petilon

Here's another definition of AGI from Sam Altman:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/podcasts/hard-fork-sam-al...

Sam Altman: Let’s say we make an A.I. that is really good, but it can’t go discover novel physics. Would you call that AGI?

Kevin Roose (New York Times): I probably would, yeah. Would you?

Sam Altman: Well, again, I don’t like the term, but I wouldn’t call that done with the mission.

He says the same about AGI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/podcasts/hard-fork-sam-al...

Sam Altman: Let’s say we make an A.I. that is really good, but it can’t go discover novel physics. Would you call that AGI?

Kevin Roose (New York Times): I probably would, yeah. Would you?

Sam Altman: Well, again, I don’t like the term, but I wouldn’t call that done with the mission.

Sam Altman himself has said it is not AGI unless it can discover novel physics.

https://x.com/burny_tech/status/1725233117055553938

In the tweet Sam Altman is quoted as saying: "If (for example) super intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get there. And so there's this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?"

I think this is a reasonable criteria for declaring AGI. So can GPT-6 do it? OpenAI says it has helped solve long-standing open problems in mathematics. No word on novel physics.

This is wild: OpenAI is basically declaring that AGI is here.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/989601/o...

“If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, ‘When was it, really, that AGI was created?’ I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model,” OpenAI president Greg Brockman said during a Thursday press briefing. Later in the call, he added, “For me personally, I do think we’re there … I think it’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.”

You can use another word instead of "port". What is undeniable is that the Gates team looked at the DEC Basic source code, had extensive experience with it (having enhanced it), and the Basic they later made had functional similarities to DEC Basic. It is undeniable that DEC deserves some credit, as MS Basic is not a clean room implementation.

> In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transportation won't change in a meaningful way at all.

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.

What about this sentence don't you understand:

"The BASIC they did which we got ahold of the BASIC source code and enhanced t quite a bit was great."

That's a direct Bill Gates quote, see here: [1] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

That's completely false. Bill Gates has said [1] he got DEC's Basic source code and "enhanced it". So it is not limited to OS.

[1] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

> We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed.

And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manufacturing, food services, elder care, and so on.

The post-scarcity world will be here sooner than we think!

They got the source code of DEC Basic, studied it, "enhanced quite a bit" then wrote their own Basic which is similar to DEC Basic, and you don't think it is a derivative? Ok. It is a derivative in my book.

In this [1] interview Gates says that he and his group got DEC BASIC source code and enhanced it.

[1] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

Credit should be given to Digital Equipment Corporation. Back then software isn't what companies made money on, it is hardware. Source code wasn't guarded as a secret as it is today, and you could find print outs in the dumpster [1]. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found the source code of DEC Basic [2] and ported it. (Wikipedia says Microsoft Basic was "inspired by" DEC's PDP-10 BASIC-PLUS.)

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-abo...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/software/2000/06/29/bill-gates-r...

Forget AI, silicon valley parents don't want their kids using phones and computers either.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parent...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...

So they will switch to per-agent pricing instead of per-user. Fine, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft Office will become a just bunch of viewers as far as human usage is concerned. As far as generating Office documents, you can do that without using any Microsoft code.

There is a serious threat to Microsoft here, if everyone starts using AI for generating and updating Office docs. At some point Office will become just a viewer.

No, democracy doesn't mean everyone supports this administration. And in fact, this administration has declared that the blue states are the "enemy from within." If anything you should be sending us survival gear when Trump eventually launches war on us.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/30/nx-s1-5557232/hegseth-general...

If you want to retaliate against this US administration avoid buying stuff exported by red states. The rest of us can't wait for this admin to be over.

The example is not particularly impressive. The SQL equivalent is much easier to understand, which means it is easier to maintain. Number of lines is not an interesting metric; understandability and maintainability are more important.

Why not take a look at Medicare in the US instead? The US healthcare system has way more money than the UK, so comparing to UK is not meaningful.

Blocking ads wholesale is a terrible idea and unnecessary. What needs to be blocked is ads that execute client-side javascript (consuming your memory and cpu), ads that consume too much network bandwidth and so on. Ads are necessary so that content producers can generate income, without it they won't produce quality content. When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their ads less abusive. Content producers get paid and you get to enjoy the content for free. Everyone wins.

Yes, at the tactical level, AI is able to find better alternatives.

Yes, for simple "leaf level" features where there are no big architectural trade-offs to make, AI works well.

Right, and that's why humans are still needed in the loop.

One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of the functionality while keeping the codebase simple. AI is weak in this judgement, it doesn't spontaneously exercise architectural restraint. As a result the code may progressively become too complex even for AI manage, and it becomes whack-a-mole where you can't make a change without breaking something.

> Omni, their AI agent was terrible

What was terrible about it?

> Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude?

Claude isn't some magic genie that can give you whatever you ask for. If you need a spreadsheet, it is much easier at this point to start Excel than to ask Claude to write you an Excel.

Even when the full title is displayed it can be interpreted in two ways.

Not open source, but free for small teams: https://visualdb.com/

Excerpt: Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can access "Truth API" to get a glimpse of the president's often market-moving announcements about economic policy and global affairs before the rest of the world.

Basically, for $100K a month you get insider info earlier than others, which you can use to make investment decisions. (Some might call this insider trading.)

In the 1990s there was a backlash against Photoshop. Traditional artists and designers viewed Photoshop as "cheating," "not real art," and a threat to hand-made craft. This story [1] from 17 years ago called for a ban on airbrushed photos. Today use of Photoshop and airbrushing is standard practice, and it is expected. In time we will come to accept AI art too.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/19/liberal-dem...