> Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".
> And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
For one thing, "interesting" and "novel" are not particularly the point of art. An infinite TikTok feed of AI slop is in some sense infinitely interesting and novel.
But also, those concepts are subjective. Pop music has a ton of evolution and innovation if you break it down. Sure, not every hit is doing something clever, but plenty of them are. You might not find those features to be interesting but it takes ingenuity to stand out in an era where the barrier to entry is so low.
> I’ve long felt that math was one of those things that everyone could agree is a useful and beneficial thing for humanity in general
Funny, I think it's a very widespread opinion to think of math as useless. In the US at least it's a major failure of the education system and STEM communicators.
> and it was one of the least divisive fields, where people from different parts of world, from different stations in life could participate, and very few points, especially today, caused any controversy (unlike just about every other subject).
There's plenty of controversy in mathematics. Controversy comes from the people, not the field of study.
> Funny, I think it's a very widespread opinion to think of math as useless. In the US at least it's a major failure of the education system and STEM communicators.
That is a US centric view, and it's curious how things came to be that way. European and Asian countries take mathematics more seriously.
Which is why I explicitly said "in the US at least."
That said, from my limited secondhand knowledge of global cultures re: mathematics, it seems to me that what other countries do better is appreciating the value of education in general, and for math that means applying math to acquire better-paying, more prestigious STEM jobs. I haven't seen a drastic difference in explaining pure mathematics or presenting it as having intrinsic value.
How is that working out for them? I am by no means an anti-intellectual and I do value knowledge for it's own sake. But Europeans in particular seem to be unable to translate their mathematics educations into any sort of practical economic growth.
"What worth is education if the workers it produces are not making the rich richer."
Education is about cultivating true richness of culture and mind. The economy is in service of a higher purpose - of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not the other way around.
I think the people in Europe tend to be happy with a chosen system with a more balanced and more steady life outside of work at the cost of less billionaires and GDP growth. And they invent plenty of things, they just, like Salk, don’t seek as obsessively to extract maximum profit from it all.
How useless? Terence Tao made MRIs faster. That's a real thing that STEM and non-STEM people will maybe have to interact with at some point in their lives. Sure, we can blame science communicators. Should we put a bunch of banner ads on everything so that people know that math and science is involved in every thing?
I know there is some controversy, I would say that the field of study also “causes” controversy in a sense if the disagreement has to do with the subject itself, that is true for any field. For example, set theory “caused” significant controversy in the early years of its development, yes it was people in disagreement and insulting one another, but the fundamental questions were from the subject matter itself.
Regarding widespread perception of math as useless, I guess I was thinking mainly of academic circles rather than the general public in that statement. Even while I hated math, I knew it wasn’t useless because my late father (who was a civil engineer) was very good at it, and he was adamant on teaching it to us. It didn’t work on me back then though lol.
As I was getting more interested in math while getting my degree in computer science, I realized much of my own issue with math earlier in life was because of the same thing just about everyone else that struggles with it has: the lack of any practical relevance in my own life because of how it’s generally taught. And the fact that many math teachers themselves don’t know the foundational/philosophical aspects of the subject, which would go a long way I think towards explaining that relevance if introduced in some pieces earlier on, rather than treating it like a rote memorization subject and being so focused on continual practice to develop heuristics with exercises that some students couldn’t care less about. Of course, that works for some people clearly, but it didn’t for me at the time and I’m of the opinion high schools should focus more on discrete math like set theory, and formal logic rather than calculus, which is of little relevance at that stage unless you’re also invested in studying physics. Sets and logic on the other hand imo are general enough right at the beginning to be relevant to just about everything people of just about any age are concerned with.
> I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
I think it's paradoxical to suggest Michelin-starred restaurants could be everywhere, given the whole point is the travel-worthiness i.e. a scarcity that justified effort.
That aside, to take the strongest form of the argument, I think even if every human being could get their ideal meal, no matter what it is, at any time and for free - and even if the cook in question is only doing it for social reasons - cooking would still be valued. It's the effort put in by a person which is scarce and precious. Even if people were immortal, that time in the present would still be valuable in itself.
> How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything?
Post-scarcity of material things won't sedate humans. Kindness is a thing wanted in and of itself, but more importantly, internal struggles and desires can't all be resolved through material gain.
> How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
The answer is apparently, pretty easily? By and large it seems the consensus is social media and digital content are exploiting a niche of providing a low-effort, highly-addictive pastime.
...no? Whatever value they got from inference they already did is still there? Of course the government still needs to worry about vendor lock-in, but they'd have to do that no matter what, and also general-purpose LLMs are relatively replaceable for most use cases.
Given the statements in their SEC filing, it's not outlandish to consider the possibility of a long-term plan to make Anthropic models a nationalized, public utility before they go bankrupt.
If GSA is already considering vendor lock-in as they establish new public services across multiple agencies, the natural move is to build them to eventually transition to a federally-owned and operated provider. Especially with how involved the U.S. government is in limiting capabilities Anthropic provides to consumers today.
If the company has a sustainable business model it will be profitable and hang around without jacking up prices. If not, you wasted time and money setting up the anthropic tool chain.
Except that work would be cheaper to set up and the cost would drop over time if they were using local llms. Every dollar paid to a 3rd party rental service is a dollar that is burned in the fireplace. We are paying more for the right to be stuck paying more forever, it's ridiculous.
Reviewers are also usually biased towards reviewing products that are good and/or interesting, and while that's also true of consumers, you'd expect reviewers to be more informed.
