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Woah. Where?

who is going to read this post and think: "i am the target audience for this. i had better get working on my submission to the webmcp challenge."

3d modeling, collaborative writing, crossword builder?? huh?

i doubt it. someday harnesses get complex enough that you start asking models to interpret and modify them.

the pattern of layering of deterministic, probabilistic, deterministic, probabilistic. it's a strange pattern but it seems somehow natural.

stripe buys openrouter. nvidia buys hugging face. everyone on the hunt for the app that will function as hub/broker/search/marketplace for models.

yes, these feeble attempts to dismiss it are cope. yes, there are very smart people who are deeply in denial.

i do not agree with you that the failure mode is disaster. i suspect it is just more of the same dull march of the commoditization of the complement, labor.

maybe ai will close the loop and elasticity of substitution will climb above 1 in its own supply chain. maybe something breaks dramatically that way.

i tend to assume the desire for drama is itself cope. i suspect many of the flaccid dismissals and skepticisms here are coming from a similar assumption. they see that the dramatic version never happens, and so they conclude that anyone who is being dramatic (whether in the direction of hype or fear) is poorly calibrated. and they are on average right, so they learn to dismiss the drama. the muscle to dismiss the drama becomes very strong. you have to remember this: that they are right in their dismissal, even if the actual arguments they use to dismiss are essentially braindead. they are right to dismiss, because the dramatic possibility they are dismissing is at base the end of the world, by apocalypse or utopia. of course they are right. the end of the world is cope. drama is cope. but they are wrong because they underestimate the extent to which the predictability of their dismissal — the predictability of their complacency — makes them vulnerable to the diffuse, chronic, gradual forms of the machine's encroachment into our souls.

so i do not think we need your fancy theory for explaining why people are denying what is happening (and what has been happening, on more or less the same exponential, for hundreds of years). people do not need a reason to be complacent. people are by default complacent and by default correct in their complacency. but so is an ant.

so short them. if you think that the demand for skilled-labor-substitutive capital is saturable in the medium term or that improvements at the model level eat those at the hardware/cuda level or that nvidia just has the timing wrong, short them.

funny how we have ~10x the usual volume of hn front page commenters, here, for the most part eagerly saying that this article made them think and feel approximately nothing.

yeah, this being one component of the aisi incidents described here: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/663bd486c5e4c81588db7a1d/...

tl;dr: author is an anti-aipac zionist who tends to fixate on piker.

this is roughly how i've been reading their approach, but i wonder when/if this changes. what actually makes them start caring about having the most capable model? maybe nothing. i suppose they could be happy in a world where they (a) are still the agents' preferred search index and (b) own or produce a good percentage of the hardware that anthropic and openai run on.

this is like saying taylor swift must have been influenced by justin timberlake because they both dance on stage sometimes.

they don't. like every thing they wear away in some proportion to their use and replicate in some proportion to their usefulness to other things.

we bomb schools and walk past beggars and devote our surplus time and money to scones and brain rot and gym memberships.

our c code probably looks at us and says: how, how can you let these agents roam free.

llms are not code and are incompetent and inefficient relative to code, but on the other hand you cannot roam without a little echo echo echo in your blood.

the first lesson here is that betting is easy when you believe that you know the important variable, your edge.

the second lesson is that, no matter how poorly you perform, you are going to be able to make the case to your stakeholders that, contrary to all evidence, you do in fact have an edge and you are in fact exploiting it correctly.

the lesson not here is that, in practice, continuing to believe that you know your edge is going to be virtually impossible in the long run, partly because of volatility, but mostly because, in practice, you do not know it.

he is the real world. he is telling you that it is the case. when will you people wake up. this shit is real and happening. people who would have reached out to you asking for help are now not doing that. people to whom you would otherwise have gone for help are no longer hearing from you or never met you in the first place.

another genus of artisan falling heroically on the sword of capital

seems like laws regulating machine output should proceed under the assumption that machine output can be distinguished from human output. then the burden of proving that any given output was machine, not human, would fall on the censoring party, not the censored.

but there also needs to be some sort of stamp whereby a human effectively grants "power of identity"-style rights to a given agent; that agent would be protected under the first amendment but the human would be liable in full for its actions.

in other words we would be legally enshrining the privileged status of human (as distinct from machine) output, but that privilege has to have legal/financial gravity otherwise the number of agents claiming it will inflate.

excellent. now do lava

truly garbage writing on an interesting topic.

hard to tell whether this guy doesn't understand what he's talking about or has simply lost the ability to communicate to people who don't already know all the same things he does. maybe there isn't a difference.

in any case, don't waste your time on the article itself, but do check out the hilariously bad diagram that he attributes to goldman sachs.

it depends on what you mean by power and details and handing off and whom you are handing them to and what you are getting handed in return and your counterparty's relationship to these things and the extent to which you measure things in the same way as one another.

sam must have read my comment.

i sometimes open a text and then close it and a week later i remember i forgot to respond. so i guess what i'm saying is: it happens. they were probably busy with other things and lost track of time.

i've had it. i'm tired of reading about these same stupid companies. i am going to start a new company and run these dopes into the ground so that i don't have to read about them anymore.

my read is that everyone wins (but especially big tech) in the open weight world — except anthropic and openai. (i suspect even google could live with the open weight scenario; they are in a sense the only tech company that is perfectly hedged in this respect.)

this is presumably part of why openai and anthropic have not been shy about advertising the scarier strains of their models, these past few months; they basically have to force the white house's hand or risk being commoditized among the various other options in a microsoft/openrouter dropdown.

is the revolution a social emanation of an economic adjustment or an economic emanation of a social adjustment?

who can say!

fortunately the scientific method is here to defibrillate this flattening line with a pulse of Original Chaos.

entropy is growth. why would you name your company zeroentropy

same

yes, this seems to me to be the reason why these three companies want open weight. everyone wins (but especially big tech) in the open weight world except anthropic and openai. i suspect even google could live with the open weight scenario; they are in a sense the only tech company that is perfectly hedged in this respect.

i suppose this is part of why openai and anthropic have not been shy about advertising the scarier strains of their models, these past few months; they basically have to force the white house's hand or risk being commoditized among the various other options in a microsoft/openrouter dropdown.

yeah my read is that this industry was for a long time underlevered; these companies were generating so much cash that the only meaningful candidates for investment were in effect moonshots with highly unpredictable returns, and you can't fund those bets with debt.

but now the story is different. while the effects of ai on other industries and classes may be unpredictable, (a) the tendency toward ai itself (the market demand for economically useful intelligence) seems plausibly more inevitable than any tendency in the history of capitalism (certainly more inevitable than any in the history of these big tech companies) and (b) the technical scaling laws have been eerily steady (intelligence as log of compute). taken together, (a) and (b) make it much easier to finance than anything meta or google or microsoft have ever worked on. there are risks, but there is at least also a model, a projection; that model did not formerly exist, for these companies. anything outside their core business was literally a guess.

the upshot of these stabilizing patterns is that the industry is in a certain sense just maturing. that is, its financial profile is starting to look more like other mature industries that are mostly juggling around known quantities to try to get a small edge that they can, with financial leverage, magnify enough to M&A the competition away and thereby secure the only relief possible in a well-delineated, well-populated niche: monopoly by scale/consolidation rather than by differentiation. (which is not to say that these mature industries are less competitive! they are actually more competitive; the intensity of the competition is what drives the "anti-competitive" behavior.)