BobbyJo

TIL. I feel like I've learned this a few times now, so we'll see if it sticks this time.

I disagree pretty strongly. If someone asked "Should I drive to the carwash?", the most obvious response, and the one nearly everyone would give, is a question: "why are you going to the car wash?" because asking the question implies you don't need the car with you.

It's a nonsensical question to ask, and how an LLM answers gives 0 signal.

If you were home and a family member asked you that question, you'd probably criticise the question rather than answering. LLM are RLHF'd into being milk-toast helpers that just try to answer questions like that with no criticism.

This is all beside the fact that the world of AI has changed pretty dramatically in the last few months.

I find the same. Fable is better at hashing out a plan with some back and forth and opus 5.5 is better (cheaper certainly) at sterile execution.

You can drive a car at 15-16 most states, which puts other people's lives in your hands. You can get married between 16 and 18 depending on the state. You can join the army, take on debt, and do pornography at 18, all three of which will completely alter your life long term. You can drink, buy a gun, or enter a casino at 21. These feel someone nonsensically ordered to me. Seems like we should just pick one age for "you can now make and be responsible for your decisions" and stop talking about all of these weird edge cases as if we need the law to deal with all of them.

Yes, and the laws around that align with marriage laws, so it's still a confusing statement.

> Google is a little bit more frugal

I'm gonna need you to look at the capex obligations they've undertaken in the last 12 months. They are definitely not being frugal. If they are behind, its not for lack of spending.

> The use of proprietary internal models by AI labs to do mathematical research risks creating a two-tier system where labs outrun the rest of the field

This is literally the economic bet of the big labs in the broader economy. You use your relative advantage to front run or outcompete.

I'm not sure this argument will work given it is essentially an argument against the thesis the big labs use to justify their valuations.

A company/person that writes its/their own application that shaves 1% off capex or opex will absolutely unlock value in the economic sense.

Yes. I would bet on the latter.

> I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear

There is almost always a large amount of time and effort invested behind the scenes in exactly how to message things like this. That being the case, there is almost always some insight to be had criticizing and analyzing what they settled on.

Am I the only one with a deep aversion to the keyword "let"?

> presumably, an 'AGI' that is generally as good as a really good human at every task under-the-sun will already be much better than most humans at the task because it can incorporate cross-domain knowledge and apply it in a reasonable fashion.

I disagree with this definition of AGI, and I disagree that chess skills significantly benefit from generalizing non-chess knowledge, outside of computing moves probabilistically.

AGI has historically been defined as human level or better, with generality to new domains. I think blurring it with ASI makes the terminology confusing to use.

Chess is learned rules and the ability to apply those rules. Strategy as a whole is applying a set of rules to circumstances, that's how it is taught: "here are examples of circumstances and actions, try to pattern match to future circumstance and apply commensurate action."

If you make the point that chess is a large part of the training data, or that LLMs are unable to learn chess well, I'll accept that as refuting that LLMs are AGI, but these other points I disagree with.

> an AGI, all of this should be a cakewalk, trained as it were to surpass human capability in any and every domain.

AGI != ASI. You are confusing the two.

My point was you are misunderstanding G, or at least applying it erroneously here. Being good at chess is not a generalization of any other body of knowledge, it is a rigorous set of rules. The only way to be good at chess is to practice chess, or to apply deep calculations. The latter is the model writing code.

The illegal move aspect has more to do with a failure of online/in-context learning, which would support your point. I tend to think it is a byproduct of reasoning in language, which newer architectures would fix, but we shall see.

I suck at chess. Are you saying I can't be intelligent?

I don't think the agreements played any important role outside of limiting tests. I highly doubt agreements about nukes in particular have meaningfully curbed risks of their use. MAD has played a much larger role in that, and MAD is kind of the antithesis of control agreements, it is the natural equilibrium in the game.

This confuses me to no end as well. The socialists are fighting against the magic socialism machine.

> This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year.

I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. Opus 4.5 needed a lot of handholding not to work itself into a corner pretty quickly. Fable I basically never need to correct, and I've most become a data source.

"Can be used as a weapon" applies to nearly everything, and ceases to have any meaning. Even on a tank, they aren't considered a weapon, only the whole take together is the weapon, or the cannon alone.

I'm not sure what you're responding to. If you are making the claim that Agent Orange was indeed a chemical weapon, I'd disagree, but I think either perspective has points.

Is your argument that the resulting birth defects were intentional? If not, I'm not sure where you're going with your response.

I'm not arguing we were the good guys in Vietnam, just that calling Agent Orange a chemical weapon is a shaky claim. Not sure why you're putting so many other words in my mouth.

> is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...

Is a wheel a weapon because a tank uses it? I wouldn't consider the difference pedantry.

1) The US is not the only country to deploy chemical weapons. Are you forgetting all of WW1? It's the whole reason chemical weapons are a no-no now.

2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.

Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.

> We must pursue advancements in AI to protect us against advancements in AI

Is this not true of technology as a whole? Very little of technology's breadth exists at the human interface. Most of it is made specifically to interface with other technologies, either to make them safer or increase their capabilities. That AI is making AI safer and more useful is no more notable than trucks being used to build roads.

Oh, you're someone else. Now I'm just confused why you responded to my question that was directed at someone else.

PPP is what matters financially, add on ethnic homogeny and familial presence in a culture that values both and staying becomes a lot more compelling.

You can't ignore the impact of China also becoming a better place to live as well. China is a different place no than it was 20 years ago, and the need to go overseas anywhere is probably felt less today than back then.

So you're abandoning your earlier argument about us bumping up against the laws of physics and instead arguing that AI won't make the economy more efficient due to frivolous usage?

That's plainly false, as that's just not how markets work over the long term. We only see distortions like this iver the short term due to investor subsidies.