It's undeniable that it has improved the productivity in _some_ areas of development. But my point stand nonetheless, if development is improved, it seems to be difficult to surface that to end user.
The premise, originally, was that AI would empower workers to do more with less. Granted this is anecdotal, but most of the stuff I use today is much the same as it was 5 years ago. It seems the world is improving at the same rate as it did before, generally speaking.
This is a neat experiment, and I read the story before joining the conversation here and realizing it was written the way it was.
Many people here already chimed in on the emotion of being caught reading something that might not have felt AI so I will offer another angle. Akin to many The New Yorker article in the past, I felt disconnected with the article for a good portion at the beginning. So much so that I had to skip most of it.
The piece that got me very hooked was when he drove to Carol Lindgren’s farm. I read the remainder of the text and thought the content was engaging and thought provoking, in some sense. I loved the idea of manual override that logged into the system and changed the system behaviour over time. That's something that got me thinking about AI, actually.
Now, I would be curious which part of the author's genesis made it into the final text and how much of that couples with what I found to be intellectually engaging.
Thank you so much for sharing this video, it's just amazing to see a bunch of young amateurs getting so excited about things that would have been virtually inaccessible 20 years ago.
It’s beautiful to see. They have put in such extreme amounts of hard work to get that thing into the air. Designing a robust affordable liquid propelled rocket from scratch is hard. There are so many design decisions, complex simulations, manufacturing difficulties, and tests for every little part of that 11+ m rocket. Accounting for extreme forces, heat variations, vibrations, wind, atmosphere, liquid sloshing, rotation, etc during ascent and descent. It’s not only mechanical/aviation engineering but also software, electrical, sourcing donations, documenting everything in forms of design and risk assessment reports etc etc.
You also have to try to account for every little possible failure mode before launching which is why rockets seldom succeed on the first attempt.
And then dealing with authorities to create new launch sites and permits which probably hasn’t been done in decades in Canada.
Indeed, there are so many different ways a rocket a fail. Launch rail buttons detach, motor chuffs, motor explodes, fin falls off, structural failure (banana), parachute doesn't fire, parachute doesn't deploy, parachute detaches - to name just a few.
Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary? And given we mostly talk about technology here, let me put this through that lens:
With all the technology advancement and improvement with access to information in the last 30 years, why does it feel that all of this culminates to more disinformation, more pain, and less understanding?
It's because technology doesn't change the fundamentals of global geopolitics. Which is that nearly all of history can be explained as a struggle to control basic resources such as arable land, oil, minerals, etc. Everything you're seeing today is because those resources are becoming either increasingly scarce, or increasingly valuable.
Technology can change things but people that profit today from something will oppose a change.
Case in point: switching from oil to renewables - which can lower dependency to external actors a lot as solar panels and windmills have life span of years, so even if the producers suddenly refuses to sell more, one has some time to find an alternative - was done slower than it could have because of "discussions".
Since 20 years I almost feel the discussion "climate change or not" is fueled by people that want dependency on oil, such that we don't talk about the issue of a couple of big producer points of failure (USA, Russia, Gulf countries). Not sure if oil companies are smart enough to finance green groups (to which I agree generally but is besides the point), such that the public discourse stays in a conflict area (climate) rather than a simple one (independence), but if they are that would be meta-evil.
Geopolitics are an entirely optional game of course that just amounts to trading seats of who gets entitled to be owner of some thing that one can hardly even say is ownable outside the legal definition. Seems to me there is no actual reason why the middle east has to look like the middle east and not midwest USA. Israel arming itself should be seen as just as absurd as say the city of Cleveland arming itself due to Detroit.
Kind of interesting how we have some areas of the world where there are no geopolitics and people live in peace and don't see any differences between the people they come across in the grocery store. And other places in the world where those vary same cultures in that midwestern grocery store might now be picking up arms against eachother.
And also kind of interesting how no one cares to highlight this cognitive dissonance we have, how an israeli and a persian can live as neighbors in the US, but in the middle east they are water and oil.
No actually. There's no real "resource" justification here.
This is directly caused by technology. Morons have helped the worst possible people build surveillance and coordination and propaganda networks and are all confused pikachu about that going exactly the way you should have expected it to go.
Technology was also bypassing the "resource" problem at warp speed. Solar panels are the energy future, and thanks to China being actually good at strategic planning, solar can be deployed and utilized far faster than any other energy innovation. With the sheer abundance possible through bulk solar, water scarcity is an engineering issue, about manufacturing enough plumbing and membranes to desalinate whatever you need.
