AI continues to be a stupidly vague term, and the example I keep going back to is present in this article
Meaningful advances in medical diagnosis are not coming from chatbot companies. Some are coming from machine learning methods. Perhaps measuring public sentiment about such a vagary is not a very productive way to quantify anything
That said, I continue to also be frustrated with people using the abstract concept of a new technology as a substitute for the institutions that use that technology to exert power in the world and what they do with that power, which is - as many in the comments already point out - is what the vast majority of people are actually mad about, and right to be
Can you name a prediction? Most of your claims in the prior paragraph are retroactive causal explanations of phenomena, "just so" stories per se. Most aspects of Thiel's apparent vision of the future that have come true did so through his direct involvement via money, power, and influence. I see no meaningful evidence of unusual predictive power demonstrated thus far by you or anything else I've heard about. I suppose you could take the line that having power and using it to impose your will on the world is prediction in a sense, but it's certainly an unusual usage of the word
At this point I can't help but conclude that to a certain class of writers, "economic incentives" are a form of benevolent god who will surely, inevitably make things better in directions they care about, and those who believe this also believe the overwhelming and constant evidence to the contrary of their position is just a temporary anomaly
Whatever the hell economics was supposed to do, right now it seems to be causing every industry to produce worse products, lay off more people, and concentrate wealth in an aristocratic subset of the population, and this has been going on for the better part of my entire lifetime. If we're to reverse this trend, we need to stop pretending that economics is a natural force and remember that it is a complex system made of policy decisions that can in fact be the wrong ones
If true that would seem to invalidate the entire GPL, but even by that logic, a website (such as chatGPT) distributes javascript that runs the code, and programs like claude code also do so. Again, if you can slip the GPL's requirements through indirection like having your application go phone home to your server to go get the infringing parts, the GPL would essentially unenforceable in... most contexts
I mean, is the case you're making that you can run a SaaS business on GPL-derived code without fulfilling GPL obligations because you're not distributing a binary?
Broadly speaking, GPL is a license that has specific provisions about creating derivative software from the licensed work, and just saying "fair use" doesn't exempt you from those provisions. More specifically, an advertised use case (in fact, arguably the main one at this stage) of the most popular closed models as they're currently being used is to produce code, some of which is going to be GPL licensed. As such, the code used is part of the functionality of the program. The fact that this program was produced from the source code used by a machine learning algorithm rather than some other method doesn't change this fundamental fact.
The current supreme court may think that machine learning is some sort of magic exception, but they also seem to believe whatever oligarchs will bribe them to believe. Again, I doubt the law will be enforced as written, but that has more to do with corruption than any meaningful legal theory. Arguments against this claim seem to ignore that courts have already ruled these systems to not have intellectual property rights of their own, and the argument for fair use seems to rely pretty heavily on some handwavey anthropomorphization of the models.
Sure, but that's more a result of policy decisions than an inevitable result of some natural law. Corporate lawlessness has been reined in before and it can be again
I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Of course, it also seems clear in the present landscape that the law often depends more on the convenience of the powerful than its actual construction and intent, but I would love to be proven wrong about that, and this kind of outcome would help
I think now more than ever it's actually meta-epistemology that's valuable in making decisions. There are significant shifts in the technology landscapes that should make you question your heuristics about costs and tools and effort, yes. Also, there are significant shifts in the information landscapes, slightly less new ones in my opinion, that should make you question your trust in conventional wisdom, expertise, and what appears to you to be popular opinion. There are significant shifts in the relative levels of risk that should make you question your priorities, economically, politically, socially, and logistically. It is overwhelming for so much to change so fast and despite this unpredictability on the object level, I see people's meta-heuristics thrashing about in what seem to be pretty predictable ways. Some people are taking a reactionary posture and think we need to double down on our existing biases and shut down everything unfamiliar. Some people take an iconoclastic posture and say all extant knowledge is worthless and we should be maximally novelty-seeking. Needing to question and evolve and adapt our epistemology is... to be frank pretty obvious. The devil at this layer of abstraction is in the details just as it is elsewhere, in how to actually do this productively instead of flailing. Humility and balance is good advice, but it's so general as to basically be tautological. I think the best tools I've learned are about noticing my own momentum. Knowing the right level of friction to try a different approach rather than beat my head against a wall. Being able to tell that a new approach is going to work before it has completely worked. That is, to me, the challenge before most of us
