TechTakes

Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Let's dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, it's supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to "What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?"

That seems suspiciously soon, but my impression is based on nothing but vibes — a sense that companies are still buying in.

Write it! The time is right

The active hostility from outside the tech world is going to make this one interesting, since unlike crypto this one seems to have a lot of legitimate energy behind it in the industry even as it becomes increasingly apparent that even if the technical capability was there (e.g. the bullshit problems could be solved by throwing enough compute and data at the existing paradigm, which looks increasingly unlikely) there's no way to do it profitably given the massive costs of training and using these models.

I wonder if we're going to see any attempts to optimize existing models for the orgs that have already integrated them in the same way that caching a web page or indexing a database can increase performance without doing a whole rebuild. Nvidia won't be happy to see the market for GPUs fall off, but OpenAI might have enough users of their existing models that they can keep operating even while dramatically cutting down on new training runs? Does that even make sense, or am I showing my ignorance here?

I'm not really in on distros and related drama (strong "just fucking use Debian stable" camp), why did Red Hat get told to fuck off from the kernel?

I don't understand why people take him at face value when he claims he's always been a Democrat up until now. He's historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.

Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.

Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.

Democrat?? AH's previous hit was the one where they enthusiastically endorsed literally the co-author of the original Fascist manifesto

and a16z does get Yarvin in to dispense wisdom and insight

Apparently the "startup ecosystem" matters more than the ecosystem of, you know, actual living things.

These people are just amazingly fucking evil.

Typing from phone, please excuse lack of citations. Academic output in various parts of ML research have increasingly come from China and Chinese researchers over the past decade. There’s multiple inputs to this - funding, how strong a specific school/research centre is, etc, but it’s been ramping up. Pretty sure part of this is one of the fuel sources in keeping the pro-hegemonist US argument popular and going lately (also part of where the “we should before they do” comes from I guess)

I’ve seen some mentions of recent legislation direction about LLM usage but I’m not fully up to scratch on what it is, haven’t had the time to read up

I am overall very uninformed about the chinese thechnological day-to-day, but here's two interesting facts:

They set some pretty draconian rules early on about where the buck stops if your LLM starts spewing false information or (god forbid) goes against party orthodoxy so I'm assuming if independent research is happening It doesn't appear much in the form of public endpoints that anyone might use.

A few weeks ago I saw a report about chinese medical researchers trying use AI agents(?) to set up a virtual hospital in order to maybe eventually have some sort of a virtual patient entity that a medical student could work with somehow, and look how many thousands of virtual patients our handful of virtual doctors are healing daily, isn't it awesome folks. Other than the rampant startupiness of it all, what struck me was that they said they had chatgpt-3.5 set up up the doctor/patient/nurse agents, i.e. they used the free version.

So, who knows? If they are all-in in AGI behind the scenes they don't seem to be making a big fuss about it.

jumping off a roof with an umbrella for a parachute feels tractable

For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman

Women of the world: um, about that

So that’s what our kids will look like once society rebuilds after global thermonuclear war!!!

Others: unslanted solar panels at ground level in shade under other solar panels, 90-degree water steps (plural), magical mystery staircases and escalator tubes, picture glass that reflects anything it wants to instead of what may actually be in the reflected light path, a whole Background Full Of Ill-Defined Background People because I guess the training set imagery was input at lower pixel density(??), and on stage left we have a group in conversation walking and talking also right on the edge of nowhere in front of them

And that’s all I picked up in about 30-40s of looking

Imagine being the kind of person who thinks this shit is good

But just focus on the vibes. This diverse group of young mutants getting an education in the overgrown ruins of this university.

Not sure how it ties into robo-feyman at all but the vibes