AI is becoming a more and more powerful lever that lets you move greater loads per application; it is in a real sense giving you more leverage. But the lever is difficult to use effectively, and the methods for using the level change every week or so.
Don't you remember how awful they were at using versions? When o1 and 4o were both products available at the same time, or how they skipped from o1 to o3?
Text is in a sense way harder to do than images because of radical nonlocality. A word at the start of one paragraph can directly influence the meaning of a word five paragraphs away. Whereas images typically represent the real world, or at least a spatial domain, which gives you a lot of structure 'for free'. If you are drawing a human, you can make a reasonable guess where their hands go in relation to their face. If someone hands you the first half of an essay, finishing it is not trivial.
It would be nice if I could live my life without concern for producing capitalist exchange value. However, I live under the regime of capital and need to pay rent. So my goal is to pay rent with the least amount of suffering on my part.
Perhaps raw statistics, or estimates based on measuring traces in wastewater. I know that in the U.S. during covid they traced some new viral strains using that method.
I think the play now is to just try out whatever the best new model is every time you see a headline that fundamentally reorganizes your conception of what's possible.
If the post drops long before the IPO, it's vain boosterism. If it's near the IPO, it's fattening the pig. If it's after the IPO, it's pumping the stock price.
He's been vibecoding some stuff himself personally, on one of his scuba projects. You could take people as actually believing in the things they do and say.
Are you aware of how productivity has increased over the past century in general? That didn't lead to 100x wage increases or more free time. Labour is a market commodity and follows market rules. Increased productivity means more gets done in less time. It doesn't mean you spend less time working
You get AIs to prove their code is correct in precisely the same ways you get humans to prove their code is correct. You make them demonstrate it through tests or evidence (screenshots, logs of successful runs).
Tao's broad project, which he has spoken about a few times, is for mathematics to move beyond the current game of solving individual theorems to being able to make statements about broad categories of problems. So not 'X property is true for this specific magma' but 'X property is true for all possible magmas', as an example I just came up with. He has experimented with this via crowdsourcing problems in a given domain on GitHub before, and I think the implications of how to use AI here are obvious.
Does a system being deterministic really matter if it's complex enough you can't predict it? How many stories are there about 'you need to do it in this specific way, and not this other specific way, to get 500x better codegen'?
It's an extension of how I've noticed that AIs will generally write very buttoned-down, cross-the-ts-and-dot-the-is code. Everything gets commented, every method has a try-catch with a log statement, every return type is checked, etc. I think it's a consequence of them not feeling fatigue. These things (accessibility included) are all things humans generally know they 'should' do, but there never seems to be enough time in the day; we'll get to it later when we're less tired. But the ghost in the machine doesn't care. It operates at the same level all the time
You can recognise that the technology has a poor user interface and is wrought with subtleties without denying its underlying capabilities. People misuse good technology all the time. It's kind of what users do. I would not expect a radically new form of computing which is under five years old to be intuitive to most people.
A system having terminal failure modes doesn't inherently negate the rest of the system. Human intelligences fall prey to plenty of similarly bad behaviours like addiction.
Yeah. To me it seems very intuitive that humor is one of those emergent capabilities that just falls out of models getting more generally intelligent. Anecdotally this has been proven true so far for me. Gemini 2.5 has made me laugh several times at this point, and did so when it was intending to be funny (old models were only funny unintentionally).
2.5 is also one of the few models I've found that will 'play along' with jokes set up in the user prompt. I once asked it what IDE modern necromancers were using since I'd been out of the game for a while, and it played it very straight. Other models felt they had to acknowledge the scenario as fanciful, only engaging with it under an explicit veil of make-believe.