One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.
The concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity are legitimate, but we’re risking talking America, the global AI leader, into self-inflicted obsolescence and the obscurity of bureaucracy.
In practice, Hochman's hire is another nauseating sign that the Trump administration is destroying the bureaucracy in favor of some corrupt, neo-royalist husk of an apparatus that mostly posts memes and occasionally deploys the 82nd Airborne to extract rents.
Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.
The difference is mostly the delay, which stems not necessarily from the regulation itself, but from the incentives in the machinery that administers it.
Use red and amber lights in the evening . Bluelight is bad for sleep. You can get blue light blocking apps (f.lux), glasses and also turn red mode on your phone.
If a bed is too deep, one has to use a very coarse grind. The result in the cup may or may not be good enough, but the extraction level will be low, which is inefficient, in the sense of wasting coffee material.
I'm getting into screen-time blocking. I use the app Opal on a recommendation from Lucas Gelfond. It won't let me scroll Twitter, Substack, or Instagram for 80% of the day. Gmail is also blocked from 11pm to 8am.
Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.
But Google has never had that DNA of like, "This is a product we should sell." The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There's a lot of bureaucracy here.
They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
I think there’s an interesting thought experiment here that, we’ve been spending a lot of compute in the pre-training to acquire general common sense, but that seems brute force and inefficient. What you want is a system that can learn like an open book exam.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.