Is there some sort of cultural revisionism where we are expected to deny the existence of e.g. the Soviet design sensibility because of contemporary politics? What a bizarre response.
> If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine
You may as well make the same argument about commanding a billion Nintendo 64s. We cannot simply scale up Claude instances like you say, its ability to produce interesting output is bounded by the underlying model.
The "Claude part" is important here, though. If you believe we can produce AGI by simulating physics then the existing paradigm is far too slow. A zettaflop does not even get close, you can have a moon-sized computer and it probably will not be able to produce AGI using the current transformer-based, extremely slow, classical computing architecture. We need to improve the underlying computation paradigm.
This is why the focus on raw compute is a poor use of engineering time. We have plenty of it, we are just headed in the wrong direction.
The output undoubtedly improves when looping LLM output back into the model at inference-time, but there is a limit to this and it is still bounded by the acumen of the underlying model. You cannot just recurse these models with tooling and compute to e.g. solve new physics.
Using a single Claude agent, ask it to generate "new" ideas and it will generate an immense list. Ask it to rank those ideas by novelty and it will comply.
The results will be lackluster. Additional agents will not improve the result.
Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example:
> One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one.
We are already near the limits of what we can do if we throw compute at Claude without improving the underlying models, and it is not clear how we can get big improvements on the underlying models at this point. Surely geohot knows this, so I am surprised he thinks that "one million Claudes" would be able to e.g. write a better novel than one hundred Claudes, or even one Claude.
The poster to which I responded and the article are each speculating on the "why" for this contract. That said, we do not need to speculate about Cybertruck sales - Business Insider reported that Tesla sold only 5,400 of them in 2025Q3.
We know from this that they do not need the same level of third-party 4680 capacity, and (call it speculative if you so desire) this is the most parsimonious explanation for the L&F write down.
> Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier.
The latter part of this is speculative. Tesla may have begun shipping dry cathodes but it isn't clear that they're capable of matching the former third-party volume. Tesla would absolutely need the additional 4680 volume if Cybertruck sales were meeting their original projections (as opposed to now when they are ~an order of magnitude lower).
I agree with both of you, but scaling isn't feasible with this paradigm. You could need continent-sized hardware to approximate general intelligence with the current paradigm.
The timing of their acceptance of a 42-day ceasefire - whether now or eight months prior - bears little significance for the long-term outlook of Hamas or the civilian death toll in Gaza. Strange analysis to hang your hat on, Thomas.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...
Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
I suppose if we are to digress to the land of "shoulds", Israel should not have decided to delete tens of thousands of Gazan children in the interim.
Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.