tomohelix

> It's just funding.

And to have funding, you have to attract investors. How to attract investors? By making it quite profitable to invest in the company, i.e. making it profitable for the shareholders.

With enough money, you can do anything big pharma is doing. But how to get that money consistently is another question that have an uncomfortable answer. Plenty of startup and small biotech companies go bankrupt every year. This isn't something you can do in a garage and turn it into a multibillion dollar business like software. Biopharma has too many regulations and rules to follow and it makes the entire field incredibly risky and less likely for a small and unattractive player to succeed, even if they are driven by passion.

Time grinds everything to dust.

Cartilage-only fishes might have been abundant eons ago and they could be as big as a megalodon or even bigger. But because they didn't have teeth, we will never know of them...

A single cell organism somewhere might have hold a miraculous protein or enzyme that test the boundaries of physics or can cure cancer(s). But they are extinct now and we will never know of them.

An ancestor of the octopi might have developed intelligence and tool-making. But since we have no way to find records of their civilization, we will never know of them.

That is why an extinction of a species is so significant. It means they will disappear forever, never to reappear in the exact same form again. We will forever lose them and never know what secret they might have carried in their genome or biology or life.

And yet, there are species going extinct every single day, many of them are due to human...

As expected honestly. They found "chemical signals" that indicate DNA in the fossil. Such thing can be anything, from contaminations to errorneous readings. To sequence that supposed "DNA" is a whole other level of technology. In fact, it would be so complex that unless they are hiding alien tech somewhere, I dare say we can't do it at all with our current level of technology.

Ok, to clear things up, what they found was a rock, literally a rock down to the molecular level, that is perfectly shaped as a dinosaur embryo. It reveals some interesting similarities to birds and stuff and good for paleontology.

But none of this contain even a miniscule amount of meat or organic material or DNA of a dinosaur. Those already disintegrated aeons ago. DNA half life is around 500 years. After a million years, it would have degraded so bad you literally have nothing left to reconstruct no matter how much sample you discover.

If you start with an entire dinosaur, let say 10 tons, and let be generous and have 1% of that being DNA, you get 1e15 copies of the genome, assuming a 10Gb genome. After 25,000 years, you get less than 1 copy left. Now make it 25 millions years...

I know this "half-life" term is kind of a misnomer since unlike radioisotope where it is unaffected by environmental conditions, DNA "half-life" can be longer depending on things like temperature and pressure. But still, on the scale of millions of years, it becomes exceedingly improbable that we can find even 1 copy of a dinosaur genome left.

Why would this be flagged? They made a pretty good case.

I personally know someone who has been in the US for more than 10 years, highly educated (with a PhD in engineering), employed in healthcare research, pay more taxes than most American, never break a law, etc. Basically the ideal citizen. Except he isn't a US citizen and according to him, unless he marry a citizen, it isn't likely for him to be one anytime soon.

Depend on how you look at it. There are definitely higher chances of a cell becoming a cancer cell when there are more of them. But as the rate become too high in very large animals, they evolved mechanisms to fight it and these are so effective they are more resistant to cancer than apes like humans.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325178

Some companies, e.g. Square Enix and Ubisoft, invested significant amounts of money to NFT-ify their main products. The first of these NFT games were released recently. Not sure how they are doing but the previous SE CEO was pushing crypto a lot and then he got replaced by another guy.

Wonder if they are still on this path.

I would not be confident at all in engaging an LLM in a trivia contest such as this. Unless the subject is about what I spent 20 years studying, I am almost certain that my 25W meat-processor is inferior to the MW scale silicon monster that is an LLM.

I wrote a small book once and I poured almost all I know into it. It came out as a few MB PDF file. The freaking LLM contains GB or TB of information in it, I am not trying to fight that.

Unfortunately, people who are aware of this won't even use this thing anyway and many who are exploitable would be tricked into giving their phone to the police.

I hate how police is legally allowed to lie and psychologically trick/pressure people into things they would not normally do. It makes me distrust and question everything they do and say, i.e. being uncooperative to them. Which they then can use as an excuse to escalate and detain or get violent to me.

