software craftsman; professional polyglot (particular to rust, typescript, lisp); open to talk or work scott@fwlr.io (re: employment - remote/office agnostic, right to work australian citizen)
GPT-Synopsys brings together OpenAI frontier models with Synopsys' EDA technology and domain expertise, enabling the specialized model [to] directly operate Synopsys' tools. Engineers will delegate design objectives … with agents running tools, interpreting results, implementing changes, and iterating toward verified outcomes for engineer review.
“Agents will do all the engineering work. Engineers will delegate and review.” Lol, no, what the engineers are gonna do is get laid off.
I used to joke about a hypothetical programmer with so much mechanical empathy that he would oppose fuzzers because a program would find it very uncomfortable to be fuzz-tested.
It now occurs to me, non-humorously, that’s what this person and many others are going through with AI: it’s a multi-year fuzz test of their sense of self, their methods for ideation and expression, and their ethical principles on attribution and intellectual property.
Will people find new work to do? And if they do, why wouldn’t AI follow them into their new industry and undercut them there, too? So perhaps it’s not “people will find new uses for their money”, as people won’t have any money to find a use for. Perhaps instead, businesses will find new users of money - the AIs who are now doing all the jobs. At least in principle, I don’t see why there couldn’t be an economy that’s just businesses and agents.
I suspect the plan is not “make 6T revenue by having AI add >6T value in new and improved software”, but rather it is more like “make 6T in revenue by having AI substitute for ~6T cost or human labor”.
Dots is a terrible name. We use dots in an ellipsis when eliding parts of a quote, and we also use them in loading screens and progress bars - so its meaning is both “placeholder for missing content”, and “computer is making you wait”. In the marketing copy they try using “your dot, a dot” etc and it just looks like they typo’d “don’t”.
The author seems unable to tell the difference between “the enormous weirdos with blogs” and “the enormous labs with trillions of dollars and a substantial fraction of the world’s compute”.
The enormous weirdos aren’t the ones trying to regulate AI. They’ve been saying “we should regulate AI (ban development of recursive self-improvement)” for a long time but lack the influence to make it happen.
The enormous labs are the ones trying to regulate AI. They’ve taken many words and phrases from the first group, but only in the sense of “now that we have hollowed out the original meanings, we can wear it as a skinsuit while pushing for a different kind of regulation (ban competing with me)”.
I’ll admit, I read some papers about basic instrumental drives common to all goal-directed behaviour, that suggested artificial intelligence might end up competing with us (and soon after, outcompeting us). But I am relieved to learn that if this does happen, it will be an “artificial stupidity” instead of an artificial intelligence that repurposes the atoms I am made of.
If you will tell me precisely what it is that my machine cannot do, then I can always prompt my machine to do just that.
- John von Altman
Articulating “what humans can do, that AI cannot” is a mug’s game. If you specify it well enough, they just paste your text into their /goal prompt box and ralph loop their agent swarm until it produces something too exhausting to distinguish from doing the thing. If you don’t specify it well enough, then you’re just doing human-centric magical thinking to move the goalposts etc etc.
Cute that they were concerned, but they need not have worried - as you can clearly see from any HN comments section on these kinds of articles, everyone long ago wrote down their conclusion (“OpenAI/Anthropic/LLMs are good/bad”) at the bottom of the page, and now all we are doing is shuffling facts, quotes, and arguments around the page above it.
We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.
If someone tells us about their new method for practicing guitar, it is very natural and not at all a toolish behaviour to hand them a guitar and say “go on, play us something”.
In fact it’s actually a very socially agreeable action, as it gives them the opportunity to show off their new skills without them looking like they’re bragging.
Now, if you happen to know for a fact that the guy cannot actually play guitar, then you’re just setting him up to embarrass himself, which is maybe an extreme punishment for the relatively minor crime of spouting some bullshit. I could buy that that is hostile, sure.
For “I want A connected to B and I don’t particularly care how” where A and B are long distances apart, Shapez belt mechanics are nicer than Factorio belt mechanics, but Factorio train mechanics are nicer than Shapez belt mechanics.
For “I want to lay down a lot of belt in this area and I want each piece placed in a certain way” I think Factorio belt mechanics are nicer.
I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.
God’s been around for thousands of years and we are still here and flourishing, so obviously God is in some way “aligned”; the same cannot be said for AGI.
edit: Guys, I said “in some way”, not “perfectly”.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
You know the saying “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it”? With how many salaries today are dependent on creating negative externalities, I wonder if maybe kids are better at understanding certain things like AI and climate change simply because they don’t have salaries.
Regardless of how many reasons you can come up with for real tutors being better than AI tutors, it’s clear that real tutors can’t survive in a market that also has AI. In other industries the accepted ritual for this situation is to genuflect at the Altar of the Invisible Hand and repeat the phrase “Actually, The More Economically Competitive Option Is Better”. (It is understandably harder to swallow this platitude when the industry happens to be “your children’s future”.)
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
I have now seen several people using the “arsonist / forest fire” analogy in the context of the Australian hack, seemingly unaware that Australia does not treat arson and wildfires as acts of god that just happen and you only have yourself to blame for improperly preparing for it, but rather as acts of man that are addressed with things like “total fire ban” (if translated back to the AI context this would ban even individuals using airgapped local models), “levy fines” (e.g. 2M for a 20B corp so if translated back to OpenAI’s context ~1B), and “class action lawsuits” (e.g. 500M for a 10B corp so if translated back to OpenAI’s context ~50B).
In Australia we have some experience with this scenario (usually with higher temperatures) and some of the measures we have found effective are “total fire bans”, “jail the arsonists for extended periods of time”, and for negligent companies whose insufficient vigilance caused the fire specifically, “levy steep fines” and “find in favor of the plaintiff in class-action lawsuits for significant fractions of the company’s net worth”. Perhaps these measures could be of use here!
It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.
I am not familiar with every theory behind every condemnation of usury (there are a multitude) but this is not true for any of the theories that I do know.
In fact it rather sounds like an intentionally foolish theory invented by someone practicing usury as the only possible reason anyone could disagree with them, and then incorrectly attributed to any opposition to their practice. You can sort of tell this is the case, because if you reverse the theory you get “usury creates wealth while other activities just shuffle it around”, which is a very flattering thing for an usurer to believe.
Charging rent on capital was historically called “usury”, and was denounced by everyone from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Moses to Buddha to Muhammad. I suspect they had the right of it, which poses some problems for our present society, fractally composed of usury (as the article aptly outlines).
I mean, you can s/“won”/“had their ideas reach a supermajority in the population such that their future (and our present) resembled the future they wanted instead of the future they worried the target of their ire would (and did) bring about”, or equivalent, at your leisure - I think my point stands either way.
Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.
(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)