We are fighting an 80s oil war because people voted for an 80s TV personality to run our country after he was known to rape kids, brag about Mein Kampf (even though everyone knows he doesn't read for fun), and attempt to invalidate the 2020 election.
Israel saw a clear opening to wildly advance their imperialist ambitions and because Donald Trump is so damn stupid we have jumped in to this absurdist situation because Donald Trump wanted to be seen shooting first, because he thinks that looks "Strong".
Dems had Trump dead to rights for insurrection. They had everything in the Epstein files and didn't drop it. They told you they were working tirelessly for a ceasefire - while unilaterally vetoing 4 of them at the UN.
Genocide. They armed genocide. Which we could all see on our phones.
They loved arming it so much, they decided they'd rather keep arming it than gain millions of votes in swing states vs Trump.
Trump is worse. Yes. But when both parties in the two party system are pro-genocide, pro-torture, pro-ICE, pro-Epstein etc etc etc, you can't blame the whole problem on just half the people involved.
Americans are under the delusion that Democrats are the second coming of Christ, even after it enabled and took part in genocide. To anyone outside of the West, the differences between the two parties are inexistent.
The memoryholing of all Democrats' failures, corruption, and horror is painful to watch. But they do it with a different kind of posturing, and this seems to be sufficient to most.
Yeah that's the really painful bit alright. The pretence isn't even good.
But they'll get so mad at you for pointing out the obvious.
It's been this way for a long time - MLK pointed all this out 6 decades ago. It's gotten worse since, to the point where over 98% of US voters in 2024 didn't hold enabling live-streamed genocide as a red line for their vote.
I'll keep talking about it, and USians will probably keep getting mad at me for it. Ah well.
Neither of which is actually true for oil. We're still finding oil reserves faster than we deplete them, major users such as China are rapidly decarbonizing, and the price was relatively low before the war.
But the people in power thought it was true, which is all that matters.
Technology is at the mercy of our social and financial systems, it rarely leads social advancement. As with other tools, it can be used in many ways
In surveying my friends in Silicon Valley, it seems that most VCs/techies know that:
1. This administration is likely leading us into long term wars and social instability
2. American Dynamism and Defense Tech (or more politely bundled into "DeepTech") are war profiteering, benefiting from greater instability
Speaking / acting out against the American military complex and Big Tech/VC's role in this carries 3 big risks:
1. Not being invited to parties ("too much negative energy, we want to be surrounded by positivity" or "don't talk politics")
2. Censorship and reduced following across most major social media platforms
3. Being economically left out as the world bifurcates into a K-shape economy
As a result, most of my community (generally peace-loving, music-loving humans) seem to be either taking a position of "the world has always been at war and will always be at war, I'm just a realist" or "I'm just going to focus on my locust of control and my personal wellbeing" or "if it's gonna happen anyways, I might as well make money off of it". There is a strong contingent of the resistance as well (still fighting for climate, social justice, peace) but much higher rates of depression and social isolation in this group
So it does not seem to be a problem that can be solved by more information and more technology (though k-12 and higher education assuredly is worth investing in), but perhaps by less nihilism and a stronger social/moral fabric
A big reason I am considering starting a company again is that we need more flags of institutions that carry large weight/reputation and stand for a set of values that is different than the current (and historical) status quo. I expect most of my community would be thrilled to align with those flags if those flags where held up tall and broke through the noise
Which is to say, if you're considering setting up one of those flags, please please do. The world doesn't have to be this way.
Because it is much easier to do more damage (disinformation, propaganda etc) with today's technology than ever before. Radio could do more damage than newspapers, TV could do more damage than radio, internet can do way more damage than TV...
Someone with a 500$ laptop, internet connection and a handful of social media accounts can do a level of damage and cause pain that would be impossible 3-4 decades ago.
Technology might advance, but people are still people. Greed, stupidity, ego, jingoism...these don't change no matter how much tech advances
>Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary?
Because the United States government is so grossly dysfunctional that a blatant real world re-enactment of Wag the Dog[1] has gone off without a hitch. "Without a hitch" in the "distract from the President's rape of a child" sense of the original film, of course.
This is a tale as old as humanity itself. Power-hungry people will always push lies to foster their version of events. This always causes pain and destruction.
I am not delusional about those power-hungry people, but I somehow thought that with better access to information, society would have been able to better regulate them.
Maybe in hindsight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.
Irak war seemed to me reasonably "in plain sight". And there were other blunders as well. What I find amazing though is that more people passionately believe very strange reasons.