Interacting with the police is a terrible experience no matter how upright you are because even if you are faultless, they can still make up shit to mess with your day, or life.

People eat rice or bread every day in every meal. I see no complain at all...

I mean, if it is cheap, healthy, nutritious, and doesn't taste like cardboard, then I would not mind at all. In fact, I would voluntarily use it as a staple food.

Manufacturing is tied to national security. Even if those cars are of terrible quality, the Chinese government can subsidize them (they already are) to the point they are valid competitors to normal quality cars. On the surface, this is a win to consumers as this would drive down prices and expand options. But to the US government, this would kill many automakers and factories and reduce national production capacity in time of war.

A very significant factor that allowed the US to completely dominate WW2 was its intact infrastructure and the resulting high manufacturing output. When you churn out ships and tanks in matter of days while your enemy, even with superior technology and quality, takes months to do so, you win. Japan's ships were incredibly well built but they lost the war because they can't replenish fast enough.

I predict this thread will get flagged soon. The underlying topic is a bit too sensitive.

That said, my 2c is that when you are writing hundreds of pages while referencing hundreds of articles and authors within a few months, it is actually quite easy to forget quoting something, especially when citation tools and word processors weren't as advance as they are today. As long as the main topics and major findings within the dissertation were properly cited or are original, that dissertation is valid enough. A few slip ups mean little. Those who dig deep enough to find these and try to make a major case out of them are usually, imo, hired guns executing a smear campaign.

We all know that right now, the media seems to have a bone to pick with people not supporting certain opinions. But that is very "sensitive".

And in 2029 people would call 10 trillion params models "medium size"...

I mean, with about $120K, we can technically run a 137B model locally. Any small company or rich individuals can afford this easily. So the "outrageous" back then is pretty "middle" now.

It was a (dumb) joke. The phrase I used came from Shrek.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/some-of-you-may-die

But, to nitpicking, I guess you could say the selection came after the gene got recombined. Surviving the zap and was lucky enough to do the recombination still do nothing. The effect of the recombination, i.e. the expression of the foreign gene, is the interesting part. If it confers an advantageous trait to the mutant, that mutant get selected for in the game of life. If it doesn't, which is most often the case, it is selected against, and would be quickly removed from the genetic pool.

We do this selection quite often in the lab so perhaps it unconsciously leaked out in my phrasing.

Yes! Electroporation is literally just subjecting the cells to a strong electrical potential. A lightning can definitely do the trick in some conditions. Many cells will die, but it is a sacrifice natural selection is willing to make.

Although, this doesn't mean you zapping someone with enough lightning and they can become the flash. The electroporation process is one way of damaging the cell just enough to make them take in foreign DNA. Think of it like poking holes in the cell and DNA got in. Whether that DNA get recombined or not depends on other processes, which might also get activated as a stress response to the damage. But it is entirely random. So the DNA coding that specific function/protein must be available in the environment first, and the cell must survive the process of getting struck by Zeus and be lucky enough to do the recombination just right to retain that piece of DNA to produce a proper mutant.

Lots of entropy here, like someone said elsewhere. But that is life. Do it enough time and maybe something fun come out of it.

It is actually Mega-base pairs, not megabytes. But yes, that how we count it in genomics. Kb, Mb, Gb, etc.

The library type here probably refers to gDNA, mRNA, total RNA, etc. Due to biological and chemical reasons, these affect how the sequencing work and the amount of material available for the sequencer to read.

That said, this is pretty much a toy. You pay $1000 for the sequencer. You also need a $2000 PC to analyze the data. You also pay like $800 per run. So the running cost is so high it isn't worth it.

I thought it was going to use the SSD as a slower memory cache for the GPU, but this is just literally a regular M2 hard drive slot built to use the PCIE lanes from the GPU...

And here I thought I am going to have 1TB of GPU memory for AI lmao.

