But I think this impulse to gild the lily and attribute the rise of Hitler to deep intellectual trends is an example of a pretty common fallacy of assuming that an incredibly important world event must have incredibly important roots.
One of the most important for me is just how incredibly complex the human mind is, and how hard the task is of understanding & treating the nearly infinite ways it can stumble/faulter.
And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now, today, and I've done it a lot of times over.
open models are still incredibly useful, but fill a long-tail ecosystem relative to the closed counterparts that have monopoly ownership stakes in the most valuable areas like knowledge work collaboration, drug discovery, SWE, etc.
if you look at the um the economics of nuclear it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants right the uranium is very cheap right the the fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply?
I'm so incredibly tired of seeing low-effort AI-designed web pages. I basically bounce off any new product immediately when I see it (never get a chance to judge the product itself). Lots of thin lines, glowy styles, inconsistent fonts, lots of monospace.
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
Um, and to give you an example of a a a use of a coding agent that works extremely well is you can ask today's models to translate software from one computer language to another very effectively because in that case you actually have a incredibly detailed specification.
And often you can actually make the model work better and succeed at that kind of problem by not just adjusting the model parameters which is hard to do from the outside but from you know creating better guidelines for the model you know writing skills for the model to know how to use different tools that would be incredibly useful for solving this particular class of problem.
Yeah, I mean I think it's really having incredibly good taste in what you ask your agents to work on, right? That is the the crux of you know from my background uh a research problem. You know, a researcher can have all the tools and all the techniques, but often most of the battle is what problem are you gonna spend your time on?
the first is talent density was incredibly important. That was the the core thing to bet on and um, like talent density is something that compounds naturally. Like the more talented people you have the more of the most most talented people want to join you.
I truly believe these these models are already just incredibly powerful. Like they should they should be so powerful to fuel, you know, um many many points of expansion of GDP growth and I think it's like up to smart people with vision and ambition to make all that happen.
But great airplanes are incredibly integrated and everything affects everything else. uh the the best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, of aerodynamics, of structures, of all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it.
for us design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship.
And so so I think the the ASIC margins are are incredibly good from what I can tell and and they believe it. They believe it so too. And so they're they're quite proud of their their incredible ASIC margins.
I mean funnily enough I mean spending time stuck is incredibly important. Um and and I sort of you know, I that used to just be annoying. Now it seems like oh, this is actually um uh uh maybe even the most important part of the whole process.
Ideas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.
The problem with language models is they're incredibly gullible by design. Like, language models do exactly what you tell them to do, and they will believe almost anything that you say to them.
one of the magic tricks about these things is that they they're incredibly consistent. If you've got a code base with a bunch of patterns in, they will follow those patterns almost to a T.
So, I feel we, as a society, we need some catching up to do in terms of understanding that AI is incredibly powerful, but it's not always right. It's not, it's not all-powerful, you know?
I'm with the markets here: I believe in the output gap. The structural slowdown of the Chinese economy is an incredibly consensus view, and I believe in it too.
Including things like universal basic provision or something like that where a lot of the increased productivity gets shared out and distributed to society and maybe in the form of services and other things where if you want more than that, you still go and get some incredibly rare skills and things like that and make yourself unique. But there's a basic provision that is provided.
I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.
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.