Contrarian view; I think he’s right. Many of these ideas it’s almost shocking how many you can find sketched out in his old papers. To the point where I think it’s very wise to read all his work to see what hasn’t showed up yet but likely will. Artificial curiosity for example.
The entirety of Anthropic believe ai is going to eat everything, not just software, and result in major societal disruption within a year. They do not have a sliver of a doubt on this. Article has no idea, is completely wrong.
This is called linear mode connectivity and seems to work for almost every large model. So well that in most cases it’s an explicit part of the training process; do many training ‘branches’ then merge then continue.
People forget the people in charge of these companies are some of the smartest people out there full stop. Far more shadowy strategy/things like this going on than people think.
What are the odds this is partially them making the point; you were all complaining about monitoring/access/safeguards: remember we don’t have to give this to you at all. And using a us gov letter as justification for that.
In many cases the GPs are not, at least nowhere near as much as you’d think. Obviously there are power laws here as well. Non partners, forget about it.
The other thing is it is maybe the most nepotistic industry out there. Which somewhat makes sense given the actual job is so relationship based.
The extreme privilege of being forced to pay a major portion of all income you make, regardless of where you earn it, to the us gov indefinitely. And they make it hard for you to apply to do this. Crazy.
The US isn’t what it used to be. It’s definitely not the best place in the world to live for quality of life, on basically any metric.
The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income, if you have any kind of global mobility, is not worth it when you look at the situation objectively. The US is the only country that requires this, and signing up is voluntarily.
So while US immigration continues to act as though people will jump through any hoop they put up in order to be granted the extreme privilege of being able to live in the country indefinitely, it’s worth realising it’s not the 70s anymore and thats a goal many people are no longer optimizing for. In fact the opposite - the most talented people I know are all planning their lives to not settle long term in the US.
The other thing people don’t understand is exponential curves are self similar. The start of an exponential looks like an exponential. People always look at and think ‘well that’s it it’s exponential now, have missed it, can’t sustain’. Nope.
Good example of this is number of submissions to neurips/icml/iclr. In 2017 that curve was exponential.
The argument is that there is no incentive to carefully review a paper (I agree), however what used to occur is people would do the right thing without explicit incentives. This has totally disappeared.
Whether it’s actually 20% or not doesn’t matter, everyone is aware the signal of the top confs is in freefall.
There are also rings of reviewer fraud going on where groups of people in these niche areas all get assigned their own papers and recommend acceptance and in many cases the AC is part of this as well. Am not saying this is common but it is occurring.
It feels as if every layer of society is in maximum extraction mode and this is just a single example. No one is spending time to carefully and deeply review a paper because they care and they feel on principal that’s the right thing to do. People did used to do this.