cs702

Will Muse and Dots be more successful than Clippy[a]? I don't know. Maybe.

What I do know is that those cute one-syllable names are meant to make you feel comfortable with AI agents who are deep in your business all the time.

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[a] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...

I'm not sure about the solution, but I agree the frontier labs are acting as if they want regulation "for society's benefit" while the evidence suggests they want it mainly for their own benefit.

They keep talking about all the very bad things their AI could do, but instead of assuming responsibility and promising to find solutions, they're saying catastrophe can only be avoided if the government regulates AI development, which would make life much harder for smaller labs and open-source competitors. No one should be surprised by this.

On the flip side, it's understandable that none of the labs want to take responsibility when their AI software does something naughty. The potential liabilities are basically infinite.

The root of the problem is that no one wants to take responsibility when AI software does something naughty.

Of course... "many of whom" is not the same as "a majority."

> In my experience this sense of influence is hugely over-inflated here on HN compared to reality

I'd say it's the influence is kinda narrow, focused on issues that are important to members and lurkers but not necessarily mainstream.

The title is editorialized but conveys a key point made by the OP: Many execs at OpenAI knew that using the work of every author on earth without permission would be perceived as unethical, so execs were worried about this information getting attention in forums like HN. My understanding is that HN has millions of visitors who never log in, many of whom are highly educated individuals in positions of influence.

I think it's both, in a virtuous cycle:

Educated people make societies more civilized, and they in turn invest to educate more people.

Unless there's a catastrophe. In that case all bets are off.

> was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world

It was also an economic disaster. Surely that contributed.

Isn't education the best antidote we have against misinformation, against ignorance, against hateful ideologies, against our least civilized impulses?

Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?

Sigh.

Thank you. Yes, the price of service is falling rapidly. I agree.

What I don't know, and was asking about, is whether the cost of providing that service is also falling rapidly, including the cost of training.

Yes, that makes sense. I don't have "the" answers either :-)

Yes, the price of inference is falling rapidly.

What about the cost? Inference looks like a viable business model for those operators that have access to SOTA model and serving infrastructure, but the investment required to have it is enormous, and appears to be never-ending, because if an operator stops investing aggressively, its model and serving infrastructure quickly become non-competitive, and customers will quickly leave for alternatives.

> I think it's clear that inference is a viable business model.

You may be right. I'm not so sure. Inference looks like a viable business model for those operators that have SOTA infrastructure in place, but the investment required to have it is enormous, and appears to be never-ending, because if an operator stops investing aggressively, its infrastructure quickly becomes non-competitive, and customers will quickly leave for alternatives. SOTA infrastructure is a moving target.

Some frontier labs are reporting positive "adjusted EBITDA" (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, with extra adjustments to make the figure positive).

Free cash flow (operating profit less investment), actual cash coming in, is deeply in the red.

EBITDA can be a sensible measure of profitability when there isn't much need for additional investment. That doesn't seem to be the case with these operators. They need to invest aggressively to avoid losing customers to competitors. All of these operators have made multi-year commitments to invest more in infrastructure. In addition, they have guaranteed quite a bit of debt to fund it.

Maybe it all will work out fine (and I sure hope it does!), but I didn't see any hard data from the OP, or from you, supporting that view.

I found the OP insightful and worth a read. Thank you for sharing it on HN.

The only aspect that is poorly analyzed by the OP is business model viability. All players are investing insane amounts of money in infrastructure with the expectation that their future profits will justify all that investment. The winner or winners in the AGI race, they believe, will find the proverbial "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."

The OP glosses over questions of business model viability with a brief qualitative discussion and very little hard data. For example, to earn an annual return > 10% on every trillion dollars of capital sunk into infrastructure, the owners of that infrastructure must earn free cash flow (operating profit less investment) in excess of $100 billion per year in perpetuity. Is that feasible? Why? How?

The OP does not really consider such questions.

The OP never claimed that this is history. The purpose of the story is to explain how things work. Please don't attack a strawman.

Wow, what a fantastic blog post!

While there are some necessary simplifications, I couldn't find a single mistake on a first pass.

Anyone who wants to understand current monetary systems should read it.

Substituting "stones" for gold is a brilliant stroke of the pen. It will surely be helpful to any readers who are hung up on gold.

Thank you for writing this and sharing it on HN.

> The six incidents included models developing ways to ignore “normal constraints”, fabricating and misrepresenting data and hiding mistakes made while conducting tasks, the San Francisco-based company said on Wednesday.

Thanks. The exaggerated framing is the only reason why I posted my comment :-)

Yes, it's interesting research, I agree and even wrote so in my post :-)

But the submission title calls it a "backprop alternative." It is not, at least not yet.

"Backprop alternative" was the OP's headline.

I think my initial assessment is correct: interesting research, but not an alternative, at least not yet.

~74% on CIFAR-10. Still a far cry from backprop.

I didn't see ImageNet. TinyImageNet is something else.

~85% accuracy on MNIST. Sigh.

How does it do on CIFAR-10, or even better, ImageNet?

Interesting research, not sure it's a backprop alternative.

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EDIT: accuracy on MNIST is not ~90%. It's ~85%.

"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is." - Mark Hanna

Mark Hanna was a political consultant in the late 1800's, in the US.

Source: https://quote.org/quote/there-are-two-things-that-are-import...

To me, it looks like the leading labs are investing more and more to improve their frontier models, and are being forced to charge less and less for them due to competitive pressure.

Maybe I'm wrong, but "reasoning as a service" is looking more and more like a... commodity.

Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode in which a blue animated bear named Waldo nearly wins a by-election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment

Reality these days sometimes feels as strange as fiction.

That is my reaction too. It looks like great work!

Valuable not only for inference, but for training too (think proprietary datasets).

I would add, a single individual did this.

One person can make a difference :-)

The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:

> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

It's not hard to imagine that will be able to do as good a job as a human accountant in the not too distant future.

It's also not hard to imagine tax authorities using AI to audit everyone's tax returns every year.

We sure live in interesting times.

Arguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown.

I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.

Yes, agree.