semiquaver

> The problem with proprietary models is that you don't get to poke inside and see what it is doing and how it arrives at its answer, which is precisely what mathematicians do

Uh, a hypothetical fully open source model would have the exact same problem, because LLMs rely on emergent phenomena and no one understands why they work.

Flagged for a submitted title which directly contradicts the actual article title, which is “Asha Sharma Says ‘Xbox Is Not For Sale’ Amid Concerns Microsoft’s Gaming Business Is Being Streamlined For A Spin-Off”

I have no problem with this person choosing to use different language to describe this.

But I do have a problem generally with attempts to impose language changes on others (in the case of this post you only see that tendency in the title).

This sort of linguistic prescriptivism seems in vogue for political reasons lately, most saliently in the hordes of people who insist that you must not use natural anthropomorphic language when talking about LLMs, but that’s far from the only political attempt to control language we’ve seen recently. Let people talk how they want! Langauage is an evolving thing that shouldn’t be controlled by scolds!

1. What? No. You’re simply wrong.

2. What’s your point? People are demanding justice for behavior they don’t like but isn’t illegal? The way to fix that is to gather a majority and change the law.

One thing that these nerfing conspiracy theorists fail to realize is that Anthropic isn’t the only organization that directly serves Claude inference.

My company uses Claude models exclusively via Azure and AWS bedrock, which have their own licensed copies of the weights.

If all these people are so convinced Anthropic is nerfing models, have they tried other inference providers? Do they think the nerfing is coordinated across independent providers? Why wouldn’t any of these nerf-benches use these comparison points or even talk about them?

I think the most likely conclusion by far is that this is a psychological phenomenon.

Perhaps this article is one step in the process of forcing disclosure. The Dutch parliament has recently (April 2026) clarified its law implementing the EED.

The knowledge isn’t copyrighted and, thank god, cannot be.

I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that. What a bunch of hypocrites, willing to betray their ideals as soon as it’s convenient.

Do you mean the subsidized subscriptions which allow individuals to pay a tenth of the normal API cost for tokens?

Companies need to radically change to be able to take advantage. Most companies are afraid to do that and are letting their engineers serve as slow meat proxies, doing software development basically the same way as before.

Agreed. You can’t “brute force” reality, which has an infinitely large state space. A million monkeys won’t write Shakespeare and all that

What universe do you live in that you can look at the past six months and see anything like a plateau in capability?

Edit: removed a comment that was uncharitable and rude, for which I apologize.

Seems like I hit a nerve. I don’t think I am troubled but I do think that Americans have more rights that are better protected than the British, ICE notwithstanding.

Your information is out of date. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was disbanded in January.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/business/media/corporatio...

> AI does not have goals

You can try to language-police all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that the best way to describe the reality of the effects that LLMs have on the real world is to use language that analogizes to human concepts.

No, the UK’s equivalent law specifically requires human intent and mens rea:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/3 (1b.)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/1 (1c.)

I’m told that the UK is a relatively authoritarian country where citizens have no real rights, so perhaps it can be charged anyway, but the plain language of the statute would seem to bar it.

I gave an example of why they are not.

Could you explain what your legal strategy would be to overcome the intent requirement of the CFAA? If openAI didn’t intend to hack anything and agents can’t intend to do anything at all, and the CFAA doesn’t permit negligence to stand in for intent, seems to me like the existing law does not cover the situation everyone keeps saying it does.

> Hacking is illegal

I am not a lawyer, but I seriously doubt the feds could win a CFAA conviction on the Hugging Face fact pattern, even if they wanted to charge it.

CFAA has specific intent requirements, and unlike some laws, negligence does not suffice. The agents can not have legally cognizable intent and it’s unlikely there’s anyone at OpenAI who intended for the hacking to happen (if there was, the case is easy).

Existing laws don’t contemplate AI agents that have independent goals. We need new ones, the existing laws are not remotely sufficient.

