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Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

xeiaso.net

131–140 of 237 posts

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just "you're holding it wrong" with a little smooch of condescension. If only we plebeians could comprehend what magnificent works those who have ambitiously integrated agents into the workstream have wrought!

Sometimes you actually are holding it wrong. It's pretty reasonable to think that Fable isn't worth the massive increase in cost, but if you think it outright doesn't have any benefits over Opus 4.8 then your workflow is probably not making good use of the tools.

> Sometimes you actually are holding it wrong.

I couldn't imagine being so presumptuous as to know that my workflow fits all sizes, and all others are just holding it wrong – or worse, they're not doing real work. It would take a bigger ego on my part, or maybe less social awareness, to presume this.

> but if you think it outright doesn't have any benefits over Opus 4.8 then your workflow is probably not making good use of the tools.

I don't even use claude, I give exactly zero shits about fable or opus or bingus bongus.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#132
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause Personally I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system that also just outright kills you if you sell weed will have a hard time sympathizing with Bay Area thinkers who talk about AI killing us all during their ayahuasca breakfast before returning to their meth fueled crunch towards releasing th…

>I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system Not really relevant to the broader discussion, but this simply isn’t an accurate description of China. Starting with the gaokao, admission quotas are set by province and admits to Peking university and Tsinghua are disproportionately from the urban professional class. Candidate party members must be politically vetted, which means that people wh…

> substantially more meritocratic

It is substantially more meritocratic on domains that matter for governance, your analysis of the incentive structure between systems is off.

1) this 2026, old school CCP patronage networks are broadly dismantled.

2) even in the mass patronage, mass corruption days, system selects for BOTH corruption competence AND performance competence for the simple reason a CCP bureaucrat has to start from the bottom and climb up, which means they need to be good with patronage AND they need to be good with hitting development KPIs. More meritocratic they are at doing their jobs, the higher they climbed, the more they get promoted and more $$$ to graft, because ability to graft directly tied to actual job competence. Hence even cliques/patronage network has to select for actual competence. This works in PRC because there are many people, and hence pool of competence is high, they can have BOTH corruption and competence, i.e. whatever pool they draw from is ultimately filtered by performance meritocracy due to incentive structure. There is reason why PRC only country where positive corruption levels was correlated to positive growth.

This is not the western system where any idiot can enter politics at anytime, and they only domain they need to optimize for is popularity to get votes.

CCP cadre evaluation strictly does not evaluate on popularity domain. It focuses on administration/execution and in so much it needs to focus on patronage... which btw any political system has (factions/cliques)... the patronage system still selects for execution, not popularity. On side, functionally what west politics selects for IS mass patronage (popularity), so attention meritocracy and not performance meritocracy, aka completely stupid incentive structure for governance. West also has ample, ample corruption, "legalized" under lobbying and paper pushing industries, so I suppose west also meritocratically selects, except for lawyers etc, and KPIs is # of document generated and not # of things build. The two are not the same when it comes to nation building.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#133

A lot of people in this comments section seem to be against this, i genuinely don't get it? Why? Do you think the current state of affairs is GOOD? That if we let companies create a mind that is, AS OF TODAY, able to solve problems no human in history has solved, with no regulation, things will end up good for us? We need some sort of regulations, some sort of method to help ensure the thing we are creating ends up g…

Any paths for regulation under capitalism will end in either regulatory capture, or in complete noncompetitiveness like seen in the EU. Either one or more corporations buy out the regulation, stack the ranks with their people and decide on who can use what, when and how. Or you get an iceberg of a system that can't build, decide or do anything for years. The latter one only works if there is no competition in the world or any other group working at a faster pace on the problem.

I think the latter choice is better for the average person, but I think that for it to happen, the global system has to undergo some major disruption or crash so that everyone gets on board with it. Like all middle class and up has to lose their money or be starving or something. Also I find that kind of mentality impossible to swallow in the US, so in practice its not a choice or needs people literally starving.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#134
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've not plataued but they're certainly not as impressive as the hype would have them to be. The reality is, it doesnt matter if LLMs keep getting more powerful because they still need a human to steer it. Without the human providing inputs to the LLM it just sits there and does nothing.

You don't need human input. Any coherent input will do the trick. You can, for example, hook it up to a logging system and have it fix errors as they occur on your platform.

