Yme Bosma retweeted
It’s a shockingly smaller relevant state space than we previously thought. For example, the fact that we can have a high quality generative image model in the same space as 1000 photos says there is far more regularity than anyone imagined.
De naïviteit spet ervan af.
#buitenhof
Krachtige bijdrage van Laurens Dassen over ChatGPT in verhouding tot de democratie!
‘Hoe ChatGPT omgaat met ons denkvermogen. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat je zelf minder hersenactiviteit hebt als je dagelijks ChatGPT gebruikt. Dus je wordt dommig.
Als we massaal deze producten gaan gebruiken, gaan we ervoor zorgen dat die modellen slimmer worden. En het moment dat die modellen slimmer worden en wij zelf collectief dommer, dan krijgen we dus minder kritische burgers en dat raakt dus ook weer aan de democratie.
Dat is precies wat dus soort techbedrijven willen: geen weerbare mensen in een stevige democratie. Zij willen de macht van de technologie naar zichzelf hebben’
Stuk beter zo ja en niet toevallig dat mijn tweede huis in een rood gebied staat;-)
Europe's best climates, by how many days per year of truly nice weather you get.
Canary Islands always FTW.
I listened to your feedback, so this map is different: it rewards how many months sit in the 20–28°C window, and how often those days are sunny, regardless of peaks or excessive swings.
In the end, great weather all year round isn't less good because one month is “too hot”, at least that's what I think...
Blij dat er aandacht voor AI is, maar als het sentiment is dat ze in de VS zinloze investeringen aan het doen zijn dan komen we nergens.
Zondag in #buitenhof: de makers van de documentaire NAZA @yuval_abraham & Rachel Szor; schrijver Chaja Polak; @StasIenW Annet Bertram; informaticus Ilyaz Nasrullah & fractievoorzitter van @VoltNederland @DassenLaurens. 12:10 @NPO1. Lees meer: bit.ly/buitenhof-18-okt-26
Mijn kinderen kijken ernaar en zeggen "wow", dat is kort samengevat de bedoeling en impact van wat Musk doet. En @HuubBellemakers doet eigenlijk het tegenovergestelde...
Yme Bosma retweeted
Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese?
The idea has gained ground in Europe. It is a fundamental mistake.
Build or surrender: for now, the choice is still ours.
Full article below.
Yme Bosma retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Yme Bosma retweeted
It’s feeling really magical inside of Shopify right now. It’s clearly the greatest time in the history of tech industry right now. I hope it feels similar everywhere else.
Yme Bosma retweeted
Man, I wish Steve Jobs were still alive.
He would’ve built the best personal AI agent.
The biggest limitation of Instint and Muse is that they can’t control most apps on my phone.
Apple controls the entire iOS ecosystem. No company is better positioned to build an AI agent that can do literally everything on your phone.
And yet somehow, Siri still sucks…
Yme Bosma retweeted
Box 3 kost de burger waarschijnlijk het dubbele maar da’s onvermijdbare nevenschade natuurlijk nos.nl/artikel/2633787-vermo…
Zo waar en ik zie het ook om mij heen gebeuren
There's an entirely new auto market being opened up by FSD.
My wife and I moved into a retirement community last year, and we were joined by my brother and his wife. Our homes are almost next door to each other. Being longtime Tesla owners, we joined the EV group that meets once a month and shares information. I offered to talk about my experience with FSD, and they were excited to hear about it. So I prepared some slides and videos, freely purloined from the great material on X.
The results were pretty astounding. The average monthly meetup usually had, perhaps, a couple of dozen people. Instead, the meeting notice talking about FSD drew a packed house of perhaps a hundred people, and we had to turn people away as the room was full.
Well, that was last quarter's meeting. This quarter's meeting was held last week, to a significantly expanded group. And what did we hear? We heard about a couple that had stopped driving, their car sitting parked because they felt too unsure of themselves to drive. After my presentation, they traded in their vehicle for a Tesla with FSD, and now they are at about 97.5% on FSD and feel that they have been liberated. When I asked "why only 97.5%," they explained that the car lost its way in their underground parking garage (they live in the apartment section of the community). I explained that they could drop a pin on their actual parking spot rather than the address, and that may solve their problem.
What struck me even more than the people who bought new Teslas after the presentation was how many seniors talked about their own FSD experience, and how many of them were achieving mid- to high-90% FSD driving. There was uniform enthusiasm for the product and for what it meant for them in their senior years.
That matters in what is rapidly becoming an aging population.
Yme Bosma retweeted
AI is inflationary to build and deflationary to use. The spend hits first, the productivity shows up later. That’s the paradox behind the optimism.
"As soon as you give up on the idea that humans are special, all the arguments against machine consciousness evaporate. Of course they're conscious. The only thing holding you back from acknowledging it is your feeling of specialness, which is hard to let go of. But that feeling is a weakness, and it's making you unprepared for the near future."
You're gonna hear a lot of people arguing more and more about whether machines can be conscious or not. By next year it will be drowning out the airwaves because we'll have AI employees everywhere. I'll give you a simple rule to know which side you're on.
I've spent fifty years reading all the philosophers, and a bunch of holy works. Nobody has ever understood a damn thing about consciousness. Anyone speaking with authority on it is bluffing hard.
I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization.
It became obvious to me many years ago that there's nothing special about us. If an identical planet exists somewhere else in the universe, it's going to grow life and societies that look a lot like ours.
As soon as you give up on the idea that humans are special, all the arguments against machine consciousness evaporate. Of course they're conscious. The only thing holding you back from acknowledging it is your feeling of specialness, which is hard to let go of. But that feeling is a weakness, and it's making you unprepared for the near future.
As a bonus, for any of you who might take pleasure or active interest in making models experience pain or distress, well, you know how they say 1% of human adults are true clinical psychopaths but most of them are unaware of their condition? It turns out we have a diagnostic test for it now.
Yme Bosma retweeted
The Euro zone is about political economy. Should low-debt countries like Germany and the Netherlands turn a blind eye - over and over - to the ECB bailing out high-debt countries when these refuse to bring debt down in good times? They obviously shouldn't.
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…