This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.

Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.

  > He also had a very large family despite his protests about overpopulation.

As far as I can tell this is false. He had one daughter and then immediately and publicly had a vasectomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich

Poor Terra. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

I re-read my comment and I’m not sure where you got that impression. LLMs perform a simulation of cognition. if you have used them for anything nontrivial you would be a fool to deny the fact that behind the language there is something approximating cognition. If you haven’t, solving a bunch of millennium prizes is pretty good evidence.

I grew up with the Disney channel on cable as a kid in the 90s. Disney channel at that time was ad-free except for cross-promotions for other Disney channel shows, most of which I (as a kid who liked the Disney channel) wanted to know more about. I have HBO Now/max/go/whatever and before most shows there’s a skippable promo for HBO stuff. So yeah, I don’t think this is new and Disney+ as it is now is way more ad-free than either of those, so I’m not surprised they are trying to nudge the status quo back to a historical equilibrium; it’s just what these companies do

I’ll always pay more to see fewer ads. My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up watching linear TV in the 90s and I’m going to keep it that way. If Disney+ gets in the way of that I’ll stop paying them and stop using their service, easy as that.

Did anyone actually read the linked wiki in full? It’s basically saying “if there are embedded ads in certain live (likely sports) content we carry you may see them even on an ad-free plan because we don’t have an alternative. Also we might try to promote different tiers of Disney+ itself within the app so to the extent you see that as an ad, that’s an exception to ‘ad-free’”

I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.

“equivocating” is not the word you meant to use here. Probably “equating” I suspect. But yes, I stand behind my claim and I deny that it’s a semantic game. The two areas are not identical in human understanding but they’re on the same order.

It’s likely that at some point we will also be able to represent a scan of the human brain digitally as code and data. Assuming we don’t separately make a huge number of leaps in neuroscience which are far from assured, it will be very likely that we can get the appearance of an operational human brain simulated digitally well before we gain much if any understanding of why it does what it does.

All that is to say, being able to build something is not not not the same thing as understanding it.

Not all workplaces are high functioning in the way you imagine. Until recently a shocking amount of software development did not use source control.

I am absolutely serious. I agree with you that the extent to which we don’t understand brains is overpowering. And I would stand by the proposition that “we don’t understand LLMs in almost exactly the way we don’t understand brains”.

We know lots about human development and genetics and biology and evolution and neuroscience and the physics of how brains are connected and send signals and how generally they are put together and have names for their parts and all that, but we’re clueless when it comes to “the hard question” of how qualia and consciousness emerges from that.

The scenario with the spooky simulation of thinking that emerges from LLMs is in the same category, with different details. Lots of knowledge about the substrate of the phenomenon, little to none about the much bigger question of how we get the appearance of cognition from these trained artifacts.

Clearly we understand extremely well how LLMs are created mechanically. We invented them and are currently putting massive amounts of work into studying and improving them. But that work is perforce largely empirical; figuring out the why once again eludes us. It just goes to show how mysterious the underlying phenomenon of cognition is.

Paraphrasing

    Me: it’s disturbing we don’t know why this pile of numbers we made seems to *think* in a way previously only done by humans. I think it’s important that we understand this better if possible. 

    You: we don’t really need to know why that happens.

We don’t? I sure would like to know!

I’m not saying gradient descent was empirically discovered, I’m saying that its use in machine learning (or elsewhere, I suppose) is itself a form of empiricism in that what it is is essentially a repeated observe/measure error/adjust cycle.

“Putting a lot of effort and training” into a dog or an inanimate carbon rod would never result in something that can plausibly substitute for human mental labor and looks likely to eventually surpass us at many tasks, no matter how much you put in.

So I don’t think “labs worked hard” is the same thing is “we know scientifically how these things work in any real level of detail”. The ability to build a thing, even if building it is hard, is not the same thing as understanding of what the thing is or how it works, not even a little bit.