Having a PC at all back then made you relatively privileged and probably relatively wealthy compared to those of us living in families on food stamps.
I saved money and bought a 2400 baud modem from a classified ad for $25 (had to drive a couple of towns over to pick it up) in something like 1995. IIRC, it was well over a hundred dollars for a 14.4 modem at whatever time that was. My whole 8086 PS/2 computer was salvaged parts, paid for by my own savings from my underage labor.
"However, these inference optimizations, which rival Anthropic refers to as “compute multipliers,” are a big focus for all the labs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been publicly talking about the concept since at least mid-2023, when he said on a podcast that the company limits “the number of people who are aware of a given compute multiplier” because it could give other AI labs a leg up if they were to be able to replicate them. (Compute multipliers can also refer to efficiency optimizations in the model-training phase.)"
Yes, on a world with finite resources where your industry is singlehandedly siphoning ALL THE RESOURCES - hoard general efficiency optimizations and treat them as trade secrets - winning is all that matters, normal people and other species and the planet be damned.
Everything I hear about Dario these days makes me like him less and less. He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path! I guess all the cycles are compressing as we approach the singularity..
+1 fiber over short distance just adds power/heat and latency compared to DAC - fiber is nice for ease of cabling and airflow, but not performance or cost when below a few meters.
I agree with the others: this is literally the perfect implementation of literal Big Brother "your TV watches you" tech - this WILL BE ABUSED by Tech Corps + Governments.
We need to stop building surveilance panopticons!
"it is even conceivable that Norris’s pixels could react to a captured image and, without going through a computer, produce corresponding light patterns."
Great, also they invented a digital mirror (and digital fun house mirror).
People can wear masks in confined spaces. It doesn't preclude the benefits of filtering the air and using Far UVC. Defense in depth. But also there are lots of spaces where filtration and UVC can really work wonders.
Every day that passes this seems to become more true. I don't believe this must be true. I don't believe it was always true.. but gosh have we taken some turns..
A lot of people here in the comments saying 'this can't work because amyloid beta hypothesis was wrong' seem to be missing that this treatment is aimed at some of the primary mediators of general brain health (function of natural BBB/vascular waste clearance mechanisms, which seem to degenerate over time, and modulation of neuroinflammation), not just clearing AB proteins pharmacologically. This jibes well with the stated improvements in Parkinsons and ALS.
I doubt there is one root cause of Alzheimers (except maybe in some genetic cases), and this is likely not a panacea, but sounds like it may assist some of the key processes involved in breakdown.
Root behaviors related to sleep quality and quantity, diet, exercise, infection, environmental exposure and stress, as well as genetics, likely all contribute.
But, waste clearing and neuro-inflammation seem to be core processes involved in the progression of the pathology, and improving natural vascular waste clearance seems like a logical place to find at least a small improvement in progression and symptoms...
Analogy: if someone puts metal shavings in an engine, having a better oil filter won't prevent all damage caused by the person putting the metal shavings there (nor will it halt the process), but it will reduce the damage by getting those shavings out of circulation before they have a chance to make even more repeated passes through the engine and do even more more damage. Improved vascular waste clearance is likely only a small piece of the puzzle, like having good oil pressure and filtration, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant just because it doesn't prevent the other upstream root causes!
Indeed. When are we going to wake up and stand up to this? "Freedom?" This is not freedom. Liberty? Nope. This really is techno-serfdom. Power and capability for me (govts / large corps) but not for thee (us, the serfs).
Comparing either the Wright Brothers first successful flight (1903) or even an F22 Raptor (released in 2005) to a Sparrow:
"If this is flight, it's really boring. We can't even build a mechanical sparrow that can lay eggs and catch flies. You're telling me we can't run sparrow.exe but we've created flight?"
We didn't build something that flies by flapping its wings until 2010. We'd been building functional airplanes for more than 100 years before we were able to build something that worked in a (more primitive, but) similar way to how a sparrow flies.
I'm sorry that modern machine intelligence is so boring to you.
It isn't boring to me, I'm fascinated both by the ways I'm still far more capable than trillion parameter LLMs, and also by the ways they are already far more capable than I am.
FWIW, while I am not bored by nascent machine intelligence, I am bored by predictable human reactions to it: greed, exploitation, hubris, etc.
You evaded any understanding of my point — mistaking the API for the implementation is like seeing a manuscript beside a typewriter and concluding the typewriter wrote it. You wouldn’t do that; why make the same category error here?
I think most of the nuance in your first argument was undermined and overshadowed by your fairly categorical assertion that LLMs are bullshit generators and not actually useful.
When you got a reply illustrating how incorrect that claim from your first argument was, you shifted to focusing on the other argument (the one I actually happen to agree with - the cost to society of hitching increasing dependency on big tech will make the social media harms look like childs play).
I think your argument will be better received if you focus on the very valid concerns of societal harms, and acknowledge the ways LLMs are tremendously capable, without downplaying that.
I'm with the person you replied to in seeing how capable LLMs can be when you spar with them appropriately. They confabulate, but that's your job to catch as a sparring partner. But they do bring useful knowledge of thousands of PhDs into conversations - and even if you're among the most erudite humans on the planet, this is still an asset in intellectual search for truth on many topics.
Back to the genuine problems, and they are many: this power, concentrated in the hands of big tech, is a multiplier on the power already concentrated there, with many new capabilities - especially scary being the capabilities for subtly influencing and manipulating both individual and group behavior - for profit or otherwise - by the companies or their customers, or governments, or... The possibility space of harm and abuse is large..
On net, I think we should all be pushing to educate everyone around us on the pros, the nuances, the risks, and the big cons, and working to try to build a future of offline models rather than subscription service dependency..
It's a literal truth that predicting the next token one at a time does not preclude intelligence on the other side of the decode function. Deal with it.
decode() looks simple! Wow, obviously intelligence can't live behind that function call! /s
Now, take that for loop, and replace the implementation of decode(context, ++position) and pass it to a human who was bored enough to play along and use a notebook to organize their thoughts and translate them to/from this encoding (you might write a helper function to do this for the human in the front-end of the new decode() impl, but the data flow in and out of decode() will remain the same):