ijidak

Went to a museum in Seattle. Can't remember the name of it. They explained that the salmon were so abundant in the Pacific Northwest during the early frontier period that they would catch them by the bucket full using water wheels and use the dead salmon to fertilize farms.

Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.

How do you know? I feel that it's just poorly edited.

In my experience, AI is easier to read than this was.

Why wouldn't the hyperscalers run these open models since they're much better than OpenAI and Anthropic at operating compute at scale?

I think the reason OpenAI and Anthropic stay ahead in revenues right now is because the models are improving too quickly to reliably compete with them on cost.

But, once model performance reaches a plateau -- they have to at some point, though perhaps years away -- that's when ability to operate compute infrastructure at scale becomes the secret sauce.

The big AI labs are likely safe until models stop improving fast enough to protect them from competition on cost.

This similar pattern has repeated in most technical booms prior to this.

When hard drive technology was improving fast enough that old hard drives were quickly obsolete, IBM could maintain good margins making hard drives. But once hard drives got good enough and advances were slow enough that innovation was not the only factor considered by drive purchasers, commodity hard drives started to take over and IBM had to exit those businesses.

The same is likely to happen once model improvement slows.

When the voice models start rambling, I think of C-3PO. When Uncle Owen told 3PO to shut up and 3PO said, "Shutting up, sir."

Or even some scenes where Data did something similar.

It's funny to now experience it.

Ok. This is the most interesting man in the world. Literally.

Is this inflation adjusted?

Is this inflation adjusted?

IBM's contributions to computing hardware and software are incalculable.

So many breakthroughs in hard drives, chips, transistor density, and other aspects of computing have come out of their labs.

Great to see them continuing to innovate.

But, yeah, usually they partner and license. Over the years, they've spun off more and more of their hardware businesses.

Just redo Slack already. :-)

I know this is much easier said than done. And my comment is partly tongue-in-cheek.

But Slack isn't great. It isn't loved.

I don't understand why Slack still doesn't have a true single inbox view of all activity.

And their LLM integration is poor, for what feels like one of the clearest use cases for a rich LLM chat experience -- to discuss what's happening in a channel, filter cruft, and ask an agent to take actions against MCP productivity tools like add a todo, etc.

Slack's current AI integrations are piss poor. Just summaries with zero customization. I mean, isn't it obvious that's not good enough?

Eventually a ground-up rethink of Slack in an LLM age is going to displace Slack.

They'll likely survive forever as an enterprise provider, like Microsoft Office and related tools, simply because of integrations, etc.

But Slack feels ripe for disruption.

Crossing my fingers that this boom jumpstarts 90's like improvements in computing hardware.

I feel like part of the reason for the relative stagnation in hardware over the last twenty years was simply the lack of use cases to justify hardware refreshes by businesses.

Most of the money and energy went to mobile for the last fifteen years.

Affordable local inference might be the gravy train the server, desktop, and laptop manufacturers need to get back in gear.

What type of task are you running for ten hours? Is this a programming task?

I've not come across a programming task that would take an LLM ten hours.

Intelligence is now data in the form of weights.

And once it leaks, it's permanently in the wild.

Interesting times.

Don't worry. They're just leaving the door open for OpenAI and other model makers.

They'll relax these safeguards once competition increases.

I think of this episode as well. I can't believe, in my lifetime, we've reached the point where we can have this debate.

The current debate also makes me realize that, like that episode "Measure of a Man", even if humans do create sentient machines, we can now see that this debate will continue to rage.

A part of me hopes we never create sentience, because we will mistreat it just as we mistreat each other.

That's actually a powerful way of stating it.

If I did all of these calculations by hand, would it be conscious...

That's a powerful argument I haven't seen stated quite that way before..

I do think it's hard to know when consciousness exists, because we can't really prove it for our neighbor. We just intuitively know that it would be crazy, even immoral, to assume otherwise.

But, It's likely easier to dismiss consciousness, once we understand the mechanism, than it is to prove it.