30 years ago people were like "meh, sure we don't get something, I bet there are hidden interest that I don't know about". Nowadays they are like "oh, yeah we attack country X because they have aliens that attack us telepathically, I know that for sure and if you don't agree you are an alien too!".
> With all the technology advancement and improvement with access to information in the last 30 years, why does it feel that all of this culminates to more disinformation, more pain, and less understanding?
One of the original adages in technology is:
garbage in, garbage out.
The more technology ate the world, the bigger a problem that became.
>For many years we had to rely on our own internally developed fork of FFmpeg to provide features that have only recently been added to FFmpeg
I really wonder if they couldn't have run the fork as an open source project. They present their options as binary when it fact they had many different options from the get go. They could have run the fork in an open-source fashion for developers of FFmpeg to see what their work was and be able to understand what the features they were working on was.
Keeping everything close source and then contributing back X amount of years later feels a little bit disingenuous.
I think the brunt of the disruption regarding AI is already behind us for LLMs at least. It's possible we'll see improvements over the following months/years, but government will inevitably start to catchup to the level of disinformation and confusion that AI has brought to this world.
Laws & regulations that needs to be created to reign in AI will undoubtedly increase the opportunity cost of training LLMs.
For some, it might be similar to the early 2000s, but I think it's just a healthy rebalance of what AI is, and how the society needs to implement this new, hardly controllable, paradigm. With this perspective, OpenAI has a lot to lose as it hasn't been able to create a moat for itself compared to, let's say, Anthropic.
I think that even if the models were to plateau today, there are still a lot of room for improvement in all the tooling around them, people finding ideas of applications, and users getting used of them. So we're not done with the disruption.
Some of the apps made possible by smartphones only appeared a decade after they were made technically possible. A lot of the new use cases made possible by the Internet and broadband connections only became widely used because of Covid.
I was already using Skype 20 years ago to make video calls, but I've only seen PTA meetings over Zoom since Covid.
Yes, I think you're right that it is not the end of the road for LLM and the application of LLM might be adopted over time across a variety of industries.
I guess what I failed to convey in my original comment was that, like the Internet 20 years ago, the current advancement made by AI might stall at a foundational level, while the landscape evolves.
Essentially, I believe what you're saying is really close in spirit to what I'm saying.
Interesting adjacent theory is how much are datacenters becoming military target to strike as part of disrupting initial defenses. It doesn't seem it was the case in this instance, but I could see this becoming a more important target in future.
Seems like it should be somewhat easier to bomb 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.
Again, this is just me thinking out loud on a tangent and this doesn't have much to do with this story, but I felt it was an interesting thought to share nonetheless.
The more interesting question, is how many datacenters are just plonked next to a high-value military target?
For infrastructure reasons, we plonk datacenters down next to airports big enough to fly major hardware into, and near where the big oceanic cables come ashore… and for strategic reasons those are also the perfect places to place military bases
You sound like you know things, and I have questions! What are the chances that we see infrastructure move to less-developed-but-more-stable regions of the world? What even are the candidate locations that wouldn't be an absolute headache to set up? I'm thinking perhaps West Africa? Or South Africa if it can stabilize a bit? Maybe other coastal locations that have good-enough transportation hubs nearby?
AWS spreads a pretty wide net - there are already datacentres in Cape Town, São Paulo, Jakarta... You could certainly deploy your app far enough to dodge any regional instability.
However, proximity to money/power tends to be a factor in business, and the bulk of datacentres cluster around US/EU/MENA/China/Japan
> Seems like it should be somewhat easier to nuke 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.
The bigger part of me seems that if we someone nukes 50 datacenters all at once or say all of Amazon's datacenters at once, then the data stored in there would simply be gone and given so many datacenters are located in Virginia,USA iirc or just so many companies being reliant on few datacenter providers.
The larger threat to me with the lose of data is firstly the panic within public fronting services but also, with Hedge Funds, Pension funds or banking datacenters who might be using these and if they lose the data, then its gonna cause even more public mayhem.
Some might be saying oh off-site backups exist but there has atleast been one instance, where a single Google accident had led to massive issues for a 135 Billion $ pension fund.
In my experience many middle eastern companies tend to only operate out of the Middle East AZ’s. They’re not backhauling their data and customers to us-east-1. If the goal is to severely disrupt middle eastern rivals, then you don’t need to hit every possible AWS datacenter.
Interesting, I didn't know that so thanks for telling me something new.
But why is this the case? Like, saving costs? Doesn't this recent attack on AWS DC does show that they aren't as safe as previously thought especially in a region of conflict.
