Sol-

> Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them

But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle. We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.

> To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse".

I think a more optimistic take people usually bring up is the Culture series. But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete. That does not give me worse existential angst than life (to which there's no real point) already does, however, so I don't see it as worse than the status quo.

> that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI

Setting aside whether a permanent underclass will be an outcome or not - is it not a bit incompatible to simultaneously believe that all jobs will be gone and that a subsistence UBI is necessarily very bad?

The way I see it, if strong AGI really replaces all jobs, then even a subsistence level UBI (by the new post-AGI standards) will be a world with ubiquitous resources and post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want. Yes, perhaps it might be an "underclass" in the sense that Musk and Altman meanwhile settled Mars with some privatized space colonization, but I might still be orders of magnitudes richer than I am today - so why should I care, except for status games?

It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!

Shame that prediction markets seem to have failed a bit, since they seem in principle like a good idea. You force participants to have skin in the game and remove the usual mood affiliation and ideological bias that afflicts the professional commentariat in the media.

Perhaps a solution instead of banning them would be to create a class similar to accredited investors that are allowed to participate. And stuff like market manipulation should just be prosecuted in old fashioned ways like we prosecute any crime.

Both sides are at fault here, no? A consumer could work part-time and live as well or even much better as someone 50 years ago, but they largely don't want to. I do concede of course that housing is a bit limiting factor here and my "just adapt your lifestyle" doesn't fully hold.

200 years ago people would have booed the industrial revolution. They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits.

You can gauge the quality of the article by seeing Emily Bender quoted, who will insist on stochastic parrots when AI does billions of dollars of economically useful work.

Isn't it surprising that there were enough pre-1930 tokens to train an intelligent model? I was always under the impression that many tokens are also necessary to force the model to grok things and compress its learning into a somewhat intelligent model of the world, so to say. But perhaps I'm underestimating how much digitized literature exists from then.

Civilization needs energy, not a problem per se. Just generate more, preferably from sustainable sources.

Perhaps the adversity of the contracts cancels out with their sudden success and increase in valuation and it ends up a wash compared to the counterfactual scenario where they would have speculated on high growth early on.

This seems to be a very peculiar and adversarial interpretation of anti-social. I am relatively anti-social and consider this a bit of a character flaw, but would generally say that I do not assume the worst in others and am relatively introspective. It just doesn't come naturally to me, but that does not mean that I think less of others.

Jesus, do the people who work on GNOME even like Linux?

People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.

I always considered hooks a nice to have feature for devs to already validate that their PRs will probably satisfy certain CI checks. If they don't install or run them for whatever reason, it's on them to do another iteration and update the code to make it mergeable if CI complains. So I usually considered it fine that they are only opt-in, since the merge will be gated by a CI outside of the dev's control anyway.

Also seems that having a very capable military that lets you project power around the world also invites that power to be used. See for instance the Iran war. Quite pointless by all accounts and wouldn't have happened if the US didn't have aircraft carriers to send around the world.

So perhaps thriftiness in defense spending would also invite a prioritization in actual defensive capabilities?

Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs.

Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.

They are all very wealthy, or are about to be at the IPO. Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.

And money aside, it is certainly one of the most exciting companies in the world to work for.

Maybe a collaboration with a metaphorical gun to your head.

I understand he wants to deflect liability from his platform, but I guess I have to concede that it seems like a legitimate defense. We allow the stock market to exist even though insider trading can happen and it's (I think?) not Nasdaq's or NYSE's responsibility to pursue that. We have a legal system for that.

I think there is still the debate to be had whether prediction market enable too much criminal activity and insider trading compared to traditional stock markets and therefore need to be limited for pragmatic reasons (i.e. the legal system can't keep up), but that's a different discussion.

Once AGI is achieved, they'll reach the fabled superhuman "two nines" of uptime.

I figured they already have your identity via the payment process. Not like you can do anything (risky or not) via the free tier.

I don't know. Practically, LLMs are already better conversation partners on any topic compared to the average human I have access to. This also holds in reverse, of course - if someone wants me to explain something, usually they'd be better off asking an LLM.

I think in domains like Math and Software Engineering, they are less constrained by training data anyway. They can synthetically generate and validate programs. To what extent that scales into novel insights is a different matter, but I think they dream of the AlphaGo Zero moment at least in verifiable domains.

In addition to the managed interface for agent configuration and so on, is the novelty that all the agents run on Anthropic's infra? Sort of like Claude Code on the Web? If so, interesting that they move up the stack, from just a provider of an intelligence API to more complex deployed products.

I don't want to be overly cynical and am in general in favor of the contrarian attitude of simply taking people at their word, but I wonder if their current struggles with compute resources make it easier for them to choose to not deploy Mythos widely. I can imagine their safety argument is real, but regardless, they might not have the resources to profitably deploy it. (Though on the other hand, you could argue that they could always simply charge more.)

Maybe countries could tackle such problems twofold:

- first, implement a nationwide social freezing program, where women in their 20s are offered to freeze their eggs at a young age for free. Such a large-scale program would probably also improve the tech and might make egg collection less intrusive.

- combined with this program, let the women who freeze their eggs opt-in into an egg donation program, where some of their eggs can be used by women with fertility problems

But as with many things fertility, seems that modern states simply do not have the capacity to seriously try anything. Who knows why that is.

From what I've read, the immediate effect will likely be worse for CO2 emissions, because the alternative to (liquefied) gas is often coal power. Also, the various inputs that are needed for global manufacturing are also affected, so maybe even renewable tech gets more expensive.

I'm not saying that the dependence on the middle east was good, but I think it's good to keep in mind that this was a pretty stable equilibrium even with the various questionable countries involved until the US initiated a global supply shock without a good reason.

> An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder

But this implies higher productivity, no? This must mean more outputs that should benefit someone, unless the jobs that are being automated had little value to begin with. Seems paradoxical.

I guess I was mostly arguing that the integration of something like Grok into Twitter was definitely a net positive for online discussion, as anyone has a fact checker and explainer at hand now to diffuse irrational online arguments.

Also I think you overrate Musk's success in fiddling with the model. As I have written, I also don't like his attempts to tune it to his tastes, but if you see the outputs that people get from Grok, it seems mostly fine except in the specific scenarios that Musk seems to have focused their misalignment on.

Of course something like Claude being integrated into Twitter would likely be better.

> AI as it is being developed is likely to centralize it

The access to AI is centralized, but the ability to generate code and customized tools on demand for whatever personal project you have certainly democratizes Software.

And even though open source models are a year behind, they address your remaining criticism about the AI being centralized.

I don't use it myself, but I feel like the way Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants. I think it's good that people tag @grok if they don't understand something or want an opinion, even if it looks pretty silly to see "@grok is this true" repeated multiple times in replies.

That said, Musk's attempts at misaligning the thing and make it prefer his opinions of course destroy any trust. It's surprising that it's seemingly as good and helpful as it is despite the corruption attempts.

I also don't quite get how the business model is supposed to work out if its main usecase is to serve Twitter. I know they provide API access as all other models, but with how distrusted Musk is and how sensitive of a topic reliable model behavior is, they seem to sabotage themselves. Which company wants it to go mechahitler on them?