It never ceases to amaze me watching these tech bros breathlessly hyping the next revolutionary product for it to be a huge nothing burger. Like that’s it? You gave gpt an image to text input + and a text to speech app? Dawg, I’ve been watching Joe Biden & Trump play Fortnite for 5 years at this point, text to speech just doesn’t hit the same anymore.

I mean my god, at least some hardcore engineering went in to making the migraine inducing apple vision pro. If this is the best card in oai’s deck, I would be panicking as an investor.

Well, I suppose dating a chatbot taped to a fleshlight is exactly the sort of relationship these people deserve. Self-solving problem.

It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too

https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o

this model has lower latency, and they’ve priced it at half of the previous model’s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[…]

Yeah it’s totes more efficient, it’s not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers

I’ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with “bad” code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think that’s important given that software has been eating the world.

Couldn’t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?

if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.

ChatGPT-4-o-face

Talking about the demo and not those HN reactions (they suck): So we all in tech have collectively forgotten the whole ‘apple iphones didn’t actually work when they were being presented and it was all just theatre’ thing? Because I wouldn’t trust a slick tech demo like that at all. (I also want to know about all the edge cases where it fails and well, there is also the whole ‘what is this even for?’ thing). (And yes some HN people did voice these concerns).

E: also don’t these GPT things have a sort of token limit? After a while they just get stuck in ‘cannot accept more new data’ mode basically (which I assume is a limit so people don’t use up too much compute (I hate how we are making that a word now)), how would that work? (This is more about the robofuckers, who have also not learned anything from the previous gen of this shit when somebody turned the naughty cybersex function off).

there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (…)

Ofc it’s not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of “let’s move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks” then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!

You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?

lol this mcdonough guy’s great

@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren’t interested in that.

yes it’s a cynical power grab by the woke mob

and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other’s company

Libertarianism is the ideology of splitters (which is sort of ironic as that is what they accuse ‘the woke’ of being (which also gets combined with the oppression Olympics idea, ideas which are not only not compatible, but is a thing I have only see concern trolls use against things ‘ow you are protesting against the Gaza genocide? But you never said anything about the Darfuris in Sudan, which is a much worse genocide, much curious, I am very intelligent’) it is annoying)

E: note on a bit of language used which was a bit of a red flag to me.

I want people to know that the author of this blog post (another ex-contributor to the discussions) is not the only one who believes the process was corrupted[emph mine].

The language used here is quite interesting, corrupted vs coopted, or some other word, as corrupted has implications of a profane/divine sort of thinking (which fits nicely into my splitting link above. But it is probably just more like ‘government corruption’ than this divine/profane thing).

And the name of that George Washington? Albert Einstein!

this mcdonough dude’s a trip

this blog post before this

referencing how much he loves this blog post from another guy just kicked out for sealioning

I keep hearing this shit from creatively bankrupt folks and fash billionaires, because it’s very important to them that art and creativity isn’t for us — it’s an expensive relic of the past and a commodity that only they can afford. it’s fucking ghoulish, but that goes without saying with Sammy

what none of them seem to have an answer for is the obvious chicken and egg problem that their weird fucking conjecture leads to. if creativity isn’t possible, where in fuck did all the art come from? these assholes assert that modern artists just remix their inputs like a fucking generative AI, which is plainly false to anyone who knows artists or has even objectively evaluated generative AI outputs, but where in fuck did historical artists get their inputs from if we’re supposing that’s true? generative AI copies, but there’s nothing to copy from when there’s no original.

and that’s not meant to give a single inch to these shitheads and allow the fash idea that true art comes from some fantasy version of history either. modern artists do fucking fantastic creative work — when they’re not shackled by the capitalist systems that keep shitheads like Sammy boy buying expensive, unchallenging art pieces purely as a tax dodge

I’m starting to think that this Sam Altman guy just might be a giant asshole.

It’s hard to understand what Samuel Alternativeman hopes to accomplish by making such statements. Does he want everyone to give up on being creative and just defer to AI? Does he think that without a source of real creativity for training, his products have any value at all?

Is increasing the amount of long-term health risks code for showering even less?

Same Aella Same, but moon.

it’s clear that the moon was right and we have it coming

Ugh, this post has me tilted- if your utility function is

max sum log(spending on fun stuff at time t ) * p(alive_t) s.t. cash at time t = savings_{t-1}*r + work_t - spending_t,

etc.,

There’s no fucking way the optimal solution is to blow all your money now, because the disutility of living in poverty for decades is so high. It’s the same reason people pay for insurance, no one expects their house is going to burn down tomorrow, but protecting yourself against the risk is the 100% correct decision.

