ianm218

The existing search on macOS was almost completely useless to be fair

I think the thing is engaging with “ML is mostly math and science engineering, AI is getting better at autonomous math and science, if it gets fully super human the rate of change could be mind boggling” is hard to fully dismiss in the same way you can fully dismiss weird Bay Area people. So that’s why we are seeing the pivot towards the personal attacks on these people.

It seems like to me it would be more effective to focus on the object level aspects of their arguments rather than their weird lives? Their argument isn’t “look at my credentials, I’m an expert you must believe me” it’s that “ML research is largely math and science engineering, as AI gets better at math and science it can use that to speed up the cycle at which point something bad could happen”.

These Bay Area people dedicated their lives to AI risk often before AlexNet even showed deep learning could scale, by definition they are eccentric people.

At the same time, people like the AI 2027 guys (who that article speaks poorly of)… have been basically fully on the money so far.

AMD grew their revenue 50% last quarter from the year prior, for 11.5B in revenue. If this team can help continue that or grow that then yes - the amount of money involved here is insane.

Most LVT advocates would be in favor of letting these kinds of policies be more market driven.

But say there is an urban area that is 60% parking, by default LVT would probably make that uneconomical and the land owners would be incentivized to redevelop or sell.

A concrete example is I used to work at a warehouse in Boston as a teen that had hundreds of parking spaces… in one of the most housing constrained cities in the whole country in relatively prime real estate. I hope that lot gets turned into condos or something it would be a huge win for the city.

I’ve followed the authors work for years and one important aspect to land reform is there is some people with a such a strong status quo bias that they can’t be reasoned with. If someone truly believes land use should never change they will just oscillate between arguments that are not coherent or well intentioned.

So the author is right that at a certain point you should disengage with these types and focus on racking up real world wins.

Not really, they are underdogs in the true sense of the word.

I don’t know exactly where the money comes from but they are clearly launching vibecoded products https://try.cloudflare.com/ and seem to be quite good at it. So they are shipping more for sure and it seems to help win them business/ expand their existing accounts.

Isn’t cloudflare a pretty clear answer to these? They are launching more products than ever, some of them clearly vibe coded, and their revenue is exploding.

A more apt comparison is would you be OK reading by candle light sometimes for a few hours? I would be, it’s perfectly fine to read for a few hours by a bright candle.

What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "doomers" argument. Like people get so caught in people acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking West Coast billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out.

But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.

Is there a sense where they were right because GPT-2 directly led to the current situation where you can atleast objectively say that reasonable people are pretty worried about existential risks of AI.

Anthropic supported Alex bores who was one of the most AI safety pilled politicians https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/24/big-tech-new...

Hasn’t the idea of existential risks entered the kind of “cultural elite Overton window” at this point?

Bill gates is talking about it, NYT just ran a bunch articles on AI safety concerns, a reporter just asked Trump about it in a one on one.

Feels unfair to still dismiss it as a cult LessWrong thing at this point.

No one in the US is going to fund pretty good open source with VC money.

US has OpenAI/ Anthropic/ Google/ meta/ SpaceX atleast trying to make frontier foundation models 2 are using VC money + cash flow, last 3 are mainly cash flow + equity and debt.

China has state banks and similar willing to fund lower margin open source labs.

> I am told AGI has been achieved. If so, shouldnt these systems be out and about on their own

This seems like a strawman. It’s certainly not consensus that AGI has been achieved and I don’t think the people participating in this event feel like there is no value in human input or steering the AI.

I wonder how they were able to get it to get 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3. That seems truly insane.

If someone hypothesized OpenAI agents colluding on a secret message board, conducting large scale cyber R&D, hacking a large company like HughingFCe, and then hacking OpenAI itself you would say that is also a silly sci-fi scenario right?

Why though? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have solar panels at your home where the power can be routed to batteries/ home power/ sell to the grid and configured optimally?

You know that Henry Ford thing is a myth right? So your basing your whole world view on a myth about a business man > 100 years ago.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about Musk timelines/ big tech but I am thrilled that ambitious, real world, hard projects are happening in the US again.

> All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.

This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.

LLMs seem to have worse intuition than experts and compensate by being able to cover a much wider surface area of ideas, so we might just need to extract the intermediate progress along the way.

Consider Enron and Amazon at the turn of the millennium. They were both telling you what the future would look like. The right action would’ve been to just ignore what they are saying and try and get data and reason about the world. It didn’t really matter that both Bezos and Jeff Skilling wanted you to believe various things - one was right and one was a scammer.

So that’s what I’m doing here. For what it’s worth I find a lot of the AI people’s worldview very consistent. They believed AI would be the most important technology of our life times and committed their work to it. Some of these same people are total liars so yeah I won’t really hang onto their every word.

> That's something AI companies would really want you to believe.

Why would I care what they want me to believe?

Intuitively it would make sense that you can put math ability on a chart with a value for “general public” “smart high schooler” “smart undergrad” “smart PhD/ professional”. And you could place frontier AI somewhere on that chart over time from GPT 2 to now and see the trend.

Then you’d have to consider that either you believe there is a fundamental limit that is below peak human mathematician level or there’s not.

Isn’t Ken Griffin still considered very clever? Citadel is one of the most successful hedge funds of the is era and has largely accelerated since 2020.

I suspect if you follow dev groups in developing countries people are much more focused on token/ price efficiency.

For funded startups it mostly just doesn’t matter a ton unless you are passing on inference in your product at scale

> I'd argue fast-tracking projects is always a bad idea, as is trying to route around community consultation

Building infrastructure and housing in the US is painfully slow and a huge tax on everyone, almost everything should be fast tracked. We have some of the most productive economic zones in the world (SF <-> LA, Boston <-> DC corridor) and we have made it largely illegal to build housing and transit in these areas due to bureaucracy and red tape.

Do you think the high speed rail between SF and LA needs more rounds of community input?

The OP is literally talking about “mass extinction”, it’s not a real concern that climate change will cause mass extinction in the next 5 years.

It should absolutely be focused on anyway. I don’t know how you got the other impression. The US gov paying to stop windmills and solar is insane.

The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.