Yes, I absolutely know some. At the same time, many weren’t out of financial necessity but maybe financial convenience. I know a few who had a remote job or worked in their hometown even though they had savings and weren’t spending a lot.
They then would move out to a bigger more expensive city and feel more financially comfortable than they would have. This was in first generation immigrant families, which as the article notes, is where this practice is more common.
Some interesting ideas in this, but I think his argument is somewhat undermined by the fact that his main example of computer use has actually gotten much better recently because of RLVR
Perhaps. RL env companies based in the U.S. sell to Chinese labs quite a bit too though (though on a discount, once they're no longer on the frontier)! And it would make sense that a lot of these problems which are based on work in the U.S. enterprise economy would be coming from the U.S.
What did you do around cross-harness testing? I don't see anything in the blog post about what harnesses were used in evaluation. SOTA benchmarks have consistently shown that frontier model performance is quite sensitive to what tools are exposed (e.g. str_replace vs. apply_patch) as the labs are RLing on their own harnesses. Did you do testing of the models in a standard setup or in their native harnesses?
Obviously a balance would be best, but as someone who went to a very grade-inflated school, I do believe that grade inflation gets in the way of education substantially. When you can get through classes with very little effort and understanding and know you will get a sufficient grade, many people will simply not learn the material deeply.
I mean, so many graded assignments are online now that very little technology is needed to cheat. I would guess that is the largest driver in increased cheating at universities.
As someone who attended an elite school in the post-covid era, here was my experience:
There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.
Sort of. Putting current knowledge into a number can be pretty interesting / useful though. Like many people, I read headlines and pay attention to what's happening in international politics, but from those it's hard to have any sense of how much reality there is to bluster in Iran/Panama/Venezuela/Greenland just from general discourse and media. For me, prediction markets have been very helpful in offering some sort of grounding beyond the general noise in areas where I have very little intuition or realistic sense of the possibilities.
I’m not so sure. From talking to some of my own friends at google they feel that antigravity/gemini models are handicapping them and would much rather be using claude code (which only deepmind gets to use)
I mean the same level of intelligence does get cheaper. People just care about being on the frontier. But if you track a single level of intelligence the price just drops and drops.
I wish I had the opposite of this. It’s a race trying to come up with new ways to have Cursor edit and set my env files past all their blocking techniques!
It’s unlikely the students at Brown killed were targeted. He opened fire on a room of students at a review session, shooting 11 people. It seems very possible that this was an act of violence out of resentment towards Brown, where he dropped out a graduate program over 20 years ago. He would’ve had most of his classes and spent most of his time in the building where he carried out the shooting.
He appears to have attended the same undergraduate program in Portugal as the MIT professor.
Therefor it seems possible that these shootings were carried out of personal resentment, though only he knew for certain.
I grew up in a very warm place, then moved to a very cold place and was miserable. I’d never done a winter and every year I was deeply unhappy for huge spans of the year.
But then I moved to Denmark from that cold place and found myself very happy! Of course circumstances change and a single account means little but I definitely believe some societies lend themselves to greater happiness than others, even in the very developed world.
I believe they’re just classifying all models into “reasoning models” eg o3 vs “non reasoning models” eg 4o and just doing a comparison of total tokens (input tokens + hidden reasoning output tokens + shown output tokens)
They then would move out to a bigger more expensive city and feel more financially comfortable than they would have. This was in first generation immigrant families, which as the article notes, is where this practice is more common.