while i share your frustration, Google for their part is trying to adapting a new technology into an existing service. while the whole endeavor might have been misguided, not sure we want to blame them for trying...
evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.
my cat at its peak weight is about 8kg, and that's the size that i'd get a bit nervous around if i didn't know it's a tame housecat that runs away at sight of a mouse...
despite the convenience of a well-run public transport system and uber-like services, the ease and freedom of owning your own transport is still hard to beat, and evidently worth the ~75k dollar COE. it removes the walk from bus/subway stations under the tropical/sun, humidity; and the wait (typically 5-10min) of waiting for your uber/taxi driver to showup and enduring the uber car smell (often heavily scented for some reason and triggers my allergic reaction) and someone else's music. and once you have children a car is almost a must.
came here to say exactly this. in fact, this is probably why we are not seeing a lot of AI application on customer service use case, and when we see one, it's almost always frustrating.
but maybe... the said human has also read every other piece of text ever written, including ones about other (similar?) board games, which in aggregate vastly dwarfs whatever he has read on chess, that non-chess reading could have corrupted whatever he's learned about chess?
yes to agents! how i had wished i could just point an agent at my footage and instruct "do something sensible with color grading and audio cleanup". i just want something presentable for a hobby video podcast. it doens't have to look a million bucks, and i have no time or desire to learn the intricacies involved. just something that would get me 70% (or 50%!) the way there would be more than fine.
maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.
extreme cases aside, memory and intelligence have always been found to have very strong correlation. so much that you might even just call them the same thing.
agree and i wonder why don't they (the leading AI labs that are putting out these models) fix this? I felt it shouldn't be too hard to introduce some bias towards more intelligible text during the post training/fine-tuning stages?
might want to look into statistics on ppl who play a lot of first-person shooting games. does it have to navigation of physical environments? or virtuals ones work too?
so their idea is to put an ipad in the middle of the forest, installed with games, and if played right, delievers a treat... makes me wonder if something alien civilization is not doing something like that to us.
came here to say some version of this. for the average joe, good financial advice is simple and boring (low cost ETF tracking broad based index), and AI is definitely able to give that. the question has always been getting people to listen though, and I am not sure how effective AI will be at that. I continue to be amazed at the confidence that people place in hot stock tips from tiktok (yes, tiktok!). little has changed since the 1920s i guess.
if authors get an advance that's greater than the sale of their books, doesn't it mean that the publishers lose money, i.e. paid more for those books than the books sales?
There are any number of smaller region/states that are already benefiting. Singapore comes to mind. Leading labs are all setting up in Singapore and both 1) internally-transferring their previously US-based talents on work visa to Singapore, and 2) using Singapore as a base for Asia hires, mostly notably from China.
Yes, this... all the hype from the leading AI companies just pattern-matched so many past cases where things didn't pan out. really giving me the bad vibes..
I want to thank you for the following reasons:
- that's an amazing, mind-opening essay;
- I've been looking for this toy (Meccano) for my entire adult life. I remember playing with a set that my mom got me when I was a kid, but I didn't know what it was called, and neither did my mom. And when I describe it to people, everyone kept telling me it was Lego (Lego is a much better-known toy brand in this part of the world). I had pretty much given up on ever finding it, thinking it might have just been a niche toy that had ceased production. Words are not enough to describe my joy when I opened the link and saw images of Meccano pieces!
and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.
S&P 500 is already heavily skewed towards tech companies (Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc.). I think it's something like 40% of S&P500 is tech. If SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic are added, tech risks would be even more concentrated, which is bad for diversification.
for what it's worth, back when i was in b-schoo, the predominant theory for the existence of large, diversified Asian conglomerates (Japanese keiretsu is a prime example, but it's not unique to Japan. Similar entities exist in S.Korea and Thailand, among other places) is the friction of starting and doing businesses in these countries. Startups there have such a hard time getting funded and landing clients, that the financing aspect alone give the conglomerates enough of an advantage to edge out startups, despite the inefficiencies typical of large organizations (and in this the Japanese corporate giants are no better than IBM or GE).
this theory is typically mentioned when introducing the Theory of the Firm, i.e. why do companies exist at all? why not everyone just freelances, and when you need a marketing/finance/legal/coding person, you just contract one on the free market? the idea is that there are always frictions when doing business with someone new (is this person good? trust worthy? how do i find out?), and how much friction there is determines how big the firm will grow (to incorporate functions in-house, or expand to other industries).
in a perfect frictionless economy, it could indeed be true that business transactions all happen at the smallest unit, i.e. the individual. at the other extreme, there would just be one firm that coordinates all economic activities. all real world economies sit some where in between.
it was only after I had to manage others that I realized the logic for a lot of these simplistic metrics and rules. they are in place to hold accountable the worst performers. a simple example is when i introduced flexible work hours. it was fine with most people, but there are always a few members that abuse the system. they stretch it to the very limit to what can be interpreted as "flexible". as a manager it posed a dilemma for me. i didn't want to take away this privilege just because of a few abusers, but it was both unfair and set bad precedents if I allowed them to get away with this. and let's say they couldn't be easily fired. most of my peers simply ended up going back to a system where people punched in and out.