recitedropper

A bunch of actual humans have replied to this so at least HN isn't totally gone yet. :)

Otherwise, yes, we agree. Although, given the other replies to this, there are clearly those who disagree who appear to be smart and level-headed.

Anyhow I've learned my lesson now.

You know I think I have accepted this after a few decades on this planet, but probably can't hurt to be reminded. :)

I wouldn't argue there aren't real humans excited for this drop. It was just all the circumstances around it--the comment speed, the upvote speed, the initial uniformity of what people were saying.

Anyway, thank you for the moral reminder.

Engagement is generally more important than purely positive sentiment.

Anyway these comments were made when this thread was in an earlier state. I agree that it has gone on to be more "organic" looking. That doesn't exclude it initially being manipulated to the top, in my mind, but certainly they aren't carpet-bombing with only booster comments.

I guess there are more people eagerly watching price decreases than I realized!

More than two comments per minute right when it was posted, all simple one-liners celebrating the price decrease.

I would agree now that the thread has recovered to a more interesting state, but how it first looked--combined with it being posted right after Opus 5.5 announcement--look questionable to me.

Hopefully it is clear from my other comments that I do try to provide value too.

> You have now posted accusations/assumptions of astroturfing and manipulation at least 15 times, without ever providing any evidence.

I tried to point out the upvote speed and age-to-comment ratio for this thread look anomalous to me, and that it being posted within the Opus 5.5 release hour was further reason for skepticism. Circumstantial, sure, but I see very little ways to gather hard evidence of astroturfing without being a mod.

> when users and moderators simply uphold the guidelines, staging a protest by demanding your account be deleted.

You're right this was a little dramatic. I think it is just annoying though when two times that I have posted about astroturfing, it has been the most upvoted comment only to get flagged. I guess this is a self-fulfilling prophecy though, as you are right that other human commenters are abound and tend to flag people complaining about astroturfing.

Anyway thanks for the reply. If your read of my account is that I'm more-often-than-not a bad actor, then I will stop commenting here. Seems like it is for the best. :)

That is actually a great point. I have no rebuttal.

I've seen your articles in the past and I thought they were great. So I respect your thinking, and have no intention of being combative.

But do you really think people were so excited about cheaper versions of Astra that they were just waiting around to comment the instant this was posted? More than two comments per minute? All the initial comments were really similar too: brief one liners celebrating the cheap prices.

I think AI right now is a sort of Rorschach test. What it is clearly revealing to me is that I don't trust organizations with enormous financial incentives to not manipulate public opinion. So I see bots everywhere. :)

Do you think the "you can't mention astroturfing" rule is really serving HN these days? Do you think this thread hasn't been manipulated?

I respect you for replying here though, and yes I get that HN forum standards would suggest flagging my previous comment. But it is just sad to see a place used to be so vibrant get manipulated because of how much weight it holds for us in the industry.

And yea sure, I could go and flag all the bots and message Dang. But probably time to stop shouting into the void. :)

[flagged]

Seems like a great way to crush dissent.

But respect to you for replying to me. I wish you only the best in moderating, and I hope that this forum can remain healthy--especially in a time where enormously well-funded actors are flexing their power to set the narrative they want.

What? He quotes the opening line of the article, and notes that he reacts negatively to it. Interpreting his sentiment as "curmudgeonly" is a clear exaggeration.

And sure--it isn't a high-substance comment, but it isn't irrelevant either. It was, for a while, the top-voted comment on this whole thread. That shows people resonate with the thought, and it obviously sparked quite a lot of discussion.

This seriously makes me question your, and our other moderators, motivations. Sad times.

I don't comment on HN much, and I don't really expect HN comments to hold to rigorous standards. This forum is more casual than other places on the internet where people expect heavy citations. I also wasn't expecting this to blow up, although it is interesting to see that a lot of people react to this announcement with a negative sentiment.

I appreciate your upholding of ideals, and since I respect that, I will honor with final replies:

1. Locktime has passed.

2. Yes, intellectual work has always had elements that incentivize secrecy. If you want to say we were already in a "dark forest", so be it. My suggestion is that the multiplier AI adds to the possibility you get scooped is a step-change, and therefore we now enter a new "dark forest".

3. This is a big thread, and the twitter antics are well-documented, so I would assume someone else has cited them. If not, I think most are aware at this point that the online antics of AI researchers, especially when announcing or citing mathematical advancse, have regularly been childish.

