When the entire article reads like it’s written by an LLM —- ie the author couldn’t be bothered to write their thoughts out themselves —- it’s hard to give it the benefit of the doubt that it’s worth reading closely.
Zvi’s writing style is a bit of an acquired taste, and he has strong opinions which can fall outside of the mainstream, but there’s no one in the industry more well read and known for doing the reading and documenting the nitty gritty of weekly developments in the world of AI models, discourse, and policy.
Even many who disagree strongly with his worldview find his notes and references to be an irreplaceable resource for understanding the fast moving world of AI.
lots of useful Google search tricks and syntax all in one place. I already knew many of these. But verbatim mode is new to me and addresses a major complaint I’ve had about increasingly fuzzy semantic search.
Here’s John H Cochrane (the grumpy economist, Substack) praising refine. This is the post that first clued me into the service: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/refine
It seems like Disney’s departure from its business “deal” with OpenAI is newsworthy distinct from the Sora closure. Six months ago Sam Altman was announcing massive deals left and right, now nearly all of the impressive deals have fallen through or been scaled dramatically back.
I found Sam's early 2015 posts on machine superintelligence and regulation [1] [2] to be even more interesting in hindsight, given OpenAI's accelerationist bent of late, OpenAI president Greg Brockman's lobbying efforts against AI regulation, and frequent accusations of attempted regulatory capture.
Sam's recommendations at the time include:
1) Provide a framework to observe progress…
2) Given how disastrous a bug could be, require development safeguards to reduce the risk of the accident case. For example, beyond a certain checkpoint, we could require development happen only on airgapped computers…, require that certain parts of the software be subject to third-party code reviews, etc.
3) Require that the first SMI developed have as part of its operating rules that a) it can’t cause any direct or indirect harm to humanity (i.e. Asimov’s zeroeth law), b) it should detect other SMI being developed but take no action beyond detection, c) other than required for part b, have no effect on the world.
…
4) Provide lots of funding for R+D for groups that comply with all of this, especially for groups doing safety research.
5) Provide a longer-term framework for how we figure out a safe and happy future for coexisting with SMI…
Also, in his acknowledgments he gives the greatest thanks to onetime partner, now rival, Dario Amodei.
An OpenAI researcher tweeted:
“ Using thousands of GPT5 queries, we found solutions to 10 Erdős problems that were listed as open: 223, 339, 494, 515, 621, 822, 883 (part 2/2), 903, 1043, 1079.
Additionally for 11 other problems, GPT5 found significant partial progress that we added to the official website: 32, 167, 188, 750, 788, 811, 827, 829, 1017, 1011, 1041. For 827, Erdős's original paper actually contained an error, and the work of Martínez and Roldán-Pensado explains this and fixes the argument.”
This was taken (out of context?) to be claiming ChatGPT solved the open problems, when in fact it “just” found them through a literature review. (Though an earlier tweet in the same thread made the literature review interpretation more explicitly)
The ensuing controversy around whether there was false hype buried a potentially significant demonstration of LLMs’ ability to unlock lost and forgotten knowledge in a way Sebastien explains and makes the case here as being a big deal.
It would be great to implement a browser extension that lets you highlight a term or phrase on any webpage and open a GPT rabbit hole for that term or phrase.
@maxkreiger - if I were to build one as a proof of concept, would you object to me having it hyperlink to your UI?
Act III of episode 585 of This American Life (a WBEZ radio show broadcast on NPR and distributed via podcast) discussed this phenomenon and spoke with a few individuals with HSAM:
One of the individuals was a script supervisor in Hollywood responsible for ensuring continuity between scenes during filming. But it also ventures into powerful emotionally resonant territory, touching on the bittersweet implications of experiencing loss when memories never fade.
I submitted using the title from the article metadata instead of what's displayed in the article, since the metadata title was more descriptive and less clickbaity.
> The company pressed forward and launched ChatGPT on November 30. It was considered such a nonevent that no major company-wide announcement about the chatbot going live was made. Many employees who weren’t directly involved, including those in safety functions, didn’t even realize it had happened. Some of those who were aware, according to one employee, had started a betting pool, wagering how many people might use the tool during its first week. The highest guess was 100,000 users. OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool hit 1 million within the first five days. The phrase low-key research preview became an instant meme within OpenAI; employees turned it into laptop stickers.
> Anticipating the arrival of [AGI], Sutskever began to behave like a spiritual leader, three employees who worked with him told us. His constant, enthusiastic refrain was “feel the AGI,” a reference to the idea that the company was on the cusp of its ultimate goal. At OpenAI’s 2022 holiday party, held at the California Academy of Sciences, Sutskever led employees in a chant: “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” The phrase itself was popular enough that OpenAI employees created a special “Feel the AGI” reaction emoji in Slack.
> For a leadership offsite this year, according to two people familiar with the event, Sutskever commissioned a wooden effigy from a local artist that was intended to represent an “unaligned” AI—that is, one that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire to symbolize OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles. In July, OpenAI announced the creation of a so-called superalignment team with Sutskever co-leading the research. OpenAI would expand the alignment team’s research to develop more upstream AI-safety techniques with a dedicated 20 percent of the company’s existing computer chips, in preparation for the possibility of AGI arriving in this decade, the company said.
Article says there is compelling but contested “smoking gun” evidence in favor of both lab leak and zoonotic/wet market origin theories (only one of which can be the actual origin), including new elaboration of details about infections at Wuhan Institute of Virology that could have started the pandemic:
> Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Zhu Yan, three gain-of-function coronavirus researchers at WIV, became severely ill with COVID-like symptoms in the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.
The article is ultimately agnostic about the truth and concludes:
> the origins question has broken down into a pair of rival theories that don’t—and can’t—ever fully interact. They’re based on different sorts of evidence, with different standards for evaluation and debate. Each story may be accruing new details—fresh intelligence about the goings-on at WIV, for example, or fresh genomic data from the market—but these are only filling out a picture that will never be complete. The two narratives have been moving forward on different tracks. Neither one is getting to its destination.
> The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, argued that Amazon had “duped millions of consumers” into enrolling in Prime by using “manipulative, coercive or deceptive” design tactics on its website known as “dark patterns.” And when consumers wanted to cancel, Amazon “knowingly complicated” the process with byzantine procedures.
...
> On Wednesday, the F.T.C. said that Amazon had made it particularly difficult to purchase a product in its store without also subscribing to Prime while checking out. In one example, it said the company had used “repetition and color” to push customers’ focus to Prime’s promise of free shipping and away from the service’s price, leading some to subscribe to Prime without “informed consent.”
> The agency also said Amazon made it hard to find the page that allowed consumers to cancel the service. Once they found it, the company bombarded them with offers intended to change their mind. The lawsuit said that Amazon had named the process for canceling Prime after the Iliad, the lengthy Greek epic poem that recounts the Trojan War.
Interesting. Does the decision to use ALiBi have to be done before the model weights are first trained, or is there a way that these models could have incorporated ALiBi instead or in addition to an alternate positional encoding method to ALiBi after they were first trained?