Is there any particular reason as to why this is the case?
No idea what the laws are like but maybe data sovereignty? I'm in Australia and certain industries require Australian data to stay in Australia, which until ap-southeast-4 came along meant relying on one AWS region.
Notably they did have backups. As you would expect for a $135 billion dollar undertaking. It's just that restoring from a calamity tends to be time consuming (a key difference between failover and a backup).
That's so interesting. Are any of the US military (or other satellite state of the US) systems running in "normal" datacenters or do they have a few protected DoD datacenters in the US?
I do think that though, atleast from the Anthropic decision prior, we know that Anthropic which was used by DoD should be on normal AWS datacenters.
I am saying this because, Dod Threatened to force take the source code of Anthropic if they don't agree to aggregious demands so that means that they don't have the source code.
Perhaps DoD used Anthropic within AWS Military modular DC's but I find it extremely unlikely.
I am almost certain that even with OpenAI who bent its knee to DoD, its still hosted on regular infrastructure and DoD is using these AI models on pretty sensitive tasks (During the Venezeula Maduro's capture, Anthropic/Claude were used iirc to handle some data analysis)
IMO Tho, Any Employee from Anthropic/OpenAI might know better tho about how these models are deployed.
Data centers in space no longer look so unreasonable when the requirement is “redundancy against multi site bomb strikes mid op”. A little depressing when some pieces start to fit together.
I’m not exactly fully bought into the idea (for many practicality reasons) but it seems easier to build many (and replace) ground stations than data centers.
Additionally, StarLink et al are now able to directly communicate with cell phones. It therefore should be possible to route entirely in space between “data center satellites” and communications satellites and communicate directly with an end user device, avoiding the entire terrestrial internet.
Routing? Why route? the link at the point of comms is direct. There's no extra ground station, unless you mean the person/people doing things. But either they're communicating direct to a DC on the ground, or one in space, or wherever. Setup so that-- sure-- they can work and coordinate better if someone isn't dropping bombs on ground nodes but that all nodes have some independent capabilities as well.
IIUC part of the reason ballistic missiles have multiple warheads is that some of them detonate high up to knock out air defenses and other electronics allowing the rest to fall through to their targets. The last time we tried this experiment as a species was the starfish prime tests in 1962 which caused some electrical havoc in Hawaii. These days our systems are probably more delicate and sensitive? All that is to say, in a scenario where nukes are going off I'm not sure you'd even need to target any datacenters in particular.. they're probably all toast by default.
Now you're worried? Come on. He is using the Bully Pulpit to try and pressure other companies to toeing the line. At least someone had the balls to tell them to get fucked instead of kowtowing.
He is also clearly in the throes of dementia, as his father was. It’s a common symptom of dementia patients to become rude and violent as their facilities slip away
If only we had a constitutional process for removing presidents from office as they become obviously unfit for the office…
this reads like someone who hasn't seen dementia up close. I don't see his behavior as much different than term 1. simply more malevolent.
there's no obvious word searching. he's always been simplistic and unencumbered by the need for logical consistency. he was never a word smith. he has his stock phrases (eg, "many people are saying...<insert lie>"), which he uses as a crutch, but also to great effect.
as someone who HAS seen dementia from a to z, I don't see it here.
Yeah I don’t see it either. What I see is a guy openly admitting he’s a dictator because he thinks that’s what’s needed. A guy that knows he doesn’t have much to lose and wants to do whatever crazy shit comes into his head
yes, but this is his administration; full stop neogestapo. Hes surrounded and politically floated by white Christian nationalists. His dementia just lubricates the existing harm vectors.
I mean him being in the throes of dementia is certainly possible; but, more absolutely, he's a fucking asshole. The problem isn't just him, however; it's his entire administration, Congress, and the SCOTUS he stacked that further enable the insanity.
The only two things anthropic ask is that AI cannot be used for:
- domestic mass surveillance,
- autonomous kill decision.
That's it. The reason for the first one is clear: it violate the spirit of the fourth amendment at least.
The reason for the second is that if a kill decision is taken, let's say by an ICE agent who just got told 'im not mad at you' or something similar that would surely enrage him, he is responsible in front of the law. If it's an autonomous drone that shoots on political opponent/protestors, no one is responsible.
I will add that Google and anthropic made their AI play wargames. 93% of the time, their models escalate to the nuclear option.
The premise, originally, was that AI would empower workers to do more with less. Granted this is anecdotal, but most of the stuff I use today is much the same as it was 5 years ago. It seems the world is improving at the same rate as it did before, generally speaking.
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