"kaleidoscopic madness of noncomprehension". Hilarious image. Thank you for this. Not the OP but this actually describes my state sometimes. Darkly, I think the problem is I put too much faith in others.
I try to be open-minded to other parenting techniques... but I just don't have the brain power to internalize how any remotely self-aware human let's a 5 year old use tik tok. Poor kid.
Hard to believe numbers. I don't mean that as a critique, but literally I am so impressed. Even if the model is a few percent lower for performance but is 80+% cheaper than competitors and is a US company hosted on US based hyperscaler clouds this is kind of a no brainer. Hard for most businesses to justify otherwise.
DeepSeek v4 Pro & MiMo v2.5 Pro (Opus 4.6 quality models for code) are insanely cheap for agent-driven work due to their super low cached-input prices ($0.0036/mtok) [0]. For Luna, the cached-input price drop isn't disclosed in TFA, but the pricing page puts it at $0.02/mtok, & that's 5x more expensive.
[0] I am constantly surprised how much work pay-as-you-go with DeepSeek / MiMo will get done. I've barely crossed $2 each in a month of use (~200m tokens).
Absolutely. Although DeepSeek started announcing "Peak valley" pricing which started making me nervous. I have spent $50 usd in July on deepseek and for that much spend I got SO MUCH mileage.
I feel perfectly content in using pay as you go pricing with deepseek. On the other hand, although Anthropic's models used to be my bread and butter for personal work, they are simply too expensive to reach for these days.
our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.
People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".
“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”
There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.
Preach. I think I left a nearly identical comment yesterday in another thread. "well, the other companies do it too so they're not that bad" is absurdity. "that got shit on my couch, but he didn't shit in my mouth so he's not really that bad" just seems so misguided.
Not the direct person you asked, but my answer would be alignment, interpretability, and policymaking. Perhaps improving existing usage? Helping grandma create reminders doesn't require advancing the AI state-of-the-art.
They are state of the art at all 3! As are other labs. Of all the labs they seem to take alignment and interpretability the most seriously to the point where they are hampering their own revenue in service of trying to not cause problems while also being in an incredibly competitive space.
All AI companies are trying to do all of what you’re saying. The issue is you can’t do that for long without a frontier system. Or you become a completely different, far less profitable company.
Implied in my answer was "and not creating ever stronger AIs", which unfortunately the big 3 labs are failing at. And they might be hampering their own revenue by doing the rest, but they also know that rocking the boat too hard is even more dangerous for their revenue. I wouldn't call it selfless.
No it’s not selfless, but I can’t imagine a more shareholder minded CEO would not have done a slow rollout of mythos. The point is: creating ever stronger AI systems is what these companies do, it is integral to what they even are. If you think that’s bad, even if all frontier labs agreed with you, you’re in a horrible game theoretic position. Any player can gain an enormous advantage by breaking the agreement. Not to mention Xi would be absolutely thrilled; now China can take over the AI race, become the load bearing infrastructure of humanity. We live in a complex world where simple childlike ideas like “well why don’t we just stop developing AI” actually are more damaging than keeping things going.
You're right that shareholder mindset cannot fix this problem, but that's what policy and agreements are for. And leaders can be convinced that AI is a direct risk to their own citizens too. If everyone else agrees to stop, you have less reason to continue when this action is putting yourself at risk.
And note how your argument can also be used against any non-prolifreration agreements, which are demonstrably possible.
“Alignment” as a goal always ignores the “with what set of interests”, because there is an attempt to maintain ambiguity for different audiences (particularly, users, and non-users who seem themselves as the arbiter of broad social norms) to read in their own interests, when the actual answer is always the interests of the actor pursuing “alignment”.
Which value system to align to is absolutely the right question both rhetorically and otherwise. These models have a fairly western bias due to the domain of the training data.
But also, these models are capable of adjusting their value system depending on the user. Not saying that’s what’s being done but at a technical level that’s fairly straightforward, though not obviously better or with less problems.
No matter what human set of interests you consider important, you'll need alignment research to have any idea on how to instill it. Otherwise you're overwhelmingly likely to get an AI with a set of interests that's totally alien to what any human would ever want.
I think at this point the "instilling" part is not nearly as challenging and thorny as "what values should we instill"; that part is hard to imagine going away as it feels pretty fundamental to humanity that wars have been fought over.
Probably MistralAI or any of the Chinese companies that aren't throwing billions down the drain while American society lacks healthcare, childcare, and good wages.
American society has higher wages than almost any other developed nation [1], so it's objectively incorrect to say the US doesn't have good wages. It chooses to make you pay for private childcare and healthcare, both of which are high-quality but stupid expensive. It's a tradeoff like anything else a nation/society creates and prioritizes.
No idea how that connects to the idea that Mistral or DeepSeek are somehow the "good guys" though?
I like how you use average and not median, also while completely ignoring how bad income inequality is (worse than the gilded age ffs) or that the American elites stole $50 trillion from the bottom 90% over the last few decades:
I'm glad you mention the "trade off" where it's elites trading off the lives of American workers for money. Makes it quite apparent where you sit on the table of equality.
You want Anthropic to fund your healthcare or something? Also, have you seen the impact of these models on healthcare? Also most of our GDP growth this year is from AI buildouts, would you rather that be negative?
And not even considering: Chinese AI companies are the good guys???
It's a five horse race between Alphabet, Meta, xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Alphabet dropped "don't be evil"; Meta's CEO called their own users "dumb fucks" for trusting him and also clearly thinks "super-intelligence" is just a buzzword given how he tries to sell it; xAI's model called itself "Mecha Hitler"; and OpenAI's CEO was temporarily fired by the board for a lack of candor.
It's very easy to be "the good guys" with this competition.
But it doesn't make you the good guy, it makes you the best of a bad bunch. The least bad. Dario gets a boner every time he talks about taking your job.
I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like:
engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
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