941–950 of 1001 posts
Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely. The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.
Those that claim their opponents are in denial are most likely in denial themselves
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it is very hard for people to eat crow, as the replies will show
Really? has anyone ever claimed that ai will never be able to prove theorems and conjectures ?
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So are they right or wrong about the sigmoids?
I dunno. They've been saying this for decades, including in a very well read Harry Potter fanfic, and I'd always dismissed them as kooks, but maybe they're right in the end.
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In my opinion, after seein the Jacobian conjecture go, the Riemann hypothesis only has about a year left. I’m not sure if people just aren’t as aware, but the Jacobian conjecture practically was on par with those other great problems.
I would be genuinely very impressed - but still not scared - if the Riemann hypothesis were solved. I suspect that we may require “new math” to make progress on that. If a new operator / symbol is required, is that fundamentally not doable by an LLM because it’s outside of current tokenization space?
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The AI companies themselves, who are highly motivated to sell AI as overall positive for society, notwithstanding some security/etc risks, and who have economists on the payroll to think about things like this, do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present. Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tou…
UBI probably is the positive outcome, though it may not seem like it to begin with. Initially it will likely be stigmatised and under-resourced, but as a larger proportion of people move out of work and onto UBI that stigma will drop and the resources should grow. Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyon…
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How do I directly benefit from this supposed "growth"? Seems like its just making things worse for most people.
Plenty of people are making money from AI? And I am not sure I've seen it "making things worse for most people" yet, do you have a source behind this? If your source is AI layoffs, there were plenty of layoffs with the invention of the horseless carriage, but that doesn't mean it made humans worse off overall. There are reasons to be skeptical about progress and AI and all that but the 'making things worse for most p…
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> But if you've not yet seen a deceleration We have though. The velocity remains high but the acceleration is decreasing. The improvement between gpt 2-4 where staggering. to 5, 5.6? Much less so. The results improve of course, but the difference is no longer mind blowing. Most of the improvement now has come from agentic harnessing, which is unrelated to the acceleration of the model but the tooling around the use o…
I literally don’t understand, and have a deep distrust of people who say we haven’t seen deceleration. The diminishing returns are colossal. GPT 4 is more than 3 years old now, and while Sol is definitely better, it’s better at a tremendous cost. And 3 years of development. And it still fails in nearly all the same places as 4.0. I’m not some “zero AI” person, I don’t think this industry will collapse into nothing an…
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None of those are single issues, and the political fault lines are in the sub-issues. For example, while most Americans support "gun control," only 20% of Americans support a ban on handguns : https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx . That figure has been trending steadily downward--from 38% in 1999 to 20% in 2024. That makes it much easier for Republicans to hold the line on that issue: portray all gun control e…
> Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept. They're not. They're really not. They're incredibly capable and are currently executing long term plans successfully, one after another. This goes all the way back to Regan and the disenfranchisement of education. They know exactly what they're doing to erode democracy. Calling them inept is dangerously stupid at best, and at worst is just right wing propaganda t…
Democrats, by contrast, have much more permanent political infrastructure. At the top law schools, for example, there's probably 10x as many liberal organizations as conservative ones. Democrats enjoy politics, so they are always out there organizing and engaging. Meanwhile, Republicans dislike the institutions through which politics is done, and so they gear up once every four years and then go back to their day jobs. Among the sort of more educated people who actually run the parties and serve as line staffers, republicans also self-select into private sector jobs, and out of public sector or political work.
Most importantly, putatively neutral institutions are de-facto aligned with democrats (because the professional class that runs these institutions is overwhelmingly democrats). Conservatives might have Fed Soc, but liberals own the ABA. Virtually every legal organization that isn’t expressly conservative or highly niche is de facto liberal and participates in support of democratic policies.