested in developing said tools to combat cancer even if they will be cloned and sold in parallel way cheaper than original. Because - 1) it would be immensely profitable on it's own, cancer is one the most common ailments, 2) post-cancer treatments are…
Repairing cannot be patented. It will be rejected as "trivial" by the Patent Office. Yes, I know someone patented a "cure" for hemophilia which repairs the DNA of said patient. But that's just because no other pharmaceutical thought it worth their while to fight the patent since the number of patients is small. But I can guarantee you that a cancer cure patent that repairs the DNA will be fought in Court.
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't believe the LLM port makes the full transition any easier than doing things the old fashioned way: a dual lang code base like Linux ... how so? let's say Linus opens a branch, rust-temp, and in 2 weeks pushes ~15 million lines of code deleting most of the old C code. and then it gets merged in a few weeks. and then there's still a few months of the "merge window" and RC process. and each day folks report bu…
Because they are still dealing with memory safety issues to this day. They ported it to rust, completely introduced a bunch of bugs, went through all that effort, just for the codebase to be not much safer. I'm actually basing my opinion off the blog post, specifically the code. While they do get a few changes for free with the port, most of the code looks identical. And the number of unsafe statements certainly agre…
for me it was already "don't run in prod" quality before. (at least after this I'm considering adding it to the CI to see how it fares.)
segfaults. I don't know. I looked at their CI and GH issues over the past few weeks. (though now GH is down so I can't do a search, but I didn't see thousands of segfaults.)
by all accounts and measures it seems it made their house of cards more manageable. despite the frankenport, no?
they already had a zig compiler fork, wanted to upstream it, but the zig maintainer(s) said it's low-effort. now they don't have to maintain their compiler fork. (or wait for the zig team to deliver the features they wish for.) no need to maintain a hybrid codebase. (though it has C++ because of the embedded JSC.)
also I have no idea what's the zig-rust FFI status, but getting over with a rewrite faster is usually better, even if you are left with non-idiomatic code.
Re: On AI regulation and messaging
#380I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived. Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary P…