What you're describing is a language that can effectively take a high-level design doc (limited to a formal language representing a pseudo-English-subset) and compile to almost arbitrarily complex, formally verifiable systems. I say systems because you're also implying these could essentially orchestrate distributed systems.
Which, if that were really possible, would be pretty good evidence of AGI. Or, at least, the end of 6-7 figure software engineer salaries. Conversely, I think it's a pipe dream. Writing a compiler that actually works well across such a broad range of hugely complex behaviors would itself be absurdly complex.
AGI will accelerate it, but way before agentic development I learned this was the future when I worked at Amazon. I no longer have access to the internal talks about it (amazing to watch) but here is a public link worth reading:
You don't really need compilers anymore. LLM's can write programs over any AST and provide an equivalence proof provided you have good semantics for the source and target.
Yeah, but thats a lower level of abstraction, thus using more tokens, and more importantly occupying a larger chunk of the biggest current limitation, the context
Semantics of a language describe the behaviour of a sentence in that language when executed. When you have semantics in a theorem prover you can construct equivalence proofs between programs expressed in different languages (or proofs that a compiler from one language to another is semantics preserving).
I was mostly referring to accuracy when I said "good" above, in the sense that they should reflect the actual behaviour of the language they describe.
Check Inform7 for text adevntures. No AGI nor AI needed. On Inform6, it's a dumb simple OOP language where the structure it's almost self-evident. Classes, in-game objects with real-life attributes (enterable, a container for other objects, non-movable/pickable scenery and so on).
PD: inform7 can run on an RaspPi B+ or 25 year old PC's like nothing, and i6 down to 30 year old ones. The ZMachine adventures themselves, from any 16 bit computer and up.
Also you would probably want to cache the compiler's output in git because running that compiler would take a long time, and you probably want the compiler's output to still be inspectable to human inspection. In the end that compiled artifact would look a lot like source code.
I think Rust's success in the AI space shows how useful formal proofs are, as Rust provides something very similar to that. Both because it helps with the understanding of LLMs, as well as with trusting the LLMs are not violating any basic properties (like please no nasal demons if the user sends a buffer larger than the allowed amount).
```
SELECT A, B, Sum(C)
FROM Somewhere
GROUP BY ALL
```
Very few developers look at the underlying “source code” that this SQL compiles into. Very few people even read the “source code” that tsc outputs.
The reality is the lowest level checkpoint worth looking at and understanding is the highest possible abstraction layer which preserves 100% of the needed precision and flexibility that the product being built requires.
Also, you’d just use something like sscache or just .o files to speed up compilation. It’d be unusual to store compiler MIR/LIR in git.
I think the important part will be figuring out what we need from the higher level language that achieves 100% of the precision and flexibility of Rust for the product being built.
> Very few developers look at the underlying “source code” that this SQL compiles into. Very few people even read the “source code” that tsc outputs.
Only because there’s a group of people that do understand database theory and know how to write a proper implementation and they have a track records of doing so. Themselves relies on compilers maintainers and OS developers, and this goes on down to the semiconductors where people do study how electricity interact with the materials.
Every layers of the tower of abstractions have people that understand the current layers, knows the safe semantics of the layer below, and can provide a safe foundation for the layer above.
> formal proofs are, as Rust provides something very similar to that
Since when? Rust just has an ML-like type system, and seemingly many have met that for the first time with Rust, even though it has decadeS of history, and multiple production languages running it just fine (ocaml, scala, etc).
Formal proofs are way way above an ML type system. Like how do you encode mathematical statements in Rust's type system? What about statements about program semantics, like program A is equivalent to program B <- in formal verification THAt is the type of an expression, and the implementation of it is the proof.
By similar i meant the strong and powerful type system that Rust has, plus its safety guarantees (iterator invalidation is a compiler error etc). That is in the end a proof system: you are proving to the compiler that you really don't mutate the buffer and you can't drop the T in &T, etc.
Of course the Rust language doesn't give you tools to prove that the program is bug-free or such. The proofs only extend to a basic set of properties, but there is a proof system in Rust.
As for other ML languages, they aren't really C/C++ competitors performance wise, Rust is.
We've got inform7 with an English like language generating complex inform6 OOP optimized code since a few decades and the i7 compiler might even run under a Pentium II with 128MB of RAM under NetBSD. I6, under 32 and a Pentium. And maybe even less. ZMachine games themselves (the biggest v8 ones) under the Frotz interpreter, under a 486 and 8MB (with FreeDOS and Frotz). Or maybe an Amiga or a m68k Mac with the same amount of RAM.
Now imagine what AMD64 machine can do with 2GB of RAM (minimum baseline for legacy, maybe some C2D computer) today.
There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.
I'm sure this is a logical facility, so I apologize, I don't have an exact example but I imagine most developers are not eager to stick their hands up to say "Hey, I use AI!" given how consumers have treated games that they think use AI.
> They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want
Customers don't know what they want. Sorry but it's just true. They are anti-AI because of a multitude of reasons, only some of those reasons are based in reality. Most of them will give up their anti-AI stance once the dust settles and they will not reward the creators who "stuck to their guns".
It's the same way customers beg restaurants for healthy options then when the restaurant puts those items on the menu they don't sell. Right now mob mentality might sink a game that people think AI was involved in but give it a year and they won't care.
Thinking that not using AI will be a winning play (today) is just fighting the last war.
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