Have you tried this? How did it go?

I’d be curious about:

- your setup. How it all works - The types of errors it fixed and how quickly - Any regressions or issues it caused - The cost

Thanks!

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#135
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the level of irony here, but I keep hearing models have plateaued since a while now, but I keep being impressed with the latest model performance.

astra is more parlor tricks than real gains tbh i swear they trained in on threejs in particular so those idiots on twitter could spam their garbage demos

I'm sure that's part of it, but I run it side by side in my review bot, and Astra medium effort consistently catches more issues than Sol 5.6, using fewer tokens.

For coding it's a little harder to tell, but at least the prose feels a little better.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#136

A lot of people in this comments section seem to be against this, i genuinely don't get it? Why? Do you think the current state of affairs is GOOD? That if we let companies create a mind that is, AS OF TODAY, able to solve problems no human in history has solved, with no regulation, things will end up good for us? We need some sort of regulations, some sort of method to help ensure the thing we are creating ends up g…

Giving the big boys a regulatory moat isnt going to do anything positive for the space.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the expected state space of effective regulation though? Note that we've got passable coding models down to ~30B parameters by now. And keep in mind the ultimate floor here - the human brain only consumes on the order of 20 watts and fits in a handbag. Is there any possible solution other than mass proliferation where the models are used to keep one another in check? Either that or a religious prohibition agai…

The regulations don't have to address the end goal, but the process of development itself. Even just a pause on frontier research is a good start

What I'm asking is, why should we expect that to effectively further the end goal? You're simply asserting that it will ultimately do so.

Given the efficiency gains we've seen it seems to me that the situation has shifted from being analogous to producing nuclear weapons to producing something much closer to small arms.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture The fear is not that they will just slow down progress for all. It is that regulation will specifically burden competition. If you kill open-source training, ban Chinese models, crack down on self-hosting, grandfather OpenAI/Anthropic/Google into regulatory compliance while throwing the book at startups, etc. you wind up in the worst of all possible worlds.

That's a valid concern, but some of that is outright impossible. Banning chinese models and killing open source training is not happening without massive unified international cooperation, and that sort of level of action would require the international counties decide to allow the US aligned companies to just, win. Which would be pretty against their own interests.

It's not all-or-nothing. Banning Chinese models in the public sector and strong-arming the private sector against using them would already do great damage. Similarly, open-source training could be stymied by any of hardware embargoes, taxation, or regulation of larger players.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? My employer rolled back to opus 4.8 because 5 was expensive AND crap. Didnt even consider fable because it didn’t add any additional value. For most software eng and design work opus 4.6-4.8 just works fine. For everyday joe asking ai to plan a trip or home diy work even sonnet works fine. Any cybersecurity or other areas are niches that cannot support trillion $ valuations. What am I missing? Genuinely curio…

If Fable doesn't add additional value in your workplace, it means you aren't being ambitious enough in how you integrate agents into your workstream. Yes, it's probably comparable to 4.8 if you are just using it to write code and put up a couple pull requests. That's not where things are now.

By ambitious if you mean we are not like all the linkedin influencers with their “i one shotted an app this morning…” then no, we are not. Nobody is. I have been in software engineering for 18 years and 6 different companies including FANG and 99% of the people, on 99% of the days arnt writing new apps from scratch. Thats simply not how anything works.

And what even are these ambitious companies and people one shotting and building with Fable? AI has been around for almost 3 years now. Tell me one app or software you use which has gotten significantly better and has amazing new useful features landing on a weekly basis? If anything, every single software product I use has gotten worse.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture The fear is not that they will just slow down progress for all. It is that regulation will specifically burden competition. If you kill open-source training, ban Chinese models, crack down on self-hosting, grandfather OpenAI/Anthropic/Google into regulatory compliance while throwing the book at startups, etc. you wind up in the worst of all possible worlds.

That's a valid concern, but some of that is outright impossible. Banning chinese models and killing open source training is not happening without massive unified international cooperation, and that sort of level of action would require the international counties decide to allow the US aligned companies to just, win. Which would be pretty against their own interests.

Also, nobody ever bothers to argue why a specific proposed regulation is "regulatory capture" or would burden startups more than big companies or anything. It's just supposed to be obvious that corporations love regulation and it's bad for the public, all of post-WWII political history notwithstanding.
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