The fact is that for basically any widely held political view, a huge share of the people who hold the view are going to be ignorant, intellectually sloppy, or otherwise badly flawed in their reasoning.
We need to do something that inflicts pain on nicer, more sympathetic Israelis in Tel Aviv and Haifa, something that makes them want to actually change course and meaningfully alter the situation.
migrations (e.g. replacing one service with a new one, or switching database engines, or whatever) are part and parcel of software engineering and are a skill that you should invest in and get good at, not avoid or treat as special one-offs.
The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!
The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!
I think three of us have total conviction about the scaling law. That that I think we do. I do think the exact architecture choices and data mixtures is where the the devils are in the details.
I'd rather celebrate people updating their priors than dunking on them for being late. Make it cool to change your mind when you realize the facts have changed!
But keep those methods you use to investigate things and monitor things very separate from the methods you use to generate reward which is something that AI companies including open AAI have held up as a principle especially in the case of avoiding putting training pressure on the chain of thought. So you might have monitors that read the agents chain of thought in order to alert you if something is going wrong somewhere but you don't train the agents with the outputs of that monitor.
judges and juries have begun to accept the argument that platform design is not covered by either of those, and companies can be punished for harmful features.
So we should also have the humility. As amazing as the LLMs are now, it could be that they eventually plateau. We haven't seen any evidence of it yet, and I think this is also why we're seeing this absolute gobsmacking levels of investment, because so far the scaling laws are true, and the more billions are poured in, the more intelligence comes out.
maybe performance could be part of a package where you try to take on one of those players. like, hey, look at how much more responsive our thing is than theirs. Might be a nice plus, but that's not going to be sufficient.
we find that the performance on held out tasks decreases dramatically. Whereas if we um just take out a random 20% of the data that's less diverse than the most diverse subset, the performance um only decreases a little bit. And so this suggests that actually having really diverse data plays an important role in enabling it to generalize to new tasks.
Learning fundamentally respecting the hardware you're talking about takes time, takes effort, sometimes takes some pain. That is just how our brain is.
I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.
These <think> and </think> tags are cosmetic with respect to reasoning ability. They do not make the model reason, and they are not required to achieve good reasoning performance.
Privately held businesses in the United States are collectively worth trillions of dollars, and demographically speaking, they have an aging set of owners who are seeking liquidity or diversification as they explore how to pass on what they've built.
And so having anything that's able to give you that green check mark that says even if this is going to be complicated to understand, even if it's going to be a pain, you at the very least know it is correct. Like every other field would kill for that, right?
All institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption.
some people think either uh frontier AI gets commoditized and we all enjoy the benefits, but there might be some risk because like it's the market's really competitive and cutthroat, or um things are safer because there's a big gap between the leader and the laggard, but that means that the leaders get fantastically wealthy. No, like you could just have a relatively big gap, but it's a public company ownership and it's widely distributed.
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
This took some special care, in particular avoiding any C++ standard library I/O functionality. Current frontier AI cannot handle this detail on their own.
This is not the case with many other technology driven industries where capability or advancements often tend to be longer held and a fast-follow model is harder.
And organizations have super high pain tolerance. But human-made enterprise codebases take years to get there. The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it. With agents and a team of 2 humans, you can get to that complexity within weeks.
With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late.
oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.
The bitter lesson is don't try to be smarter than the AI, okay? You think that you've got special knowledge. The humans bring special domain knowledge to this problem and we're going to teach it something to AI and it will be smarter. What we found was bigger is smarter. Always.
But, your 'calling' will never involve constant discomfort. If you are passionate about a political issue but you hate crowds, you do not have to go to protests.
there’s like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fearmongering because fearmongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with a thing.
Swift’s build infra is good enough for most things these days. codex knows how to run iOS apps and how to deal with the Simulator. No special stuff or MCPs needed.
It is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same task. For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art, basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas.
it doesn't matter how good the drink is if people think you've bought it for $8.95 it's not doing the job it's supposed to do which is to signal generosity to signal hospitality or to mark a special occasion
Because when you believe in something, when you become obsessed with something, you sacrifice yourself to it. And that sacrifice actually feels like pain and stress and doubt. Not fun.
changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario
Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)
I I really view myself as a classicist rather than as a contrarian. I go to what what the larger community of of thinkers about the mind have always thought.
The high value human tasks, like understanding the client's true pain points and deciding on priorities and trade-offs, would be easier with a smaller, proactive team.
And by doing this, removing this from being a programming problem for the programmer to deal with, to being a language problem for us language designers to deal with. And we're moving a vast amount of pain that would be imposed on a million people, instead to a vast amount of pain imposed on a small number of people to have to actually make this work.
You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you don't have what makes that language special. You have what all the other languages make special.
The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.
I recently interviewed Mike Huemer on his new Progressive Myths. To repeat, I consider it “the best book on wokeness.” You know you’re reading a special book by page 3
Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything, from music to art, to clothes. She gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table, and it becomes incredibly conformist, because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand and they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. To disagree with her is to be irrational.
What makes humans special though, is our curiosity. Even if AI’s cracked this, it’s us still asking them to go explore something. And one thing that I feel like AI’s haven’t cracked yet, is being naturally curious and coming up with interesting questions to understand the world and going and digging deeper about them.
In a rapidly growing organization, it's much more important to have a developer environment that "just works" out of the gate, with minimal setup pain for new engineers.
The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.
I suspect, considering the process retrospect, a great deal of that pain can be avoided by committing to migrating directly to an SQL system the moment you need an index.
Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
Friedman’s focus on the money supply has not held up, as Samuelson suggested, but the alternative Keynesian macro models recommended by Samuelson in the same interview have not done better and they were not outperforming simple random walk models of predicting the macroeconomic future.
But power is ultimately held by those with the will to power. That will does not grow in decoupled idea labs, and would immediately corrupt them if it did.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
One of the best thrillers of the 1990s. I re-read this book in honor of Halloween this year (but didn't finish until November) and was pleased to find that it held up.
If you're curious how Google built it's culture and the processes thanks to their extremely data & engineering driven nature, this is a great book. What held it back was being ~100 pages too long and Bock didn't always understand where what they did only fit at a $100Bn+, mega-profitable company. Still, the insights on the studies on their 50,000+ employees is well worth the read since so few of us can get similar statistical significance to apply to our teams.
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now.
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