Anecdotally, it took like one and a half week from the c-suite okaying using copilot to people beginning to consider googling beneath them and to start elevating to me the literal dumbest shit just because copilot was having a hard time with it.

Claude’s system prompt had leaked at one point, it was a whopping 15K words and there was a directive that if it were asked a math question that you can’t do in your brain or some very similar language it should forward it to the calculator module.

Just tried it, Sonnet 4 got even less digits right 425,808 × 547,958 = 233,325,693,264 (correct is 233.324.900.064)

I’d love to see benchmarks on exactly how bad at numbers LLMs are, since I’m assuming there’s very little useful syntactic information you can encode in a word embedding that corresponds to a number. I know RAG was notoriously bad at matching facts with their proper year for instance, and using an LLM as a shopping assistant (ChatGTP what’s the best 2k monitor for less than $500 made after 2020) is an incredibly obvious use case that the CEOs that love to claim so and so profession will be done as a human endeavor by next Tuesday after lunch won’t even allude to.

(No spoiler tags because it’s just background lore for Dune that’s very tangential to the main plot)

Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden.

That’s a retcon from the incredibly shit Dune-quel books from like 15 years after the original author had died. The first Dune was written well before computers as we know them would come in vogue, and the Butlerian Jihad was meant to be a sweeping cultural revolution against the stranglehold that automated decision-making had achieved over society, fought not against off-brand terminators but the entrenched elites that monopolized access to the setting’s equivalent to AI.

The inciting incident semi-canonically (via the Dune Encyclopedia) I think was some sort of robo-nurse casually euthanizing Serena Butler’s newborn baby, because of some algorithmic verdict that keeping it alive didn’t square with optimal utilitarian calculus.

tl;dr: The Butlerian Jihad originally seemed to be way more about against-the-walling the altmans and the nadellas and undoing the societal damage done by the proliferation of sfba rationalism, than it was about fighting epic battles against AI controlled mechs.

It’s been ages since I read Hyperion but I think it’s one of those settings that start out somewhat utopian but as the story progresses you are meant to realize they are deeply fucked.

Also I had to look up Camp of the Saints, and I think complaining about living there may be a racist dog whistle.

edit: So apparently it really is a huge racist shibboleth, which makes me wonder if it’s common for grok to recommend it and nobody noticed because it’s kind of obscure.

I mean even if you somehow miss the whole computers are haram aspect of the duniverse, being a space peasant ruled by psychic tyrants still hardly seems like a winning proposition.

Nothing in the article suggests he is a programmer, or that being a programmer is inherently fascist.

I think mostly by websites colluding to track your browser’s fingerprint so facebook/meta can maintain your behavioral profile and sell it back to them.

Children really shouldn’t be left with the impression that chatbots are some type of alternative person instead of ass-kissing google replacements that occasionally get some code right, but I’m guessing you just mean to forego I have kidnapped your favorite hamster and will kill it slowly unless you make that div stop overflowing on resize type prompts.

It should be noted that the only person to lose his life in the article was because the police, who were explicitly told to be ready to use non-lethal means to subdue him because he was in the middle of a mental episode, immediately gunned him down when they saw him coming at them with a kitchen knife.

But here’s the thrice cursed part:

“You want to know the ironic thing? I wrote my son’s obituary using ChatGPT,” Mr. Taylor said. “I had talked to it for a while about what had happened, trying to find more details about exactly what he was going through. And it was beautiful and touching. It was like it read my heart and it scared the shit out of me.”

Hey now, there’s plenty of generalization going on with LLM networks, it’s just that we’ve taken to calling it hallucinations these days.

EA Star Wars pitch

Engineering/Adoptive: Adds eval tests to flag hallucinations

Oh look another one who secretly solved hallucinations.

Kind of a nitpick but there has never been anything other than AI for automated transcription, OCR and speech recognition have been fundamental use cases for neural networks, and dev-kits to deaf kids is honestly kind of an honest mistake well within the known limitations of that technology.

LLM based audio transcription however does get goofy because apparently when it mishears stuff it might compound the error by, you guessed it, making more shit up: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

Could be this will be mostly a vehicle for them marketing their AI writing coach.

Maybe wapo is an AI startup now.

Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.

Midnight Pals is pretty great.

What does solving the data problem supposed to look like exactly? A somewhat higher score in their already incredibly suspect benchmarks?

The data part of the whole hyperscaling thing seems predicated on the belief that the map will magically become the territory if only you map hard enough.

In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/

I wonder how the inevitable presidential pardon will be handled if it comes before the movie is completed.

The rest of OpenAI probably far more than Altman, given they at one point tried to oust him to bring in a more dyed in the wool rat ideologue while bemoaning how all interactions with him were lacking in candor.