> “A lot of people want local inference,” Altman said. “And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now. Because we are going to have open-source models. We’re going to be able to run them on our own computers. And so we’re not going to need all the stuff [DRAM] in the data center.”
At first TFA seemed like typical tech news but reading this quote suddenly struck me as satire, as if it came from The Onion.
What might help is if you had some external entity to be dependent upon you getting work done in order for it to get its work done. A job provides this kind of infrastructure to you.
This suggestion only applies if you're a programmer, and assumes you were doing AI-assisted coding before you got laid off... You know how the agentic AI people say you have to get your slow human self out of the ralph loop? Well, put yourself back in the loop.
Whenever your agent harness is blocked, waiting for your input, it should periodically wake and nag you to engage with it. Once you've got this, now something is depending on you to get work done.
If you need an idea for a project to work on, how about a product/service to help people in your exact situation.
A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.
> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.
The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?
Yeah. I hate commutes like that. I had a job where the commute was 30 min bike or bus to Caltrain then 1-1.5 hour train. It was expensive and ate 3-4 hrs/day.
But after being unemployed almost two years, would do that commute again if I had to.
Following Michael Levin’s work, one could argue that small collections of skin cells are conscious. AI tech has a long way to go until it’s autonomous and self-motivated.
You are right - that's not me. That is Andreas Bichler (an austrian - armbrustbauer.at). He built the crossbow back in 2014. Andreas is a true specialist when it comes to crossbows. Wherever I can, I try to get specialist voices.
Andreas very kindly allowed me to showcase and link to his video on loeffelholz-codex.org.
The photo credit says iStockphoto but the image looks absurdly fake (transparent cable with glowing lights inside). The istockphoto home page says their library has no AI images but that same site also offers AI-image generation.
I know that commenting on meta aspects of an article is discouraged here but that image is just ridiculous.
One thing about that show is it explored various aspects of the problem, not just blaming student behavior but also parents, teachers and administrators. It illustrated how the problem is quite complex and not just solved by beating up students.
Absolutely. I've had the identical experience hiring artists for game art/UI. Every once in a while you find an artist who is stellar but most everyone else is not that good.
The TFA is pointing to a prompting skills/creativity issue, but I get equally frustrated with hired artists as with genAI image models. Even with skilled human artists (remote/offshore), I find they're best at copying a particular style so I end up having to google for images of the look that we're targeting, then spend hours painstakingly describing the changes needed. Then iterating many times, and with artists in remote time zones that means each iteration takes a whole day. The process is ironically very similar to using AI image models but can take much longer due to time zones.
Well that's why and how we got the current model. Lots of noise, so tools were made to curate and figure out the most consistent artists But it goes both wwys; artists that stand out get ebough of a reputation to boost their prices. Unless you get very lucky with budding taletnt, you generally get what you pay for.It's not much different from how you'd run your gaming team.
True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value).
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
I immediately looked up whether it had "piss shiver" and it did. It was disappointing when Cecil (Straight Dope) refused to investigate it.
(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)
Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.
Ooh this is the closest description I've heard to one odd thing I had which was a satisfying feeling associated with two specific thicknesses (one around the thickness of a school copy book, the other around the thickness of a school maths book). At some points it could be activated by thinking about the thickness but long gone now.
Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?
The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.
Yup. I'm more paranoid about AI training on my chats than most ppl are. While I use frontier models to do research and to build tools, I've tried to avoid discussing details about my projects (e.g. story worldbuilding) except when using local models like Qwen-27B. Of course this slows down progress and has a real opportunity cost, but it would kill all my motivation if I got "scooped" like that.
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