Idk, they are the Rationalist^{tm} so what the hell do I know.

rip aella girl. aella dead girl

This is another one for the “throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance” category.

jesus christ that post is so not even wrong it’s hard to know where to start

This is using-a-sheep’s-bladder-to-predict-earthquakes territory.

Do you suppose that an LLM can detect a witch?

If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing.

Yes, I agree, once debt is cancelled we shouldn’t let people go into debt and attending university should be free.

Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves.

But… wait…

I have a business idea for him. Small batch alcohol produced by harvesting ethanol produced by this bacteria found in Aella’s teeth scrapings. Call it Mutella 1140, the official alcohol shot of rationalist orgies.

oh wow re-colonizing your mouth with a bacteria that continuously produces an antibiotic is a bad idea? Who could have seen this coming???

“Whiteboards, whiteboards everywhere, yet not a thought to think!”

My man spent 10 paragraphs failing to describe the intended vibe of the event he’s organizing. This is what happens when you only read tweets and substacks, you completely lose the ability to describe the immaterial.

“cozy/spaciousness”

The Danes do not have a term for this, but if they did, it might be* hyggelig dimensioner*. A good name for an oversized couch at Ikea. Also, the Danes would not include “whiteboards everywhere” as part of cozy, warm, intellectual conversation, but hey.

From a comment thread:

Other ideas we chatted about having at LessOnline include maybe having some discussions about doing research inside and outside of academia, and also about learning from GlowFic writers how to write well collaboratively.

snerk

If the house doesn’t have a roof, don’t paint the walls.

i adore this line. because yeah, what i see the rest of the tech industry doing is either:

• scrambling to erect their own, faster, better, cheaper roofless house
• scrambling to sell furniture and utilities for the people who are definitely, inevitably going to move in
• or making a ton of bank by selling resources to the first two groups

without even stopping to ask: why would anyone want to live here?

I can’t imagine signing that - unless I was being paid a lot of money

(the tweet is here, can’t find a working nitter ritenao)

Hmm, a xitter link, I guess I’ll take a moment to open that in a private tab in case it’s passingly amusing…

To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—

OK, you have my attention now.

To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—

During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI employees, their friends, and adjacent entrepreneurs, which I have not previously spoken about publicly.

It is not my place to speak as to why Jan Leike and the superalignment team resigned. I have no idea why and cannot make any claims. However, I do believe my cultural observations of the SF AI scene are more broadly relevant to the AI industry.

I don’t think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women. They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers, with broader implications relevant to X-risk and AGI safety. I believe they are somewhat emblematic of broader problems: a coercive climate that normalizes recklessness and crossing boundaries, which we are seeing playing out more broadly in the industry today. Move fast and break things, applied to people.

There is nothing wrong imo with sex parties and heavy LSD use in theory, but combined with the shadow of 100B+ interest groups, leads to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen. The climate was like a fratty LSD version of 2008 Wall Street bankers, which bodes ill for AI safety.

Women are like canaries in the coal mine. They are often the first to realize that something has gone horribly wrong, and to smell the cultural carbon monoxide in the air. For many women, Silicon Valley can be like Westworld, where violence is pay-to-pay.

I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems. Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAI and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document. I have no history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink.

I am not writing this on the behalf of any interest group. Historically, much of OpenAI-adjacent shenanigans has been blamed on groups with weaker PR teams, like Effective Altruism and rationalists. I actually feel bad for the latter two groups for taking so many undeserved hits. There are good and bad apples in every faction. There are so many brilliant, kind, amazing people at OpenAI, and there are so many brilliant, kind, and amazing people in Anthropic/EA/Google/[insert whatever group]. I’m agnostic. My one loyalty is to the respect and dignity of human life.

I’m not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAI. I just observed the surrounding AI culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned. It’s likely these problems are not really on OpenAI but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley. I wish I could say more, but probably shouldn’t.

I will not pretend that my time among these circles didn’t do damage. I wish that 55% of my brain was not devoted to strategizing about the survival of me and of my friends. I would like to devote my brain completely and totally to AI research— finding the first principles of visual circuits, and collecting maximally activating images of CLIP SAEs to send to my collaborators for publication.