People always napkin math something low, and then every academic who formally studies it ends up with a much higher estimate.

I await OpenAI's carbon footprint field.

This is such a strange reply I don't even know what to do with it. Good on you for being vegan, and not prompting?

I have gone lacto-ovo vegetarian in the past year, so I'll take your 5 years of veganism as inspiration. Otherwise, I welcome people waking up to the harm they cause, regardless of their past hypocrisy.

Someone needs to name this fallacy. The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms. I propose naming it the "GenAI Defender Fallacy".

Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.

The sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying.

I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?

I elaborated on my use of "dark forest" in another reply. We're headed for a dark forest--not amongst interstellar civilizations, but in intellectual work.

I agree that we have not solved the Fermi paradox; I disagree that comments highlighting immature behavior from people who wield enormous power in our world are unproductive.

I also think the trope is a little overused, but do wonder if there is an interesting analogy for what this will do to research: Massively incentivize keeping results secret, to avoid being scooped by someone willing to throw enormous compute at your partial solution.

So less about hiding civilizations, and more about hiding information. Math is clearly headed in this direction, and I see no reason why the rest of intellectual work shouldn't too.

Sad turn of events for our world. After watching the behavior of the most senior OpenAI researchers on twitter, I feel even less confident in them as a team to be shepherding this much capital and compute.

The dark forest awaits..

This is such a good analogy, I might have to steal it. :)

Pair this with the Hugging Face incident, and it hints that OpenAI is currently training their models to aggressively reward hack.

That doesn't feel like a good sign to me--for the AI bull or the AI bear cases.

Yes, this discovery is surprisingly similar to the recent counterexamples LLMs have been finding for mathematical conjectures: a semi-novel construction, built on previous work, that feels like it was found with enormous search and an okay heuristic.

I feel like there is a pattern emerging regarding the type of novel discoveries LLMs are good at finding, but it will take some more data points to see if the trend solidifies.

Vibe code giveth, vibe code taketh.

I can't agree with this more. May cooler, more compassionate minds prevail.

As your writing seems to allude to, life is an impossibly complicated series of trade-offs made with imperfect information, so I definitely wouldn't consider joining an AI frontier lab to be a priori bad. Even if I have some qualms with how the models are built.

If anything I was just trying to point out that, even with people we might disagree with, we deserve to show them recognition and respect when they make moves we do agree with.

But I doubt we disagree on much. Your writing is great, and it makes me sad to see this thread somehow disappear from the HN front page so fast. Either it triggered some internal flamewar detector--but without a flamewar--or someone didn't find it convenient.

I wish you the best of luck with your next endeavors, and look forward to seeing the value you add to this world.

No worries! Thanks for engaging. Fun to have the rare kindly-resolved internet discussion.

Hmm, links for what? My student project? The decisions that face humanity that are pretty clearly modellable as prisoner's dilemmas?

Otherwise not sure what I could cite--I would assume most all on this forum know that AI is trained on the works of other people, without their permission to do so. I guess you could disagree with my framing, but I wouldn't think this requires a citation.

I think maybe my writing wasn't clear, and it sounded like I was referrencing some well known thing that happened at UC Berkeley. I have edited it to read more cleanly!

Nothing but respect to TurnTrout for taking an action like this. The world needs more smart people who are willing to stand for what they feel is right, despite the pressures otherwise. Without that occurring more, our species is going to lose many impactful prisoner's dilemmas coming these next two decades.

This raises my respect for AI researchers a little bit too. I have often felt that the entire industry is pretty tainted to the core, and for better or worse that colors my opinion of the researchers.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I thought it was gross to download pirated art for a student project when I was at Berkeley years ago. So it has been really sad to witness many of the most brilliant minds of this generation answering the siren song of disrespecting the collective effort of others to extract and resell residual value.

I'd guess TurnTrout doesn't agree on that framing, otherwise he probably would not have been at Deep Mind. But clearly he and I agree on other ethical positions; I am nothing but glad to see him stick to his principles here.

There is a very real contingent of people driving AI who genuinely believe this. And it is this belief that allows them to avoid their cognitive dissonance around the negative externalities of their work. For the environment, and really for the future of humanity too.

The /s tag weakens the post. Glad to see I got downvotes--hopefully a few of these incredibly wealthy people in positions of power had to, for even a brief moment, consider their beliefs.