This is just a more asinine version of Great Man Theory, but in this case the great men are some very confident futurist dudes writing comments on the internet.
> some very confident futurist dudes writing comments on the internet
What an odd take, why would I suggest that? I meant that people who have the means to do meaningful work, especially high impact work, should do so - generally that'd mean research or in the case of IT, writing good software.
> Great Man Theory
You can see the sibling comment, would you not agree that there's some software and research out there that's very useful to humanity as a whole? Where I and the other critical commenter seem to disagree is that I don't expect another Einstein, but still acknowledge that some people will just achieve much more than others due to a variety of factors.
For example, it's hard to take risks when you're struggling to pay bills due to the economy being in a bad state, and it's hard to build great things when you're in a locale where nobody cares for whatever it may be. It's also hard to make much of an impact, where disproportionate amount of time goes fighting against illness that life has inflicted upon you.
It doesn't make everyone else useless (like me paying my taxes and working on relatively boring software is still good, just low impact), just that those who have the means to do more, should!
What a weird perspective. Other people have no particular obligation to spend their lives working on things that align with your narrow and subjective opinion on what benefits humanity.
> Other people have no particular obligation to spend their lives working on things that align with your narrow and subjective opinion on what benefits humanity.
The ones who care about AI research and developing software for that kinda stuff, should do that. The ones who can contribute to medicine, various engineering disciplines, or anything else that benefits humanity should do that too. The ones who'd rather squander their lives away when good things that'd benefit others are within reach (regardless of which discipline that is in, AI being just one of many)... I mean sure they can do that but maybe shouldn't do that.
I don't think the readings of anything I've said here are at all charitable so I'm done engaging in this discussion.
I’ve also found that fast cheap models are more sustainable because they make it easier to keep technical debt under control. Partially because I’m keeping sustained attention in one place. And partially because small fast models with low reasoning don’t seem to love technical debt either and will (unintentionally) start to give you negative feedback signals when you’re letting things get messy.
Sounds like a culture problem. I’ve never had a team I lead not give a shit. Even if the project is dumb (some projects are dumb), there’s enough pride in competence and desire not to dump garbage on the people around you to ensure they at least want to try.
Because it’s a bad faith argument that presupposes integrating someone else’s work into your algorithm is equivalent to me reading a book.
Your rule would be the right way to do all this. You could even have a mechanical royalty that applies by default where you can train on anything that hasn’t set rules and a preset rate.
"It's perfectly OK for a police officer to observe a street corner, see crime happening, and go take action, therefore, building a complete, panopticon surveillance system that watches all street corners simultaneously and deploys police to take action, is perfectly OK, too, since that is exactly the same thing."
I haven't seen this articulation before, and I'm going to remember this one!
In return, I'll share my own reasoning:
Human Life is finite, and there is a real opportunity cost to learning (say) to copy Picasso's style -- you could've been doing something else in that same Time.
However, if you're training a model on the entire career output of dozens of artists, it only needs more electricity + GPUs to do this.
And, transposing this back to the Human realm, there's no way one person can put in that kind of wide effort to learn how to copy dozens of artists' styles in one lifetime.
I really like the way you put it too -- it's a bit more succinct.
The quantity of an action can have a qualitative difference. I wish I didn’t haven’t to explain that to so many people everytime a new technology is created.
I don't know if it's even OK for a cop to just randomly watch a random street corner without a specific reason to do so. If a cop was following a given person around all day every day without probable cause would this not be considered harassment? If we view the Flock Camera network as a single system is this not harassment?
Just to add context and not to comment on rightness, that was one of the early core purposes of policing--to ensure that a people in a particular public space (where either the people or the space are particularly vulnerable) are free from unwanted disturbance. Here is that exact concept shown in a painting from 172 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_(Jules_Breton).
Yes. It’s called the ELIZA Effect. It’s fascinating, and arguably the most dangerous thing about these models given how many people it seems to affect.
Similar efforts never hit critical mass.
I have thoughts on what could work but that’s a longer topic for another day.
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