However, I’m tempted to compare to GitHub: if I join a new company, I will ask to be included to their GitHub account without hesitation. I couldn’t possibly imagine they wouldn’t have one. What makes the cost of that subscription reasonable is not just GitHub’s fear a crowd with pitchforks showing to their office, by also the fact that a possible answer to my non-question might be “Oh, we actually use GitLab.”
If Anthropic is as good as they say, it seems fairly doable to use the service to build something comparable: poach a few disgruntled employees, leverage the promise to undercut a many-trillion-dollar company to be a many-billion dollar company to get investors excited.
I’m sure the founders of Anthropic will have more money than they could possibly spend in ten lifetimes, but I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be some competition. Maybe this time it’s different, but I can’t see how.
you have 2 labs at the forefront (Anthropic/OpenAI), Google closely behind, xAI/Meta/half a dozen chinese companies all within 6-12 months. There is plenty of competition and price of equally intelligent tokens rapidly drop whenever a new intelligence level is achieved.
Unless the leading company uses a model to nefariously take over or neutralize another company, I don't really see a monopoly happening in the next 3 years.
I was focusing on a theoretical dynamic analysis of competition (Would a monopoly make having a competitor easier or harder?) but you are right: practically, there are many players, and they are diverse enough in their values and interest to allow collusion.
We could be wrong: each of those could give birth to as many Basilisks (not sure I have a better name for those conscious, invisible, omni-present, self-serving monsters that so many people imagine will emerge) that coordinate and maintain collusion somehow, but classic economics (complementarity, competition, etc.) points at disruption and lowering costs.
Why do those essays read like the watch that they look at every hour somehow became illegal in the last decade?
You can buy one. People still make clothes, pencils, cutlery, automatic watches, furniture — more than they ever did at any point in the past. Automation, electrification, motorization has allowed considerable wealth that has made making all those terminal products that much cheaper, reliable, and easy to do the little maintenance that they do need.
Regretting that there is an alternative to a Casio F-91W is missing that there are more of those made today than in the 90s. Billions more people can afford it now than they ever could, because, among other things, the farmer who collected the latex to make the bracelet can check, on their Android phone, the weather, or whether the bug they found on one of their tree might wipe out their plantation; the driver who delivered a shipment of those watches to the harbor can call the factory admin to fix a paperwork issue.
Like the author, I have some nostalgia about that exact watch: my dad still wears it every day, like he did throughout the 70s, after his dad gave it to him as a present for going to work abroad (in a humid country where a mechanical watch would not have been reasonable to bring). I don’t know how much my grand-father paid for it, but it couldn’t have been cheap given how my dad talks about it.
The parallel stories put both of our family in a minority who were privileged then and are privileged today. We could afford that watch then, when it was the pinnacle of technology, and we can afford the latest iPhone now because we are privileged. $21 is a lot for a lot of people; a second-hand Android can cost five times more. That’s also a lot for people who need more than the time and a beeping alarm to work, pay their taxes, keep their paperwork handy, etc.
Those need more updates because they can do a lot, which means bad people are trying to hack into those, and about their power. Incredibly smart and generous security researchers have been able to find ways they could do that, fix those and share that with us. That’s as much a burden as pulling the ribbon around a birthday present.
You might need to turn laws into formal proofs, and the existence of judges makes me think that’s not as likely as you would like. A commenting system would though—trained on countries’s precedents, jurisprudence and traditions might.
This is a key project, and I’m sure many countries have enough developers who might try and get it done, but a project that can do it for most legal systems (assuming the sources are on-line) would help a lot more people access legal resources.
I would love to explain to Sam Altman that Elon Musk is a bad person and using his platform isn’t a sensible decision, but I feel like he remembers more evidence of that than I ever will be able to imagine.
How many people who reacted that way then are still at OpenAI? It seems that they have lost key people in several waves.
How many people have joined since? I don’t think the people who lobbied for that are all still there, and I’m not sure a majority of people now at OpenAI were there when it happened.
This is one of the reasons Anthropic can stay competitive with OpenAI on a fraction of the budget and with less than half the headcount.
The smartest people, that actually believe they have the skillset to take us to AGI, understand the importance of safety. They have largely joined Anthropic. The talent density at Anthropic is unmatched.
> More succinctly: who decides what is legal here?
Why are people concentrating on legality? Look at the language
| The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols.
It's not just "legal". Their usage just needs to be consistent with one of
Operational requirements might just be a free pass to do whatever they want. The well established protocols seems like a distraction from the second condition.
