Video conferencing imposes a hurdle to communication that doesn't exist when people are working in the same physical space. One thing I've heard from some people who prefer working remotely is that it's easier for them to 'just put their headphones on and focus' because there are less distractions. But that makes the mistake of assuming they're being being paid to focus on a specific set of tasks, when in actual fact they're being paid to do a lot of things including passing on their experience to junior members of staff, and to communicate freely with other people working on their project. These things (in my and many other peoples opinion) work better when the small hurdle to communication I mentioned earlier doesn't exist.
So just to be clear, you’re saying there is no job where in person collaboration yields better results? And you don’t need to keep writing ‘it’s always about control’ over and over again, it doesn’t add any weight to your argument.
I work in a creative industry that's entirely driven by close collaboration. It's really just much harder to do this kind of work remotely. I get that people have other priorities but it's really not as absolute as you say it is.
I realise you're being sarcastic but the main argument for in-office work is increased levels of collaboration which only works if most people are coming in.
I don't think claiming that pure scaling of LLMs isn't going to lead to AGI is a particularly hot take. Or that current LLMs don't provide a whole lot of economic value. Obviously, if you were running a research lab you'd be trying a bunch of different things, including pure scaling. It would be weird not to. I don't know if we're going to hit actual AGI in the next decade, but given the progress of the last less-than-decade I don't see why anyone would rule it out. That in itself seems pretty remarkable, and it's not hard to see where the hype is coming from.
Nothing they're doing is bad, and sometimes we benefit when large companies interests align with our own. All the spiel about believing in open systems because of being prevented from making their best products by Apple is a bit much considering we're talking about Facebook which is hardly an 'open platform', and the main thing Apple blocked them on was profiling their users to target ads.
> The only people who sincerely care about "extinction risk" are the weird cultists. In the real world there's essentially zero chance of LLMs/Current-GenAI scaling up into AGI, nevermind AGI that'd be an extinction risk. (Yes, that phrasing is cheeky. AGI is a different kind of AI, not just specialized models made bigger. But we're only really trying to make them bigger, and not build general intelligence from the ground up)
Given that a significant number of people working in the field apparently disagree with you perhaps you could give some justification for your dismissal beyond the ad-hominem? And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'. The news is currently full of stories about coming advancements from OpenAI which have nothing to do with scaling and that's just a single company.
Doesn't materialism imply that a perfectly accurate simulation of the universe would be identical to the universe we live in? If not, in what possible way could the two be distinguished?
I take your point but living in a London flat I don't have the room for multiple high resolution displays. Nor are they very portable, I have a MBP rather than an iMac because mobility is important.
I do think we're 4+ years until it gets to the 'iPhone 1' level of utility though, so we'll see how committed Apple are to it.
The value would come if it was something you would feel comfortable wearing all day. So it would need perfect pass through, be much much lighter and more comfortable. If they achieved that and can do multiple high resolution virtual displays then people would use it.
The R&D required to get to that point is vast though.
Clearly we don’t know when/if AGI would happen, but the expectations of many people working in the field is it will arrive in what qualifies as ‘near future’. It probably won’t result from just scaling LLMs, but then that’s why there’s a lot of researchers trying to find the next significant advancement, in parallel with others trying to commercially exploit LLMs.
Alternatively, you could argue that the vast majority of released music is already unimaginative rubbish. Industrialising the creation of more of it will make releasing this type of material completely pointless, so perhaps there will be more of a focus on finding original music to cut through the grey goo?
Are you talking about some as yet unseen research/technology? The aesthetic sample looks like something we could have seen on the SD subreddit for the last year.
> The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
This is wildly subjective, different people watch movies for very different reasons.
I have to say, speaking as someone that is generally very happy to live in Apple's walled garden for my phone and couldn't really give a toss about Tim Sweeney's crusade, this most recent continuation of the Epic spat seems like a pretty spectacular own goal from Apple. I can't think of any non-emotive motivation for their actions, and I can see plenty of large downsides.
I don’t know if they are or not, but I’m not sure how anyone could be so certain that they’re not that they find the mere idea cringeworthy. Unless you feel you have some specific perspective on it that’s escaped their army of researchers?
What I don't understand is how we reasonably quantify the probability of sentient life evolving. Sure the universe is very big, but the probability could be very small. All the discussions I've seen make the assumption that there's nothing unusual about life on Earth and given similar conditions elsewhere we would expect to see life, but how does one conclude that from a sample size of 1?
I'm familiar with node based development environments in other domains (VFX) and when done well (eg. Houdini) they can be much more efficient than solving creative problems with Python or C++. So I expected to like Max, but in practice found it pretty unintuitive. Complex devices I've written end up doing as much as possible in JS, but the bridges to Ableton are pretty rickety and while you usually can find a solution eventually, it's not a fun process. I prefer Reaktor, but that has it's own set of issues and isn't really evolving at any pace.
In the end I shifted to doing as much as possible in Eurorack which feels a much more creatively enabling and stable platform, relegating Ableton/Max to covering what's left.
Agree with you there on both counts. Attempting to match physical instruments is a great learning exercise, but not usually that interesting creatively. However patches that live someone in the middle ground between naturalistic and synthetic are often the most interesting IMO.
I think a lot of his defence here is "No-one could have known exactly what was going to happen and no-one knows what will happen next."
This is obviously true - predicting the future is hard. It doesn't however explain giving a timeline of thousands of years, which is a ridiculously long time for anything you believe to be technically feasible.
How do you know the background/experience of the person you're responding to? And even if the person you're claiming has authority here were the worlds leading expert on generative AI, that wouldn't make them authorative on the difficulty of drawing an intentionally innovative image from scratch.
Regardless, the original comment was clearly not serious.
Yeah, you could see this outcome a mile away. While there are examples of in-house VFX software being commercialised (eg. most of the Foundry's offerings) it's generally not built to the same spec as commercial software. There are plenty of good developers but the teams are smaller and resources are focused on bang for buck.
I think it depends what is meant by fast take off. If we created AGIs that are superhuman in ML and architecture design you could see a significantly more rapid rate of progress in hardware and software at the same time. It might not be overnight but it could still be fast enough that we wouldn’t have the global political structures in place to effectively manage it.
I do agree that intelligence and compute scaling will have limits, but it seems overly optimistic to assume we’re close to them already.
> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
Is the board taking a doomer perspective and seeking to prevent the company developing unsafe AI? But Emmett Shear said it wasn’t about safety? What on earth is going on?