Not entirely whataboutism from my part (in my opinion), the thread above was talking about China and US imperialism in (now deleted) comments. It's not like I brought in the US out of nowhere although it looks that way due to deleted comments.
Same for the first part you're commenting on, that was in direct response to the thread.
"Maintain economic dominance" is a bit of a distorted view of late 19th century US colonialism. It was not a dominant economic power compared to colonial Europe. It was to boost the local economy for sure, with the guano islands. But colonizing the Philippines after the "war" with Spain was mostly to prevent European colonial powers from dominating that part of the world.
The US didn't become economically dominant until after the first World War, when it already had an overseas empire for half a century.
I assumed the comment I was replying to was in reference to our constellation of military bases and the economic machinations post ww2.
If it was referencing history prior to that then I would reply with the as you mentioned guano mines, fruit production, and keeping European powers out of our regional backyard after several scuffles with Spain and Britain at minimum.
I’d also mention the boat touching still.
The Marine’s Hymn doesn’t mention the Halls of Montezuma and the Shores of Tripoli for no reason.
All these companies have a nauseating narrative around AI. I want to believe they are intentionally deceitful and not actually delusional. Hard to tell though which one it is.
Clearly with a Butlerian Jihad and everyone getting high on spice while riding giant worms. Silly you need to even ask that question, didn’t you read the sci-fi books. :D
I'm thinking of selling my Index and my Vision Pro for one. The screens/tech in the Vision Pro is remarkable, but sadly the iron grip of the App Store Guidelines means none of it is really accessible for any interesting applications. The AVP App Store is a pathetic ghost town. I'd much rather have a less technically capable headset but have it be completely open.
I think it’s more than money and slowing progress. Public perception on AI is in the gutter. That is a much bigger threat to these companies. They’re trying to turn it around.
But I think with the way AI is slated to grow exponentially it's going to hit electricity limits very soon.
Big tech can build a huge data center in 5 years but scaling up the electrical infrastructure is mired in red tape and can take on the order of decades.
Someone will likely come up with some clever way to make AI use less electricity.
There's probably something in how you design the models or chips or some other thing that will be figured out over the next 5 - 10 years to make these use dramatically less electricity.
Without pressure, the release valves will never be invented. Electricity, datacenter, and DRAM demand outstripping supply sounds like an opportunity - if we can only find a way to divert funding from the current gpu/ai funnel. Maybe jack up corporate tax rates like the 1970s, then every corporate office park will have a research lab :).
I dunno, why is 90% the limit? Maybe they can set something up in the chips to use 1/10th the power and set something up in the model design to use 1/10th the power and so we use 99% less power than today.
After all GPUs were not really designed with AI efficiency in mind, and current AI architecture was not really designed with efficiency in mind, so there's probably some things that can be done. Over 5-10 years, who knows how much more efficient things could get?
Trying to turn it around by once again claiming that ai is an existential threat and will take everyone’s job right before brutally murdering every human.
These companies don’t appear to give a single fuck about public perception. Only their investors and the government (in anticipation of the biggest bailout in human history).
It’s much more likely that our current approach to large language models for general use will eventually show diminishing improvements (even if you think it hasn’t yet), than the opposite situation where valuable improvements can be made forever.
The threat of distillation and efficiency gains from competitors mean that providing value at the top end of the market is an existential necessity for these labs. I don’t think they can do that forever and, in my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases we’ve already reached very little improvement for new models when compared with available offerings.
Sorry, this is ridiculous. OpenAI said that they have a step change in model performance. They proved it by solving a Millenium problem. HF incidents are public and vetted.
If you still think there's a stall despite all evidence pointing to opposite, I don't know what to say..
Solving millennium problems doesn’t pay the bills.
Their best models might be quite good when directed at extremely difficult and very focused problems, but most business use cases are nothing like that.
Edit:
Not trying to imply these new frontier models aren’t also better at other things, just that there’s really no reason for most people to use them when cheaper alternatives exist that get the job done just as well.
What reason could OpenAI possibly have to lie about their own performance? The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research leading to the Millenium problem further hurts their case imo.
Two things can be true. Open AI is a huge company.
1. It has people in it who are career obsessed and who are willing to ruthlessly go after any opportunity to improve their standing/stock valuation. Using a 2 week old model to snipe a millenium prize for PR is in line with that.