> who decides what is [consistent with operational requirements] here?
The Secretary of Defense. The same person who has directed people to do extrajudicial killings. Killings that would be war crimes even if those people were enemy combatants.
There's also subtle language elsewhere. Notice the word "domestic" shows up between "mass" and "surveillance"? We already have another agency that's exploited that one...
As an english speaker (not a lawyer) I'd have read the "and" in "applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols" to mean that all three were required.
Why do you read that to mean just one is required?
The more relevant question is who is held accountable for the war crimes? OpenAI seem pretty confident it won't be OpenAI.
I can see the logic if we were talking about dumb weapons--the old debate about guns don't kill people, people kill people. Except now we are in fact talking about guns that kill people.
> This is key because it's the textbook example of a war crime. It's also something that the current administration has bragged doing dozens of times.
> More succinctly: who decides what is legal here? OpenAI, the Secretary of Defense, or a judge?
Yeah, there's a pretty strong case that anyone claiming to trust that the administration cares about operating in good faith with respect to the law is either delusional or lying.
I'm very tempted to agree that those markets are not providing a positive force, given the focus on questions for which a small group of people know the answer ahead of time. They are not sharing that information because it is not in their interest, and insiders likely won’t have a great time for long.
However, there is large value for some people in knowing when a country will be invaded: if you live there, you know when to leave; if you are an airline, when to stop scheduling flights there, or, if a lot of people are in the first group, up until when to schedule many more flights to get them out. But I’m positive the invading army would prefer some kid in a basement didn’t make one Lieutenant General on the committee obscenely rich overnight.
I wished the focused on markets where many people are part of the decision, like elections. There, the wisdom of the crowds would add some value.
> there is large value for some people in knowing when a country will be invaded
Are there any examples of people/companies trusting degenerate gamblers on prediction markets and making real life-changing decisions?
All the examples I’ve seen are exactly what I started in my original post - the insider circle opening a massive position on the right invasion date mere minutes/hours before they actually do it. This is useful to precisely nobody! And it happens because they are insiders, who want to avoid risk of exposure. Not to share their godly wisdom with the world for others benefit.
I don't have links. I'm a yeshiva student and many of my friends study in Israel and/or fly back and forth and I know multiple people who used polymarket to make flying decisions.
> questioning the fundamental basis of this.
Empirically, you can look at https://calibration.city/ (among other such trackers) look at polymarket, filter by market midpoint and you'll see that if a market resolves in a year, and 6 months in it's at 30%, the actual event happens at (remarkably close) to 30% of the time.
Theoretically, it relies on standard market theories, like efficient markets hypothesis etc. Basically, however corn comes ot be valued correctly, much of the same mechanisms are present here
Doesn’t Orthodox Judaism (like all religions) look quite harshly upon all forms of gambling? How is Polymarket kosher?
To be clear, I didn’t question efficient market hypotheses - my stance has been pretty clear along the thread, questioning the value of the kind of information gambled upon in popular prediction markets.
Yes, it does. I never gambled on Polymarket, I look at it to figure out the odds of things I care about.
I thought I explained the value quite clearly. ~10 years ago if you wanted to know the odds your flight will get canceled due to war, you had to trust the hyperventilating talking head on your favorite cable news channel (who's job it was to keep you watching...). Now you get basically the actual odds. If that's not value, I don't know what is.
I find the way you operate - supporting and benefitting from Polymarket - to be equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from, but I guess even in orthodoxy one can bend the rules to their liking.
> Now you get basically the actual odds.
But that's the thing - insiders bet & trade at the very last minute, and thus are not supporting the /just cause/ of "information sharing", rather just plain, old front-running and racketeering. The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds - when the actual action happens just before event takes place.
> equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from
I don't know which religion/s you're familiar with but I bet you don't know the reason gambling is prohibited in Judaism. It doesn't carry the moral stench you think it does. I've been studying Talmudic law for a very very long time and am confident there is no issue with using polymarket to get the odds on anything.
> The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds
In my previous comment I shared a link with you (https://calibration.city/) I told you to filter by market midpoint.
I don't know if you didn't see it or you are being obtuse but between repeating something I disproved and lecturing me about my religion, I have my suspicions...
I’m very tempted to agree with you: people who draw from description draw unicorns after being told about rhinoceroses. We have a lot of medieval monks’ drawings of elephants by description and theirs look like tapir with a trumpet stuck in their nose. This is not a photo, of course but it mainly highlights the head, like any one would if they didn’t measured proportions carefully.
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