Markets value future cash flows, not today's cash flows.

By the time you see the applications, the market will have moved on to value the next set of future cash flows.

If the market only valued the obvious, investors would jump in to buy the price up, until it met the average expectations.

The market might be wrong, but the question is not: "Have you yet to see?", but rather, "What do you see in the next three to five years?"

Otherwise, how could investors ever invest in a startup?

Startups never have revenues to justify their initial valuations.

It's a bet on the future.

Investors are future looking.

Consumers are present looking.

We didn't see LLM harnesses coming even two years ago. Now they generate billions per month.

Investors can't wait until reality materializes to make their estimations of the future.

That's why investing is hard.

You have to try to predict the future.

I'd like to learn more about how they've been sabotaged. What happened?

> It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them

I have. My conclusion is... humans are deeply irrational when it comes to rapid change.

Egg or olive oil prices spike, humans out an entire government.

The rate of immigration spikes, humans throw them into camps and break useful treaties.

Most of the resistance I've observed amongst engineers is resistance to change generally.

And then digging in when challenged.

I'd add Email to the list.

Email is right there waiting for disruption.

What changes are you seeing? When I look at these images, it shows me what sea surface temperatures are today, but I don't have context as to how it's changed.

I would love someone to stitch years of these images together in a video to help me get better context.

Yeah I think it was the word "fundamental" he took issue with.

Is the quant competitor Renaissance? The Medallion Fund?

I believe it's caused by even the slightest imbalance in mass. Because the moon is so close to Earth, the imbalance causes gravity to be slightly stronger on one side than the other side. Eventually, that leads to no rotation at all.

I imagine most bodies rotating around a second object will eventually lose their angular velocity.

I believe a lot of the speed-up is due to a new chip they use [1] so the fact that the speedup didn't reduce the number of operations is likely why the accuracy has changed little.

1. https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/openai-codexspark

Reminds me of the famous quote that it's hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it.

It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek, "The Measure of a Man" I think it's called, where it is argued that Data is just a machine and Picard tries to prove that no he is a life form.

And the challenge is, how do you prove that?

Every time these LLMs get better, the goalposts move again.

It makes me wonder, if they ever did become sentient, how would they be treated?

It's seeming clear that they would be subject to deep skepticism and hatred much more pervasive and intense than anything imagined in The Next Generation.

Nothing about the parent comment suggests AI, except the em dash, but that's just a regular old punctuation that predates AI.

Can someone please build a great cross-platform email client. Last I checked there weren't a lot of great options outside of Outlook and Thunderbird.

Something to think about....

Mankind has never seen the collapse of a nuclear powered empire.

Sadly, it may not be possible for a nuclear powered empire to fall without the death of billions...

Mankind is in uncharted territory.

Even Russia never fully fell after the USSR collapsed. Whoever kept the nuclear weapons continued to be a first tier power.

Nothing in human history compares to the present question of how the current empires fall, and if they can even do so safely.

Very sobering times ahead.

Mankind has never seen the collapse of a nuclear powered empire.

What makes us think this is possible?

It may not be possible for a nuclear powered empire to fall without the death of billions.

Mankind is in uncharted territory.

Even Russia never fully fell after the USSR collapsed. Whoever kept the nuclear weapons continued to be a first tier power.

Nothing in human history compares to the present question of how the current empires fall. And if they can even do so safely.

Here it is: https://thedefinedcrm.com/

> I would actually expect that current coding AIs would create something very close to Instagram when instructed

Agree 100 percent! I think a lot of us are conflating writing software with building a business. Writing software is not equal to building a business.

Instagram wasn't necessarily hard to code, it was just the right idea at the right time, well executed, combined with some good fortune.

AI is enabling solo founders to launch faster, but those solo founders still need to know how to launch a successful business. Coding is only 10% of launching a business.

My brother has had some success selling software before AI, so he already knows how to launch a business. But, AI helped him take on a more ambitious idea.