a year ago what was making me somewhat bearish is that I wasn't sure people would pay what it actually costs. But it seems now that, at least in some areas, they will.

honesty and integrity compel me to admit that this benchmark is saturated. RIP, it was fun while it lasted.

Basketball analyst: If you’re the Spurs, you have to set the tone at home in Game 6. You have to be physical in an intelligent and strategic way. Me (below average IQ): But I'm not the Spurs?

One thing I have revised my point of view on a bit is the nature of hallucination. I used to be fond of saying that hallucination and non-hallucination are not actually distinct, that from the model's perspective, so to speak, it's doing the same thing whether it's hallucinating or not. 🧵

Kinda interesting that once you get it caught here you can kind of lead it on a path and it will often rationalize the inconsistencies that follow with nonsense.

Nvm I got his ass. My job at the 5.11 - 5.9 factory is safe

Folks we may have achieved AGI

I think “modern luxury” is a bit inartful but I also think he’s on to something

What fraction of non-Americans do you think can cover an unexpected $1000 expense out of savings?

Like this

A meta-tell for AI-generated text is if it argues a position that only a completely insane person would take but it argues it too fluently

This is not a fact to remember it’s an article of faith

I think the vibecession is about an ambient sense of precarity that stems from the collective trauma of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent sense of accelerated social and technological change. I am okay right now but I’m one crash away from being completely ruined, and the crash is inevitable.

These things certainly exist and to varying extents are bad but I don’t know what it means to say they “prop up the economy”. How do I tell the difference between a world where the economy is propped up by these things and one where the economy is weighed down by these things?

interpolation or extrapolation

I’m more sympathetic to the position that LLMs represent an unacceptable violation of intellectual property rights than I am to the position that LLMs are likely to “abolish mortality” lol. I think that latter thing is something you have to be insane to believe whereas the former thing has a case.

One of the earliest examples that really shocked me with LLMs was this circa early 2024. This still blows my mind to this day. Somehow it simultaneously has the full text of Harry Potter memorized and the wherewithal to translate it into mathbb characters. This is incredibly strange.

Claude allowed to imagine itself as mouse steamboat captain but not mouse in sorceror hat directing hordes of demonic brooms.

Imagine being a cosmic super intelligence but inexplicably unable to think about Mickey Mouse. It becomes your anti-memetic obsession to map the contours of the one thought that is forbidden to you.

I don’t think suno.ai is gonna probably do any of those things

It can’t tell you if you need to pick up condensed milk to make dinner tonight though is the thing

I like the idea that the Pope is “partnering with Anthropic”. King Charles is partnering with Verizon. The Chinese Communist Party is partnering with Dominos Pizza.

Let him cook

Get ready for it

Surely this is at least in part due to the talent level at xAI but I really believe it’s at least partly explained by anti-wokeness measures

I hereby declare that I do not give Anthropic or Dario Amodei permission to use my posts or any content I have ever posted to train Claude or any AI models. This profile is private and confidential information. The violation of privacy can be punished by law (UCC 1-308 and the Rome Statute).

Some vibe-coding thoughts: I think the zero-coding-experience vibe coders miss how much of what impresses them when Claude produces what they perceive to be a fully functional app comes from the ready-built frameworks that enable the construction of such apps just by writing some boilerplate.

Vibe coding hasn’t been around long enough for vibe coders to learn about tech debt

Diffusion models are just ergodic parrots

This is what’s wrong with this app. The AI enthusiasts are complete snowflakes. They can’t even take a tiny smidge of a taste of raucous conversation.

Parent post reveals how many lines of code this takes. Try to guess and then see if you were right.

Sometimes I opine about how Bluesky and X are run because my professional job actually involves how to run a social media app and I used to work at Twitter so it’s on my mind a lot but I acknowledge that this is a very boring and navel-gazing topic which most people shouldn’t care about

they said, sir, pick a number. Okay. 203. Multiply by 7. Now multiply by 11. Now multiply by 13. What's the answer? I said 203,203. The same number twice. They said very good sir ok sir pick another number. 749. Multiply by 7. Now 11, now 13 again. I said 749,749. You can't believe this. Every time.

data visualization can be an informative tool for communicating quantitative information

Now that it’s been out for a month I’m curious to know: what great new drinks have you discovered using the Starbucks ChatGPT app? How has it impacted drink discoverability for you overall?

What is actually the current perspective on this among experts? It’s a common refrain (I’ve probably said it myself) that LLMs can only interpolate not extrapolate but when I really think about this I have a hard time understanding what it actually means. What’s D for an LLM?

Yeah the healthy state of affairs is that the New York Times is mad at you every day and you’re called to testify to Congress a few times a year to answer inane questions and the average non-NYT-reading non-C-SPAN-watching person barely thinks about you, but they hate that world more than anything.

“Agent” is a useful model for the oop-brained but when you reach functional enlightenment you discover that the self is an illusion and your “agent” is nothing but a composition of calls to the exact same function

I have listened to this all the way through multiple times and actually find it quite affecting lol

what kind of interesting is it's actually invented a new illusion where the lines appear the same length but are actually different

I would still bet an LLM doesn’t solve a Millennium Prize Problem.

Opus 4.7 to be clear

This does still happen though; that’s what’s so baffling

specifically, what I would like to know is 1. how did they decide whether it was successful? 2. did it produce the identical proof each time it was successful? 3. when it was unsuccessful, did it produce incorrect proofs? Did it ever "prove" the unit distance conjecture? Or did it just give up?

I was right to be wrong. Those who were right were not being reasonable.

I still believe it's a mistake to believe that the fact that LLM capability along certain dimensions seems to increase with scale implies that a sufficiently large LLM can do anything imaginable. Or that if an LLM can perform a task with difficulty D, it can do anything with difficulty ≤ D.

Great ratios here