2. There are many researchers and even executives at the company who genuinely think we are speedrunning the end of the world. I don’t know anyone in this field who honestly argues that if we build ASI soon it doesn’t lead to extinction. This group of people can output warnings about the state of research and fears for the future while pushing for regulation out of genuine fear of what they’re building. I tend to agree with them.
You can’t view these companies as a monolith. They’re actions won’t be consistent because it’s built of many people with conflicting beliefs. Please look at arguments regarding AI risk and the current pace of progress and value them as it relates to the argument itself, not who said it. We are in a dangerous place and no one is sure how quickly we’ll get to a bad spot.
> “the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month.”
> “This is a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment.”
> “incredibly important developments.”
> “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact.”
Clearly Buckmaster (who is probably one of the most accomplished academics in the field) himself doesn't believe that AI has stalled. What makes you think you are right?
Solving is a very interesting way of describing what happened. Unless you believe them over reputable academics I suppose?
I will note the remarkable goal post shift in your edit - giving direct counter evidence to your own earlier claim of an OpenAI proof - and leave it at that.
We are approaching what is likely the biggest existential crisis in human history.
Unfortunately, there will be people that refuse to tackle the issue head on and will instead narrow their focus on data that suggests that tomorrow will be like today.
The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research
I guess people are just going to keep spreading misinformation about this, along the same lines as "Anthropic's C compiler fails on hello world". There is zero indication that they stole anything, unless it counts as "stealing" to spin up a bunch of compute based on rumors that the problem had been solved already.
If you believe Yann LeCun and David Silver (and others), there's an architecture wall; maybe labs are starting to see this on the horizon. Maybe the DRAM supply constraints are forcing it.
Are these real step changes - big picture wise, or refinements in RL/agentic orchestration/"taste" and advancements due to bigger models and hardware technology/capacity scaling? If they not, does this tactic - and hardware improvements - continue to scale non-linearly like they need to?
It is clear that whatever does change in each model increment has resulted in meaningfully better end user capabilities (as well as regressions in some areas, honestly), but that doesn't prove anything. I'm not sure what I personally believe, but stating with your full chest that a stall is ridiculous ignores a lot of potential evidence to the contrary.
Stupid example: Astra. Its main improvements are: much much better computer use and 3d modeling capabilities; better subagent orchestration; better and more reliable tool use; slightly worse coding.
This looks to me, from a feature perspective, to be an incremental improvement across several functional areas, plus new features which are unquestionably excellent but are probably the result of RL focus, not magic.
Step change? Ehhhh depends on how you squint. But how many more iterations of this do we have? Are we going to squeeze quintillion parameter transformers into GPUs?
I don't think the technical aspect is true, performance has been growing fairly consistently, but the financial aspect, or more accurately the logistical aspect, is plausible; with competition as fierce as it currently is, for how long can they keep growing at the same pace? People can't afford RAM anymore and datacenter build outs aren't particularly popular, OAI has been doubling compute capacity every 7 months for the past 3 years, it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long, something has to give.
And this is not to say that the tech isn't revolutionary or the demand isn't there, it's simply just currently too competitive, and to avoid getting into anti trust trouble they need to involve the government.
Note this being a plausible doesn't necessarily make it true, for all I know they could have witnessed some safety incident and decided they need a pause, or maybe it's both reasons.
I just find it strange how multiple people throw completely different arguments just to land on same conclusion.
Your argument seems to mix a few arguments like: OpenAI has so much demand and it has made so much compute that it is a bad thing (?!). It can't go on (why?) hence the capabilities are stalling (how?).
Then you also say that it is too competitive which is a totally different argument to compute.
So in this thread we have multiple vectors of arguments like
- high competition
- high demand for compute (not sure how this hurts OpenAI but whatever)
They have so much demand because they are giving so much away for free.
I used 76 million sol tokens on Saturday, I have 45% still left on the week and I still have two full resets to use before October. For $20.
I used $61 dollars in Fable 5.1 credits too this weekend because I have to use that up this week. I paid nothing for those besides my $20 a month subscription.
How much would I pay at the actual API price? Nothing. Zero. My demand would drop to zero because I would just use the cheaper alternatives.
If a doughnut shop is giving away free doughnuts 24/7 my demand for doughnuts is going to go way up too. Through the roof actually because I know a doughnut shop can't give away doughnuts forever. Giving away free fancy doughnuts is not a sustainable business model.
