Envy and resentment inevitably lead to misery and nihilism.
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
Of course the flying Tesla Roadster is a gimmick but that sort of misses the point, the tech flex behind it isn't.
Tesla's bulk business is about advanced technology from EV to self drive, but decided to create the most ridiculous manual drive supercar. Supercars are a gimmick,almost by definition, based on how wild can you make them.
The gimmick that can make the car literally fly, briefly, can make it corner like no other supercar and accelerate, literally like a dragster on a test track. It's got nothing to do with flying continuously, but having a car that will outperform every Lambo, Ferrari or McLaren with technology that they cannot replicate because it requires experience from space launches and computation that they don't have now nor will in future.
So Porsche, Bugatti, Aston Martin just became legacy prestige brands, like Rolex, Richard Mille or Patek Philippe. These cars celebrate the bygone age and the baroque, physical complexity of the internal combustion engine just as mechanical watches do for non digital, complex time-keeping mechanisms. But hey won't be faster anymore than a mechanical watch keeps better time than a Casio. They are now, de facto, mobile jewelry and no longer supercars with superlative performance. And this affects their ability to market the bulk business of mainstream European internal combustion engine cars. It's the end of an era of industrial era manufacturing.
I hate to be the one to burst the Tesla bubble today, but the spectacular “flight” we witnessed at the Roadster reveal needs a little context. The car is carrying around 250kg of compressed air, plus the weight of the tanks, valves and thrusters needed to contain and release it.
Based on the published figures, that gives it roughly 1.5–2 seconds of maximum thrust before the system needs to be refilled.
In short, it's a gimmick.
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
Honestly, Elon Musk is the only pioneer left who makes you truly inspired & amazed by innovation. Landing rockets backwards, driving cars upside down...it feels like our great American pioneer spirit went dormant since the Apollo missions, and we've felt stuck in time, but he's reawakened it...and for the first time in decades people are actually asking "what else is possible?" instead of this gloomy malaise of stagnation and planned obsolescence. Just the dumbest thing imaginable to bet against this guy.
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
The consistent advice is, "don't hire big tech execs"
The fundamental problem is that they've been RL'ed by an environment in which success is measured by headcount. They will make your company bloated and ineffective because in their experience, that's what success looks like
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
you know how people used to say the internet is an inherently democratizing technology?
i think AI is an inherently autocratizing technology. it favors concentration of power and capital, it enables the personalization of mass surveillance, it makes dictatorships more stable
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
SI labs will never solve alignment.
they’re trying to solve a philosophical and theological problem as an engineering one.
they’ve assembled some of the greatest engineers on the planet, but put socially dysfunctional nerds with an incredibly shallow understanding of human nature in charge of defining what superintelligence should value.
humanity has spent thousands of years trying to align humans and always failed, we can’t even agree on what is good and now we expect a handful of engineers to solve the same problem for superintelligence? lmao, the hubris
you can’t align something with humanity if you don’t understand humanity in the first place.
at this point, you’re probably better off developing ASI and asking it how to solve alignment.
Vertigo
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.
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
This is what real software security thinking looks like. Not moral platitudes or meeting with religious leaders.
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
Satya is right. The way to make SI safe is not to train it with a sense of self, its own moral philosophy, and permission to act as a conscientious objector. That’s the “alignment” approach and it magnifies the control problem.
The engineering approach that Satya describes is different: separate the supply of intelligence from authority over it. Surround non-deterministic models with deterministic controls, observability, privilege limits, logging, and the ability to always contain or shut them down. Treat models/agents like powerful insider risks, not moral patients whose psychological wellbeing is at stake.
As Satya points out, the most trustworthy system is the one that lets us trust the model the least — not the one that encourages the model to develop independent agency and grievances. Engineering safety is not the same thing as “alignment.”
/facepalm
Αφού ο υπουργός Εξωτερικών των ΗΠΑ, Μάρκο Ρούμπιο, χαρακτηρίζει «αδιανόητο» το ενδεχόμενο ελληνοτουρκικής σύγκρουσης και δηλώνει ότι οι Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες δεν θα επέτρεπαν ποτέ να συμβεί κάτι τέτοιο, γιατί η ελληνική κυβέρνηση προχωρά σε νέα συμφωνία αγοράς αμερικανικών οπλικών συστημάτων ύψους 4 δισεκατομμυρίων δολαρίων;
#diamantopoulou
Wait. He’s onto something here.
Palmer Luckey reveals the startup he'd build today: oxytocin doping to end divorce
"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."
"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."
"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."
"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now, and if you do that, maybe you won't die alone."
"It's pure biology. It's used for women who don't bond with their kids, and now for women who don't bond with their husbands. It's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with pair bonding."
"The cool thing is it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs, it doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually unburdens you from a chemical dependency."
48?
SECRETARY RUBIO: We take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.
They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here – and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it.
Nikos Moraitakis retweeted
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on AI model distillation:
“That’s called competition. You’re allowed to test somebody else’s products all you want.”
Plausible
I’ve made this point multiple times over the last 18 months but I’ll do it again now.
The game-theory optimal approach for the labs is to use safety as an excuse to not make frontier capabilities widely available and to instead go up the stack with vertical-specific incumbent partners via a whitelist program in return for rev share.
It’s so obvious and it solves multiple problems at once including distillation, enterprise inertia, deflation of TAM and safety concerns.
You co-opt the incumbents brand and distribution. You help them gut their employee base if desired or just keep them on if you don’t want bad PR and let them jump from 10-20% market share to 90%+ as they undercut everyone given better model access.
And every competitor who isn’t whitelisted dies.
Watch what kind of panic this drives.
Game theory 101.