Great release! It's awesome that they trained smaller models. With some effort I was able to get them running on my generative sampler/groovebox project this morning (shameless plug: https://engram.audio)
Also appreciate the attention to detail with licensing in the training set. This is an important sticking point – both commercially and ethically – for any product that integrates this type of model.
The industry has pushed socially disruptive technologies in several waves (mobile phones, algorithmic social media, short-form content) with seemingly no buy-in from the greater public, nor any meaningful consequences for the ills imposed. Many are now looking at our current crop of tech leaders and billionaires and maybe correctly detecting a bit of indifference to the grievances of the masses of normal people who have been forced to live in successively more deteriorated societies shaped by technologies that they've had no voice in shaping.
AI is just the next wave, and the impact is more tangible than ever – it literally takes your job, and it's being pushed on you by enormously wealthy people who don't understand you, your life, and what's important to you. The sad thing is, AI can be beneficial to people if wielded in the right way, but we are in a polarized environment where productive conversations no longer feel possible: you're either an AI bro or a luddite. I think anyone (myself included) who has spent time developing B2C products that incorporate AI quickly discovers just how touchy of a subject this is, and it's due imo to the sins of the accelerationist crowd that never wastes time understanding the needs and perspectives of normal people.
I would love someone to play devil's advocate against this perspective:
While these tools stand to enable the democratization of productive capability in software engineering and other tasks (creating a renaissance for solopreneurs, let's say), what seems more likely to actually happen is that entrenched capital will become the only player with real access to this "knowledge as a utility" (was it Altman who called it that?).
We already see this playing out in two fronts: 1) the gradual reduction of services and 2) the DRAM market, where local-first tools (i.e., potential disruptors of the emerging "knowledge monopoly" created by the big AI firms) are being stifled by supply shortages. How many promising small-to-medium-sized competitors are being snuffed out of existence (or never starting) due to the insanity of the DRAM/storage/CPU (soon) markets?
The currently-subsidized access that we have to the big Opus-like models will, in parallel, be gradually be taken away until only the big players can afford it. And in the end what we will have is hyper-productive skeleton crews at a few consolidated firms performing (or selling expensive access to) basically all of the knowledge labor for society, with very little potential for disruption due to the hardware and "knowledge" scarcity engineered (in part, maybe) by this monopoly.
Not necessarily a closely held belief – just a hunch – which is why I want to see what parts of the picture I might be missing.
Extremely bad stuff here. Can't believe it's been 7 hours now and you can still pull up people's complete prepared tax returns right from a Google search. This should be a business-ending breach of trust and good practices, but I worry there's probably a lack of regulatory might or will to make anything happen.
> My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine
I've been wondering if it is even possible for a publicly-traded company to deliver a voice assistant product without these incentives involved. I have to imagine the UX of these devices would be much different if they were built by a private company without the same market pressures. It would need to be self-contained and local, so that the infrastructure burden (e.g., data and AI in the cloud) wouldn't create a need for subscription service or data collection revenue to cover the cost.
Some of that is probably because students at elite universities come from families who understand exactly how to navigate meritocratic systems. Parents who know you need a tutor to ace the ACT and an essay editor to polish your application essays likely also understand that, in some situations, you should get a psychiatric evaluation and disclose any diagnoses so you can receive accommodations.
I'm fairly convinced a big part of clearing the barrier to entry of these elite institutions is having a deep understanding of exactly the things you need to do to succeed given the structure of the system and the nature of the competition. Students at "non-elite" institutions are more likely to come from backgrounds where even if you DO have a disability, maybe nobody ever tells you that you can go to the doctor for it, or that something like "accommodations" exist to help you.
The LLM is not the slot machine. The LLM is the lever of the slot machine, and the slot machine itself is capitalism. Pull the lever, see if it generates a marketable product or moment of virality, get rich if you hit the jackpot. If not, pull again.
> I ask it to reflect on why, and update the Skill to clarify, adding or removing detail as necessary.
We are probably undervaluing the human part of the feedback loop in this discussion. Claude is able to solve the problem given the appropriate human feedback — many then jump to the conclusion that well, if Claude is capable of doing it under some circumstances, we just need to figure out how to remove the human part so that Claude can eventually figure it out itself.
Humans are still serving a very crucial role in disambiguation, and in centering the most salient information. We do this based on our situational context, which comes from hands-on knowledge of the problem space. I'm hesitant to assume that because Claude CAN bootstrap skills (which is damn impressive!), it would somehow eventually do so entirely on its own, devoid of any situational context beyond a natural language spec.
US incarceration rates increased 500% in the decades following the enactment of war on drugs legislation, starting with the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.
More speculatively, I think the prison system has also taken over the role of the mental health institutions that were wound down under Reagan. Over half of the incarcerated population has a mental health condition, and likely are not receiving adequate mental health care while incarcerated.
Dishonesty layered on dishonesty, marketed with an arrogant smirk on top. I feel like tech culture has fully internalized the ethos of "no attention is bad attention", so having a lack of scruples and a talent for rage baiting is now seen as an advantage. It might pay off well for some people in the short term, but it's not a sustainable way to run a society.
What a beautiful and charming project. Kudos for taking it all the way from zero to one with such a polished design. That's no small feat. I've built prototypes for eurorack and even with some simplifying constraints it's a lot of work.
The underlying idea tracks. The next generation of kids is going to interact with AI, and we should anticipate that and try to build systems that are healthy and safe for them to interact with.
On the other hand, I wonder if this doesn't just further alienate children from their parents. Kids are already given access to unlimited supernormal stimuli via iPads so that parents don't have to parent. This just seems like more of that: now parents don't even need to have basic conversations with their kids because the AI can do it.
Anecdotally, some of the most formative interactions I had as a child started by asking my parents questions. These were things that not only shaped me as a person, but deepened my relationship with my parents. These interactions are important, and I wonder if Aris doesn't just abstract it away into another "service" that further deepens social decay. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn't had the chance to ask my dad as an angsty pre-teen what the point of life is, and for him to tell me it is to learn and create so that we can make a better world for humanity. I guarantee a smoothed-over LLM would not have offered something so personally impactful.
My two cents is that you should ponder that deeper point a little bit, and think about how it informs the way you market your idea, and scope the service it provides.
So dropping out of CS to start selling something was more important to him than 2 more years of CS education. Maybe he realized that continuing his engineering education was unnecessary because he preferred selling things. Sounds like a salesman.
Also appreciate the attention to detail with licensing in the training set. This is an important sticking point – both commercially and ethically – for any product that integrates this type of model.