It's really interesting where we draw the boundary of originality. That there is significant controversy about who originated the particular words of the serenity prayer surprised me, because I've always thought of that prayer as simply a particularly catchy rephrasing of the most well-remembered sections of Epictetus' Enchiridion
It's possible that this is true generally, but it disproportionately affects legal, peaceful paths to power. Knowledge work is definitely not the only means to secure wealth or power through intelligence, but crucially, it is the one that currently hits the sweet spot of plausibly securing wealth and sanctioned and legal in a peaceful society. It's possible "AI" or some other technology that's been invented recently or is currently being invented closes all paths to shifts in power, but if the hype about replacing knowledge workers is to be believed, it will certainly closes the peaceful paths considerably faster, and this seems pretty bad for everyone
The essay, if taken seriously, has a logical conclusion that I'm sure a decent number on this website find uncomfortable, but perhaps more importantly, which at least some people who might have disproportionate power to make such decisions prefer not be discussed too heavily. This is a microcosm of the larger phenomenon
Isolated demands for rigor, really. China does have a lot of incentives to publish misleading statistics. Also, so does everyone else. In most places we bake skepticism of official lines from government and industry alike into our epistemic weights and move on, but when China does it we're supposed to treat it as a big deal. Propaganda at its finest
Yea except when everything that happens is the fault of "leftists" because they didn't vote for the same candidate, or maybe did but had some critiques of them. Sometimes "leftists" include anyone who has ever voted for a democrat, sometimes "the left" is only the people who dislike the mainstream of the democratic or labor or CDU or insert electorally-viable party here and of course then anything bad that happens to them is the fault of "the left". Sometimes "leftists" are weak and have no sense of reality and can't possibly accomplish anything in the real world, but sometimes "the left" is an omnipresent cabal that secretly rules society and can destroy the careers of celebrities. Who exactly this consists of, what their interests are, what real organizations represent those interests, and even what they want seems to vary a lot based on who you're asking and what point they're trying to make today
Also of course if you're one of "those people" - some sort of minority or a woman or something - and don't loudly say conspicuously jingoistic shit that throws most other people that share your aberration under the bus, people will often assume you're a radical leftist. Unless of course radical leftists are the actual cause of your problems in some hypothetical argument being presented to you unprompted by someone who heard it on a podcast. The left is everyone and the left is no one
This seems pretty good to me just on the level of trying to read C as someone using C++. Parameter packs and variadic templates are easily the most confusing syntax in C++ and cleaning it up is... very welcome
As far as I can tell, "left wing" or "leftist" mostly doesn't refer to any coherent ideology or group of people, so much as acting as a catch-all term for things the ruling class doesn't like or people who they'd prefer not to have a voice in media
I can see you're no fan of nuance. I pointed to what I believe is an important distinction between the general function of unions and that of police unions, this is hardly a claim of unimpeachability. Then when you for some non-sequitur reason started "what about"ing other unions, I said that I don't know enough about those to know whether they have a similar problem
I get the sense that you feel strongly about this subject, but it would do you some good to read the messages you're replying to, as not doing so makes you sound pretty foolish
I'm sure there are other things that call themselves unions but don't serve the same function we expect of organizations using that word. I'm not really knowledgeable about either of the things you mention, so I don't know if I'd view them as fitting this description or not. Both seem unlikely to have the kind of broad negative impact police unions have, which is particularly egregious because they effectively make public oversight of a government function with a lot of potential to do harm impossible, which has the knock-on effect of making that harm more able to propagate, to the point where it's both quite severe and commonplace
Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with the leadership in the organization that a union would traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot more like a military contractor than a union (in that their role is to prevent public accountability)
Yes, now they involve calling the cops to enforce a law that microsoft lawyers wrote and then sent lobbyists to bully or trick most of the world into signing. The corruption of the rule of law in modern nation-states into effectively brutal mafia-style enforcement of otherwise untenable business models certainly has facilitated quite a shift in the hardware multinationals use to secure their various unfathomably excessive bags