I never mentioned capability stalling, my point is that if you extrapolate the same rate of growth just a few years into the future, you quickly reach logistical impracticality, I don't think It's hard to deduce that AI compute can't keep doubling every 6 months for long.
The other part is that this is happening because the foundational model business is both extremely successful and competitive, if it wasn't as successful the market demand would've been saturated by now, and if it wasn't as competitive a single monopoly could've paced things more reasonably from the beginning.
"it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long"
I mean, my uneducated guess is that it's probably within the laws of physics for us to have at least 100x as much compute in the world as there is now. There would be a lot of engineering challenges, but I think it's physically possible. If so, OAI could double for at least a few more years.
I can't speak for every country, but I feel the irresistible force of datacentre construction will eventually get mired in the the immovable objects of British NIMBYism and high electricity prices.
I've seen more local opposition to datacentres than anything else, and the fact we have discretionary planning (which can't be abolished for political reasons, despite it amounting to putting economic sanctions on ourselves) means there's a lot of stakeholder vetos in the system.
At the current rate of 3.4x per year in the US, you get 100x the current capacity in just 3 more years and 9 months, that's not physically impossible yet, but just looking at the impact today makes it hard to imagine the impact 100x would have, and I find it very plausible for top labs to prefer making some sort of truce instead of keeping up this pace.
Anthropic's profit estimate they released a while ago was a masterclass in deceptive reporting. They didn't include training costs, stock based compensation, or liabilities. Token gross margin is not profit.
Basically, continuously building out compute is costing these labs enormous amounts of money, which VCs and other companies have been bankrolling in order for them to develop powerful models.
So if the new models they can develop right now are less frontier, it could be a net loss on their balance sheets.
Well, as a starter, I've been told that AI will take my job for at least 3 years now. That's not happening. In fact, what's happening is that I now have an AI vendor BEGGING me to use their product, which of course, cannot do my job.
- AI has yet to be profitable for these large labs (also zero moat etc.)
- There is considerable hype and people are tired of it.
- HF incident (and apparently many others that these labs are not reporting on or don’t even know about) proves they have terrible security practices and that’s about it.
- NS is incredibly suspicious timing wise.
You are sprinting around these threads to misrepresent the average persons issues with AI. I don’t know why people having those issues seems to be taken as a personal attack for you.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It makes more sense to read his 'public statements' and judge them individually rather than in aggregate. No one is correct all the time.
As for this current post (just a tweet really, public statement sounds overly official), I think he's making sense. If you don't follow industry trends, you'll eventually be out of touch. Whether you're a senior software engineer or engineering manager, keeping current with the evolution of tech will make you better at your job. Today that happens to be related to following AI developments, but it applied equally to learning higher level programming languages in the 90s, or big data engineering practices in the 2010s.
To his credit, this reads like human slop instead of AI slop. It's still slop though. People shouldn't take this guy (or Altman) seriously, they need to hype their products to stay afloat and for some reason get a kick out of the 'extinction threat'.
They're still 5 years away from solving cancer (just like they were 5 years away from doing so in 2023). They'll still be 5 years away from solving cancer in 2031.
For all the flaws in how Nintendo treats fans of their IP, the games they put out themselves are consistently fun. Mario Kart still feels like Mario Kart even decades later, and not in stagnating/bad way.
Nintendo seems to be the outlier in the video games industry in that they are very much willing to foster talent over a long term. People who started doing sprite work 35 years ago are still there today and directing games. It's almost like the secret to long-term success is developing a roster of highly-skilled professionals, rather than treating your staff as disposable.
Didn't know, that's pretty cool!
I do think Nintendo generally has a good sense of what they want from their games, so perhaps future generations will stay true to the current 'generation' of game leads.
Unpopular opinion i am sure but i stopped playing Nintendo games years ago. All their main games are so derivative of their source mechanics that I get bored 10 minutes past the loading screen. At this point mariocart, mario world xxxi, zelda remake of a remake, they all feel like fifa or cod to me albeit far more polished.
Nintendo as a company is also extremely odious but that is a given of all companies these days so i give em a pass.
And, breath of the wild etc mechanics are almost all pulled directly from other open world games although they were a first for nintendo.
The US meanwhile has an overseas empire for honestly no good reason.
Highly recommend the book “How to hide an empire” which talks about the American version of colonialism.
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