We're going to see the battle intensify here because "spikes" of ASI are emerging that can't be ignored. Models are now better than humans in certain domains or for certain tasks, which means capital as a moat is being eroded. This is why you see people like Jamie Dimon sounding the alarm. Most of the talk until now has been about how the models would be a serious problem for labor, but if that was true how could it not also be an issue for capital?
Yes, and given the nature of the current administration, whose actors are not inclined to see themselves as independent competing capitals among others, but rather as privileged capitals, and therefore more inclined to move towards taking an interest in the process of enclosure, ensuring it includes them, the hope seems to lie with companies at the hardware layer who have an interest in seeing the diffusion of intelligence play out freely at all levels of society.
The labs have to be told NO--the problem they're dealing with, that model outputs give the game away, and that in turn the distiller becomes the distilled, is a fundamental problem they have to figure out how to deal with without going to the State.
This is where we need the hardware companies and neoclouds to start speaking up. The labs want to elevate matters from the level of civil society (basically, competing firms) to the State (enclosure), and as always, in the name of security. But other actors in the same ecosystem have strictly opposed interests here, and are equally if not more credible as far as the State is concerned. If players like Nebius, Baseten, Fireworks, etc. among many others including obviously Nvidia, Dell, AMD, and so on don't get ahead of this they will be sacrificing trillions.
Approximate as a limit and not surpass, where the hidden hope actually seems to be that they don't surpass. There are lots of variations floating around, from simple metaphors like "LLM as librarian that speaks to you," to even Sutton's remark that rather than being a case where we've taken the "bitter lesson" to heart, LLMs may be a yet another case where we're limited by it.
It's a form of denial. We're getting another "de-thronement of man" on the order of Copernicus and Darwin. Some get excited, others turn away in horror. Negation is the outward expression of the desire to keep human intelligence wrapped in its mystical veil.
One popular idea is that these systems will asymptotically approximate human intelligence because they're trained on mostly human-written texts. Not only is that untrue, it's also directly contradicted by our experience with previous RL-systems, where they seem to breeze right by human ability without even the slightest hiccup.
A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you think about who needs to have access to the correct and current building code or electric code or whatever for regular reference, it's really your lawyer, plumber, electrician, architect, builder, etc. and in that context $170 or $130 isn't a bad deal.
This is why Google is pushing SEOs to get their clients to codify and publish their domain expertise: while it gives them a way to filter signal from noise/slop right now (supposedly helping to "improve search experiences"), it also simultaneously extracts that experience into a consumable form for later training.
They really do want to know the ins-and-outs of the HVAC service business, for example, because they hope their agents will be handling it in a few years.
In many cases the really key idea that transforms the overall system design comes from working closely on the specific implementation details. Maybe you don't redesign the system this time, but you saw how you might do it, and you get ideas about how to do it the next time. The craft involves a back-and-forth between different levels of abstraction, and cutting that link does feel like we're sacrificing something.
> Earlier automation targeted physical and manual labor, where a worker’s identity was at least partly separable from the output. A welder is not the weld.
It comes through even worse in this later sentence, which at the very least tells you the writer has never met a welder.
There was also a period around the mid-2010s where I had the strong impression that lots of younger ambitious devs were fanatically promoting rust against C's undefined behavior mostly because it gave them a way to differentiate themselves from older seniors within organizations. (And I say this not as an old C diehard, but as someone who watched more than one colleague position himself as the 'rust guy'.)
It could be a symptom of how fragmented workflows are, which itself seems to be due to providers adding friction to guard against being integrated away by some larger platform.
You mention the technical aspect (readability) and others have suggested the aesthetic, but you could also look at it as a form of rhetoric. I'm not sure it's really effective because it sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35, but maybe there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI sloptext.
Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations), while for older generations it was almost always associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution of the Microsoft logo, for example).
The development of QM was so closely connected to experiments that it's highly unlikely, even despite some of the experiments having been performed prior to 1900.
I suspect the move back to pen-and-paper exams is being resisted by the teachers. It shouldn't be that hard though--when the workload became to great, most of my own professors would offload part of the grading task to TAs and grad students.
It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.
I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
> How do I belong? How do I make my community a better place? How do I build wealth for the people I love?
What remains after is something like the social status games of the aristocratic class, which I suspect is why there's a race to accumulate as much as possible now before the means to do so evaporate.