TechTakes

But Hinton didn’t want Yu to see his personal humidifying chamber, so every time Yu dropped in for a chat, Hinton turned to his two students, the only other people in his three-​person company, and asked them to disassemble and hide the mattress and the ironing board and the wet towels. “This is what vice presidents do,” he told them.

so insanely fucking unserious

FR that’s basically this anime in which MC is isekai’d and starts a cult

Deep Research is the AI slop of academia — low-quality research-slop built for people that don't really care about quality or substance, and it’s not immediately obvious who it’s for.

it's weird that Ed stops there, since answer almost writes itself. ludic had a bit about how in companies bigger than three guys in a shed, people who sign software contracts don't use that software in any normal way;

The idea of going into something knowing about it well enough to make sure the researcher didn't fuck something up is kind of counter to the point of research itself.

conversely, if you have no idea what are you doing, you won't be able to tell if machine generated noise is in any way relevant or true

The whole point of hiring a researcher is that you can rely on their research, that they're doing work for you that would otherwise take you hours.

but but, this lying machine can output something in minutes so this bullshit generator obviously makes human researchers obsolete. this is not for academia because it's utterly unsuitable and google scholar beats it badly anyway; this is not for wide adoption because it's nowhere near free tier; this is for idea guys who have enough money to shell out $whatever monthly subscription and prefer to set a couple hundred of dollars on fire instead of hiring a researcher/scientist/contractor. especially keeping in mind that contractor might tell them something they don't want to hear, but this lmgtfy x lying box (but worse, because it pulls lots of seo spam) won't

OpenAI's next big thing is the ability to generate a report that you would likely not be able to use in any meaningful way anywhere, because while it can browse the web and find things and write a report, it sources things based on what it thinks can confirm its arguments rather than making sure the source material is valid or respectable.

e: this is also insidious and potent ~~attack surface~~ marketing opportunity against clueless monied people who trust these slop machines for some reason. and it might be exploitable by tuning seo just right

wait that's it? he wants to "replace" states with (vr) groupchats on blockchain? it can't be this stupid, you must be explaining this wrong (i know, i know, saying it's just that makes it look way more sane than it is)

The basic problem here is that Balaji is remarkably incurious about what states actually do and what they are for.

libertarians are like house cats etc etc

In practice, it's a formula for letting all the wealthy elites within your territorial borders opt out of paying taxes and obeying laws. And he expects governments will be just fine with this because… innovation.

this is some sovereign citizen type shit

Having read the whole book, I am now convinced that this omission is not because Srinivasan has a secret plan that the public would object to. The omission, rather, is because Balaji just isn't bright enough to notice.

That's basically the entire problem in a nutshell. We've seen what people will fill that void with and it's "okay but I have power here now and I dare you to tell me I don't" and you know who happens to have lots of power? That's right, it's Balaji's billionaire bros! But this isn't a sinister plan to take over society - that would at least entail some amount of doing what states are for.

Ed:

"Who is really powerful? The billionaire philanthropist, or the journalist who attacks him over his tweets?"

I'm not going to bother looking up which essay or what terrible point it was in service to, but Scooter Skeeter of all people made a much better version of this argument by acknowledging that the other axis of power wasn't "can make someone feel bad through mean tweets" but was instead "can inflict grievous personal violence on the aged billionaires who pay them for protection". I can buy some of these guys actually shooting someone, but the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.

That was both horrible and also not what I expected. Like, they at least avoid the AI simulacra nonsense where you train an LLM on someone's Facebook page and ask it if they want to die when they end up in a coma or something, but they do ask about what are effectively the suicide booths from Futurama. Can't wait to see what kind of bullshit they try to make from the results!

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