AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

Post by kannanvijayan » Tue, May 19, 2026, 11:31 AM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #144

kannanvijayan wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the talk about "world models" is trying to reach at that, but cast it in different terminology. World model is just domain model, and once you're at domain model, there are multitudes of domains. Unsupervised learning over domain rulesystems has the potential to let us define really well-defined, scoped models that behave a lot more deterministically and don't colour outside the lines, and reserve their w…

> Mixture-of-Experts seems like an attempt to do this - the domain structure being extracted into specific sub-models that are presumably trained on particular domain-associated content This is a common miss-conception. MoE LLMs are NOT trained with each expert receiving domain-associated data. It's just an unfortunate naming decision that stuck, and is commonly miss-understood by non practitioners.

Post by elvis10ten » Tue, May 19, 2026, 11:45 AM UTC

pingou wrote: post #145

libraryofbabel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the summary. I do love Benedict‘s work; I find he’s one of the few commentators who consistently strikes a balance between taking the transformative potential of AI seriously while not falling over into hype. Some things that stand out: * He’s really good with his historical analogies, especially looking at previous transformations like the early Internet and mobile; no surprise given that he has a history…

I just got a bit triggered by the "hype" word. What if the hype was real? It is easy to say that nobody knows how all of this is going to work, and I would say it is a prudent thing to say, but there is value in making a bold prediction from the start instead of just updating your view to respond to change. In one case you are predicting stuff, in the other, just reacting. But I absolutely agree that in hindsight we…

Post by jp57 » Tue, May 19, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

Post by GolfPopper » Tue, May 19, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

pingou wrote: post #145

libraryofbabel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the summary. I do love Benedict‘s work; I find he’s one of the few commentators who consistently strikes a balance between taking the transformative potential of AI seriously while not falling over into hype. Some things that stand out: * He’s really good with his historical analogies, especially looking at previous transformations like the early Internet and mobile; no surprise given that he has a history…

I just got a bit triggered by the "hype" word. What if the hype was real? It is easy to say that nobody knows how all of this is going to work, and I would say it is a prudent thing to say, but there is value in making a bold prediction from the start instead of just updating your view to respond to change. In one case you are predicting stuff, in the other, just reacting. But I absolutely agree that in hindsight we…

Post by GolfPopper » Tue, May 19, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

pingou wrote: post #154

elvis10ten wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype is in what AI delivers (at least so far). I would never create a PR without an AI review. I will ask an AI to write code for me from time to time. But it still has huge gaps in quality. And from time to time, it shows me that it doesn’t really understand things. You might point out that how is that any different from your mediocre engineer. But for most people skilled enough, you can easily know the differen…

Ok so the hype would be people saying AI can currently do something well and autonomously when it cannot (or not consistently enough), and it is easy to prove them wrong. But I feel like people are more hyped about what the AI will be able to do soon rather than what it can do now. I think AI does understand things (depending on your definition), how else could we communicate and ask it a question if it didn't? I mea…