RetroFedsamvines, samvines@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
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Posts and Comments by samvines, samvines@awful.systems
techtakesComments by samvines, samvines@awful.systems
Somewhat buried by EdZ’s exposé… Nvidia trying to raise $21Bn with bonds this after Google raising money too…
Seems that even the mag 7 know the jig is nearly up and are trying to liquidate and get as much cold hard $$$ as they can now
So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.
The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don’t need to list them in this forum.
Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.
First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.
Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don’t keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don’t produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.
Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn’t be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We’re doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
I’ve already seen “Europe 2031 was right. Shortest time between a work of science fiction and science fact” on LinkedIn…. 🙃🙃🙃
Now seeing one-shotted Europeans calling for the development of AI/LLMs at home - "Mistral" is not adequate
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like “saccharide” in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
So very excited for the biggest pump and dump in the history of consumer investing, brought to us by a man actively inciting race riots in northern ireland. Can’t wait for this afternoon 🙏
Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. He’s right but he’s such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say “I told you so” but it’s way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting “I ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGO” every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for "claiming credit for something"
He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it won’t be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being “one of the good guys” and then shows his true colours every single time.
The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesn’t like what you’re asking. It’s couched as a “safety countermeasure” but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.
We’ve moved from ‘accidental’ hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you’re paying $$$ for the privelige.
Let’s all just agree that it’s a beloved RPG game by Lionhead Studios and we’ll leave it at that
Babe wake up, new model that’s too dangerous for public consumption but not really just dropped.
Literally the only pivot to AI that I am happy about. Molly is GOAT
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won’t be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
Easiest way to avoid using LLMs as a software developer appears to be to get a religious exemption
It’s a shame Gary Marcus is usually right because his writing style and personality are so annoyingly smug. He hates LLMs but only because he wants his own methods to be the path to AGI (or we could just… Not try to build AGI?) and wittering on about Trump bailing out OpenAI being socialism (bailouts are not generally considered socialism - it’s such an annoying tic to just shout socialism any time governments do something you don’t like).
Still great to see the stock market cottoning on - hopefully this sticks and it’s not just short-lived deepseek panic again
Around 4 years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying that AI has feelings - which he testified was because when he spoke to it it just seemed to be intelligent.
He found Lamda showed self-awareness and could hold conversations about religion, emotions and fears. This led Mr Lemoine to believe that behind its impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.
Today’s tech has not fundamentally changed or evolved but the difference is that now the industry needs the hype to keep the valuation high!
The number of one shotted people who think that “stochastic parrot” is an insult and not just a definition/description of how the models work is funny. Similar to how lots of cishet white guys get really upset when you call them cishet white guys (fwiw I am a cishet white guy)
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
FFS the amount of circlejerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.
“Hello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chips”
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just insulting, it’s a full on attack on clanker wankers.
Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!
TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…
Oh… Well that’s disappointing.
I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)
This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren’t explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).
Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia
Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?
Missed this paper last week from Google
Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their “it’s going to take your job” stance. Surely just a coincidence
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour
So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
Yeah exactly.
I want to pause ai because it’s a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.
They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.
We are not the same.
I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…
I think it makes far more sense to pin the temporarily embarrassed millionaires over the orange site as psychopaths and cargo cultists.
Enjoyed Andrew Kelley’s rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust
Some pretty good sneers in there like
Me too. Saved future readers a search
The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).
US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…
From the same presentation talk of an AI bubble is blasphemy
Giving strong “pay no attention that man behind the curtain” energy
Three scenes and a comment:
Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.
I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.
I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI…
We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
Prometheus the AI startup is a bit on the nose isn’t it?
Another explanation that feels likely to me is that all the monorail salesmen at the big corps know the gig is nearly up so they are rushing to IPO or raise new funds (Google did the same recently) to maximise the amount of $$$ in their bugout bags as they sail off into the sunset
Whitehouse gives anthropic "just draw the rest of the fucking owl" energy over Fable:
With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I’ve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude
Wait anthropic are admitting that their model is basically the same as gpt 5.5 and the hype was undeserved?