Hacker News Reader

Simon321on We need a more sophisticated debate about AI

If the open letter is taken at face value

That's quite an assumption, because i (and many others) don't believe it is to be taken at face value. It looks like a ploy of Elon and others to catch up to their main competitor (openAI). It's known Elon hates openAI[1] and is competing with them. He also provides the majority for the organisation that published the letter. Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided.

[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Simon321on [dead]

looks like a joke

Simon321on Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

He was furious because they didn't make CEO and withdrew his funding/left: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Simon321on Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

He is indeed: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Simon321on Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

He's furious at them because they didn't make them CEO. He withdrew his funding and parted ways.

Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Simon321on Universal Speech Model

I saw deepgrams claims as well an believed them also, then i tried it, it was TERRIBLE. Don't believe them. It only does well on the benchmark they trained it on. It is faster though but the quality is terrible.

Simon321on AI for developers and Google Workspace

Wow! Looks like they're determined to catch up!

They're going to open up PaLM & an image generation model (imagen?) through Google Cloud. It looks incredibly easy to finetune PaLM in their environment:

Video (Build, tune, and deploy foundation models with Vertex AI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2yHIKQ7oM

Simon321on More People Are Freaked Out by AI Than Excited About It

The greatest technological breakthrough we've seen in our lifetimes, it can make our lives so much better. And people can only see potential downsides, it's sad.

Simon321on GPT-3 is much better at math than it should be

he's using GPT-3.5 aka text-davinci-3 so not chatGPT

Simon321on John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

A hard take off is unlikely because stronger AI takes a lot of hardware and data collection. Building fabs is hard and takes a lot of capital and time. Intelligence can only take you so far.

Simon321on Prime Voice AI: AI speech software

Hmmm i don't know of any open source project that can get similar quality? Can you name one? This one also allows fine tuning for custom voices on a minute of audio and it works great.

Simon321on OpenJourney: Midjourney, but Open Source

Keep in mind the real Midjourney uses a completely different architecture, this is just a checkpoint for stable diffusion.

Simon321on VALL-E: Neural codec language models are zero-shot text to speech synthesizers

This looks pretty good: https://play.ht/

It was used to do the fake joe rogan/steve jobs podcast: https://podcast.ai/

Simon321on ElonJet – Account Suspended

Elon Musk:

EU passed a law banning Russia Today and several other Russian news sources. We have been told to block their IP address.

Actually, I find their news quite entertaining

Lot of bullshit, but some good points too

--- Wow...

Also looks like he's great friends with Larry Ellison. That explains a lot.

Simon321on ChatGPT passes the 2022 AP Computer Science A free response section

I'm excited, if this technology can live up to it's promises it will lead to a time of great prosperity for mankind.

Simon321on Comparing Google and ChatGPT

Nevermind lamda, they have Flan-U-PaLM which is even better. They have the best LLM know to man. But it's private.

Simon321on An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj ŽIžek

What was used to do the voices here? It's very well done and according to the FAQ it's using only open source tools.

Simon321on Tell HN: The regret of parenting and how to handle it

Oh only have no time to do what i love for the next 8 years huh? Sounds like a breeze! And that's the best case scenario, kids won't leave the house usually before 18-25 years of age.

Simon321on Ask HN: Is WWIII already in its early stages?

> Russia won the war in the first 72 hours. Russia has also only committed 10% of their resources, the rest are on standby in case NATO intervenes.

Imagine the mental gymnastics you have to do to believe this.

Some sources:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-14/russia-tu...

> There are indications the Kremlin is running out of troops for its war with Ukraine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62496905

> the nation has been "forced into a greater reliance on old Soviet-era equipment, such as personnel carriers offering limited protection, and tanks last produced in 1973." > Kremlin is increasingly using "older, less-precise missiles for strikes, killing and injuring innocent people." > "These outdated tactics are a sign of Russia's desperation amid its equipment shortages and tactical deficiencies,"

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-running-out-steam-growing-de...

Simon321on Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

This is something i see a lot in conspiratorial thinking, you can't believe a government would be so incompetent, so somebody MUST be behind it and have caused this maliciously. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Simon321on DALL-E 2 generates images of Kermit The Frog in various films

> My personal opinion is that the Chinese Room argument is fancy handwaving that crucially relies on never being explicit about what it means by "understanding", combined with an appeal to intuition.

bingo

Simon321on DALL-E 2 generates images of Kermit The Frog in various films

And in reality it's up to the user to pick one 1 of 8 for Dalle-2, usually they're all at least decent.

Simon321on IQ scores are falling and have been for decades (2018)

This is from 2018 to be clear.

Simon321on Twitter restricted in Russia amid conflict with Ukraine

> As of July 19, 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there were 4,431 total deaths in Iraq (US troops).

>The number of United States troops who have died fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had passed 7,000 at the end of 2019.

Still seems to be a lot, not sure if that number from Ukraine includes captives as well.

Simon321on The internet changed my life

You've isolated yourself from the world man, if it wasn't Internet it would've been something else. If you really don't want to be isolated you can change that right now.

Simon321on Welcome to Waifu Labs v2: How Do AIs Create?

That's because humans have also seen a lot of human beings with diverse skin tones. If we had only seen anime our whole life it would be much more difficult for us to conceive of also. With more compute, we will eventually be able to make bigger models with more knowledge of the world that will also be able to overcome this.

Simon321on The Matrix Is Unreal

This is running on current generation consoles, imagine what the next generation will look like.

Simon321on 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

>The Fed explicitly justifies QE and the rest of their monetary insanity on the basis of the “wealth effect”.

They do?? Do you have a source for this?

Simon321on If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?

Personality traits like that are also normally distributed and the concept of 'grit' specifically is controversial: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/15/04/problem-grit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)#Scien...

Simon321on Ask HN: “HN” for Sysadmins?

To be honest, r/sysadmin isn't that great. It seems most posts are not about technology but about how they want to quit their jobs. Even though i think sysadmin jobs are pretty good.