I think it is an estimate. Yours is on the extreme low end of things. The GP was using 4K as a standin for touch, smell, taste, pain, hunger, pleasure, etc. Those are a bit more complex than just videos and you can't encode those on a CD.

Regardless, yours still came out to be an order of magnitude higher than what GPT was trained on. So I guess the original argument makes some sense.

Apparently, me feeding my dog some cooked boneless chicken is poisoning them...

I am sorry but this is terrible and almost outright misinformation.

For coding and "reasoning" tasks, there isn't any that can match GPT4. You can try Bing but it is slightly nerfed in my experience.

For general writing, simple discussion, basic knowledge etc, Claude is pretty good. In fact, I find Claude's writing a lot better than GPT. It sounds more "normal".

For vision and API calls and developing apps and such, unfortunately, GPT is king and anything else pales in comparison.

So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever.

Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.

Here is the preprint and free version:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10441380/

Interesting. If Ilya already signed the letter and wants to bring Sam back, who else on that board has enough power to resist? And early reports said Ilya was the main force too. So apparently he was played and used as a scapegoat for the real mastermind(s?).

This drama is incredible. If someone had written a fiction like this, I would have called it a very imaginative but cliched and unrealistic story. Nobody that high on the "smart" hierarchy would do something this dumb. But now it is reality... I don't know if I should be sad or amused.

One thing pretty clear to me now, if even only half of these rumored reactions from the current OAI board are correct, then they have nobody or have consulted with nobody with legal and business experience regarding their actions.

Like come on, a merger talk at this point is so stupid. Nobody would want to touch something this hot and the attempt alone just made OAI situation worse. What are they thinking?

One thing is at some point, you are peer pressured into signing a petition. When your boss, your coworkers, and your reports are already in it, you got to be in it too.

That said, it would still take a significant number of people before it gets to the snowballing phase and it is obvious OAI won't come out of this unscathed.

I am pretty positive on AI and LLMs and all this stuff. But even so I really doubt OAI could have made something so much better than GPT to the point that it worth sacking its CEO in such a manner.

Sam has always been a salesman, that is true and the board knows it. It would take much more than just a disagreement on the value and urgency of a deal to get rid of him. I think it has to be active sabotage and some kind of business maneuver that basically kill the company as it is right now while not telling the board about it.

Altman has always been a bit sly, I am not surprised if he has made some backroom deals that don't sit well with the board. But there is a fine line between doing the right thing and unable to do anything at all. Sometimes, it is better to have the moderately bad guy that can at least bring progress instead of a virtuous leader that can't win a fight.

I guess only time will tell. Right now though, OAI is not looking good and depend on how Microsoft was involved in all of this, someone's seat might get a bit shaky.

This horse and pony show is a farce, most of us agree. But the fact is, if you don't dangle this GC reward, much fewer people would come to the US for work and study. The "irreplaceable" term is vague enough that if you strictly enforce it, it would effectively shut down this class of visa. Ask yourself this: how many people in your department would be 100% sure to keep their position if their job is offered up to the public again?

Some would welcome the reduced influx of immigrants. But in the long term, it would cripple the US. If an individual can convince a company to sponsor them, they are already highly qualified and productive to society. If you deny even these people from immigrating here, then who would you let in? You turn them away and China or the EU would gladly take them. Meanwhile, you lose a significant portion of your workforce that contribute tax without ever withdrawing from it and a lot of research and development at the PhD and master levels done at minimum wages.

The current situation benefits the US a lot. There is a reason why they are hesitating to make any big reform. The US is having the chance to exploit the world's best and brightest all for a few pieces of paper a year. At most there are 140K permanent residents being made each year via this route. It is insignificant compared to the millions of US college graduate annually. The argument about "they took our jobs" is not really valid to me.

I see it as arbitrary barriers to immigration to satisfy those who don't want to see foreigners in the US. The fact it was corrupted to become a money-making business is just a natural result of any archaic laws in the US. It is rather the norm that lawyers and politicians make a dumb law to get attention, then later on they refuse to change it because it is profitable to keep it that way. If it wasn't profitable, they would change it to get political points already.