>Even if they're a near perfect tool, we are still the interface between them and our lived experience.

Until they are embedded into automatons that can interact with the world.

(To be clear, I'm both on board with this, and I think it's the natural progression. Currently they are bounded by their training set, but interaction with the world is the imperative for theory -> test -> analysis -> update that is essential for growth and creativity.)

they're still bounded by training data and how it relates to the real world.

Yes and no. They can extrapolate and build upon the training data, as was the case with the last dozens of math proofs

Yes, but the point being for the LLM to be useful to us it has to do something relevant for us and we have to define what is relevant. Even if you view them as fully human level or beyond (in terms of agency) there's still some purpose that we have to help provide them with.

To put it differently, if you have some idealized model in front of you that can do anything a team of humans can do, what do you say to it? It's still just a model that takes an input and provides an output.

I don't understand. You will ask it for something you want, and instead of needing to pay a the team of people with expertise, it will just do it for you.

Someone will still need to ask for something (or maybe it will just run autonomously making things it thinks we'll like) but it won't require any expertise in the field.

I can’t help but believe that reality will keep the interactions more useful when coming from a person with expertise in the field, e At least for technical questions.

For things like sickness, old age and death, generally the lacks are not knowledge but the consistent will of the group. Like global warming, there is no real profound knowledge gap except how to get everyone to agree to mitigating the carbon burn. Perhaps it is likely LLMs would be able to persuade the group to stop burning the carbon before it’s [more] uncomfortable, but the small group of people committed to accelerating the carbon burn can also pay for LLM persuasiveness.

Global Warming does have a knowledge gap of sorts. Yes there is a viable solution to Global Warming, drastically cut back carbon and methane emissions. Where the knowledge gap is: drastically cut back on carbon and methane emissions, whilst maintaining or even improving quality of life in developed countries, having no economic issues, maintain industry, and keep developing countries developing. That is the hard part.

There might be a few industries where a technical fix is needed, but having to replace all our infrastructure is always a huge decades long win for the economy. Solar and batteries are made from abundant materials and cheaper than anything else, and almost all the sticky technical issues have good solutions with large amounts of cheap energy. Fuck we could desalinate and pump sea water back onto Greenland and Antarctic but instead we are arguing that windmills cause cancer or whatever the fuck the oil companies are paying morons to be persuaded by. Before the morons took over in the US, banks and insurance companies were salivating to fund electrification and selling 5 billion electric vehicles. The leadership there apparently has the moral fiber of a petty crook instead of a vanquishing hero, so they are ditching a lot of that, but none of these are prima facie cases where GenAI / LLM will help, unless you think "everyone having a personal physics tutor" will transform the world the way my friends and I thought "everyone being able to chat with a physicist" would transform the world 35 years ago.

Of course they can't just talk to themselves and improve the knowledge of the world. They are just stochastics parrots that give you an average answer.

LLMs giving you something novel would be like if you let a model play chess against itself and become the best player in the world this way. Totally impossible.

/sacrasm

You develop a set of heuristics for skimming it in the same way you do with code.

Big wrapping operations like sums, integrals, and matrices, then what's nearby them, give you a very good idea of where things are going context wise.

FWIW I quite liked it but I'm from the RF world so maybe I'm biased.

It's a 4th power because you're doing the inverse square law twice, once for the outbound pulse and once for the reflection.

8B is still three orders smaller than current frontier though

The anti counterfeit strategy is that the volumes here aren't worth it for someone to clone, even if the board and code are dead simple.

These niche hobby products are usually reasonably safe because they rely on community network effects, becoming the darling of a random subreddit or discord group and people aren't going to save $20 to get some device of dubious origin.

I fear you may overestimate the median benefit of government oversight.

I fear you underestimate the malice of the average tech company

This is only true for experiments funded by the government. In this case the experiment was funded solely by Google.

IRB approval is required for human subject research funded by private parties, too; not just government. But only really in the medical field.

>But only really in the medical field.

Looking it up, the exception where it is required is specifically for clinical investigations regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Does this apply to Netflix, Amazon, Disneys, and many other streaming providers's "What to watch next? Recommended..." of sorts (or music/podcast streaming services)...

Routing traffic affects not only the drivers using Google Maps, but also everyone around them IN REALTIME.

Netflix personalized recommendations affect only the individual, not those around them who are not using Netflix.

Oh yes, good point! Stand corrected!

That's not what the parent is talking about. You're using the strawman of what appears to be occupancy zoning or something similar to argue that a techno fascists should have free reign to manipulate the mass movements of people within a city for their own purposes.

Generally you need to be pretty competent to get to the level of where these Google maps guys are.

To get to the competence level of a local traffic planner, you need to have stuck it out through a Civ E degree and maybe went through the motions at a firm for for 15 years before getting laid off and then wanting a "cruise control" job with the power you never would have achieved in private industry for the rest of your career.

You end up dealing with guys where you live or die based on the opinion of someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything new since 1991, and have no interest in breaking their "cruise control".

Still a strawmam somehow?

Yeah, it always strikes me when this crazy, obviously stupid stuff ends up "49 to 51" like either there are active forces fighting each other ending in an equilibrium, or the equilibrium is arising passively, everyone and their representatives are just randomly scribbling in the circles.