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Comment by sbszllr | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how OpenAI and Anthropic effectively mass dumped a bunch of similar features in the last two days.

I wonder what other features they're cooking right now.

I think that's the wrong question. What kind of shadow spy network must exist around all these companies such that they all happen to be working on the same features at the same time.

> What kind of shadow spy network must exist around all these companies such that they all happen to be working on the same features at the same time.

Stuff like that happened even before the invention of the telephone, humans within the same geographic location is even more predicable, so surely this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Yeah the spy network is just all these people living in a 7 mile radius of each other (San Francisco) and have lots of overlap in social circles

Who said I was surprised? :)

I mean your initial question kind of implies something that is likely to be the wrong answer, so sounds like at least someone could potentially be surprised by that :)

Frequently, two movies with very similar concepts drop the same year. Is that because they're spying, or because the companies make decisions in similar ways based on similar input information?

It's possible and even likely there's industrial espionage going on. But imo, you don't need that. I've worked in cutting edge industries, and even when you don't know what your competition is doing, there are usually only so many logical next steps.

This. / Who remembers the "birth" of crowdfunding? Why did so much seem to happen at all once? The most likely explanation imo is that it was "in the air" -- we share culture and ideas. These ideas don't have to be stolen to co-occur... quite the opposite.

The human brain strikes again. It is built into our cognitive machinery to look for patterns and naively ascribe causation. We're not rational beings that sometimes mess up. We're a clusterf--k of cognitive biases all the way down.*

Cool pattern! Sure, maybe there is something there.** And/or maybe our brain is doing "conspiracy theorizing lite". Its all on the same spectrum -- the same flawed cognitive machinery trying to operate in a weird modern world quite different from where we came from.

A better way: write out your favorite hypothesis. But don't stop there... keep going... write out many hypotheses. Then find ways to test them. To tap into our best selves, I recommend The Scout Mindset (book). Here is an infographic summary of part of it: https://imgur.com/qN31PX8

Probably not a better way: float one's first gut feels to the Internet phrased as i.e. the better question and feed empty calories to our pattern-craving brains. There is reason some of our brain functions are considered higher order.

* Maybe I'm overstating this. Let me know? I want to read Rationality and the Reflective Mind by Keith Stanovich (https://academic.oup.com/book/5930) as a counterpoint to the usual suspects (such as Tversky & Kahneman)

** But what is there. What kind of pattern? What kind(s) of causation could be at work? See Judea Pearl's "ladder of causation". Nice write-up here: https://samuel-book.github.io/causal_inference_notebook/pear...

It’s because they embrace their coding models to ship new things at light speed.

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