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The Closing of the Frontier

tanyaverma.sh

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Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#21

Post by shevy-java »

> Even though the American dream is nearly dead

That dream was always a lie. But in the past, people could purchase more in parity. You only need to look at income versus housing cost in, say, Canada.

Realistically there should not exist any superrich, but this seems hard to change. That means there needs to be a different society be given as promise. Other countries manage that. In the USA they have the orange oligarch who said a while ago how there is no money for health care because he has to invade countries and wage war. So much for the "no more wars" promise.

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#22

Post by bredren »

Ancalagon wrote: post #12
wyc wrote: post #8

> A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary constraints, in a way that didn’t require assembling vast capital or prestige or connections, where your creativity and work could speak for itself, and you had agency. This is now truer than it ever was.

The point is it won’t be if these new models stay locked to the public.

We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model.

I take a contra view and instead see this as fuel on the fire for tinkering to squeeze advanced functionality out of more available things.

It has always been like this, the amateur improvising tooling and equipment to outdo companies with comparably infinite resources.

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#23

Post by fwipsy »

cortesoft wrote: post #6

This feels really premature. The announcement was a week ago. The “this model is too powerful for the general public” sounds like marketing to me. Give it a few months and it will be just another model they are selling, but the NEWER model is just too powerful for the public.

Security researchers always having a model one generation newer than the general public would still achieve the stated goals.

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#24

Post by simianwords »

wyc wrote: post #8

> A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary constraints, in a way that didn’t require assembling vast capital or prestige or connections, where your creativity and work could speak for itself, and you had agency. This is now truer than it ever was.

This is so untrue - prestige and connections matter even more, now that work is being commoditised. no?

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#25

Post by taurath »

cortesoft wrote: post #6

This feels really premature. The announcement was a week ago. The “this model is too powerful for the general public” sounds like marketing to me. Give it a few months and it will be just another model they are selling, but the NEWER model is just too powerful for the public.

For one I fully agree with your statement.

For me, the seeming majority optimism and acceptance of “mythos’” as yet untold capabilities is betrayed as not real by the fact that one can’t react to it with the same reverence while framing it as a downside without being told “it’s not even out yet”.

“It’s not even out yet” should apply to both situations or neither.

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#26

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

airza wrote: post #13
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #11

I admit I didn't read the entire post (I honestly think authors really need to come to terms with the fact that we now live in a world of information excess, and pithiness is more important than ever), but I wouldn't feel too bad yet given there was a recent front page HN post about how free, open models could actually catch all the issues Mythos did, it just required a little more orchestration. E.g. see https://ais…

if an 1800 word post is just too long I think you are cooked. This is the nicest thing I can say on the subject.

It's not that 1800 words is too long, it's that I've seen probably 40-50 (at least) posts, analyses, and bloviations about Mythos since it came out. If the author doesn't very quickly get to why I should read their particular 1800 words over the other similar and competing tens of thousands of words on the subject, they are "cooked".

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#27

Post by atleastoptimal »

cortesoft wrote: post #6

This feels really premature. The announcement was a week ago. The “this model is too powerful for the general public” sounds like marketing to me. Give it a few months and it will be just another model they are selling, but the NEWER model is just too powerful for the public.

Their main motivation of the model being too dangerous is predicated on their discoveries in its ability to find exploits in commonly used software. The idea is that if this were served on a public API, it would massively increase the scale and scope of what malicious actors could do.

I think it's a reasonable choice to make given that Mythos actually does have cyber capabilities on that level. We already have evidence that large-scale scams are being perpetuated using AI models (such as AI video being passed as real, people deepfaking themselves in job interviews).

If you've noticed your new model can be trivially pointed at some open-source codebase with a prompt and harness that amounts to "find as many exploits as possible" and your results are non-trivially substantial and beyond what existing models can do given the same initial parameters, then a gated rollout seems the most reasonable option.

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#28

Post by brunoborges »

fwipsy wrote: post #20

The opportunity from the early days of the American frontier is not typical. Instead, it's the brief burst of unrestrained growth as a better-adapted organization (the US, software companies) expands into, and expands, a niche--cannibalizing the previous occupant (Native Americans, older stagnant companies.) At times growth is so rapid that individuals are able to advance the frontier, but if the field stagnates, ind…

> Yes, but today a 16-year-old building a unicorn is about as likely as winning the lottery.

In today's world, a new digital service is more likely to be successful when attached to celebrities than from pure PLG / Marketing.

Re: The Closing of the Frontier

#30

Post by fwipsy »

brunoborges wrote: post #28
fwipsy wrote: post #20

The opportunity from the early days of the American frontier is not typical. Instead, it's the brief burst of unrestrained growth as a better-adapted organization (the US, software companies) expands into, and expands, a niche--cannibalizing the previous occupant (Native Americans, older stagnant companies.) At times growth is so rapid that individuals are able to advance the frontier, but if the field stagnates, ind…

> Yes, but today a 16-year-old building a unicorn is about as likely as winning the lottery. In today's world, a new digital service is more likely to be successful when attached to celebrities than from pure PLG / Marketing.

Sorry, I removed that line from the comment because I realized it wasn't really in line with the rest of the point I was making.
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