Any chance you could post an (anonymized) sample of the writing style? think have a pretty good vibes-based intuition about what’s Al. Also, (just as the state of the world)

I can deal with the sideways ones but the trains in my city have backwards seats :(

The material conditions of the world would have to be so different from what they currently are in order for this to happen, so it’s hard to speculate. Tensions currently are slightly increasing between ROK and US (it seems) but the ROK bourgeoisie would certainly not willingly give up their class position, and I’m sure that the US would go to bat for them if push came to shove. So I don’t think it would be able to happen until the US’s influence at the world stage diminishes sharply. Currently it seems to be on the decline but obviously still very relevant.

My prediction of how it would ultimately happen would be that the proles in ROK would gain more class consciousness as a result of labour struggles, and the labour movement would get powerful enough to threaten revolution, in which case a post-recolution society could consider/discuss reunification.

I think the current free travel status is very much dependent on the US’s role in geopolitics, so if that sharply declining is a precondition for reunification, I think that it would be a much different situation than it is now.

I heard that before going on strike, Canadian posties were escalating labour action incrementally, where first they refused overtime work, then they threatened to stop delivering flyers, which apparently makes up a substantial amount of Canada Post revenue.

I wonder if Trump or RFK Jr didn’t short Johnson & Johnson (they are the company that owns Tylenol). (Also, just fyi it’s acetaminophen, in case knowing how to spell it improves your life in some way)

Just as they ban Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, they unban the anti-vaxxers

Well, obviously, money is a Christian sign of virtue, it’s the Protestant way! How else are you going to atone for your sins?

Finally got around to starting this and I’m very much enjoying it so far! Thanks for the rec comrade

RIP to the good bit about saying “I wonder what Milo Yabadabadopolis-fe-fi-filopolis has to say about this” then linking to his Twitter account that just said “@Nero was banned from Twitter”

Right after your quote:

For companies and investors caught in the fray, it’s been “total misery,” says Dan Wang, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab and the author of Breakneck. China’s model relies on “a lot of state power, a lot of consumer power, but not very much financial investor benefit,” he says.

won’t someone think of the poor shareholders?

No.

I’m sure that they’d be happy to make him a Charlie Kirk cake. It’ll use a lot of red food colouring, though.

Like when Biden’s campaign claimed he had a history of civil rights activism… They failed to mention that it was against civil rights

I had forgotten how bad it was to venture out of my safe space of /r/TrueAnon, /r/TheDeprogram, and /r/ShitLiberalsSay

The other person was talking about image generation models, not LLMs. I think that the only LLMs with super curated input sets are tiny and less useful. Unfortunately it takes a lot of data for LLMs to be trained so it’s hard to find enough good quality data if you’re curating it.

Currently there’s a benchmark for creative writing where samples are produced by various AIs and then graded by one particular “judge” AI, so I’m sure they’re working on this

Canola is a genetic variant based on that type. All canola oil is that oil but not all that oil is canola. It was specifically bred to have particular properties, like being low in erucic acid.

There are some differences between canola and the type of oil you’re referring to (but they’re pretty much the same)

I get my info from a bunch of places, here are some of them:

• Simon Willison’s blog. He writes about LLMs in an interesting way, and has been consistently talking about security and best practices, which is refreshing when no one else talks about that. He seems a bit biased towards western models, but he still provides good coverage of a lot of model releases.
• /r/LocalLlama - one of the best places on reddit for people talking about LLMs, particularly open ones that they can theoretically run on their own computer. However, most people there still use hosted LLMs via e.g. OpenRouter, which makes sense because not many people have the kinds of GPUs needed to run the largest of these models.
• Gwern, AI Alignment Forum, and LessWrong. All of these have the rationalist bug and generally bad politics but they can be interesting to read. A lot of abstract philosophy about AI in general, plus crazy stuff like Roko’s basilisk (don’t look it up if you don’t already know about it, it’s a cognitohazard). Papers on AI safety are often linked here.
• arXiv for technical papers, and once you find one interesting one it’s easy to go down the citations rabbit hole to find 300 more.

Also, do you see anything in the horizon regarding people trying other ways to conceptualize “AI”? I mean, nowadays, for all intents and purposes, AI equals LLM.

Good question. I think that LLMs are definitely the dominant metagame currently. I think they will still get better, and I tend to agree that I don’t think this will lead to AGI, but I also have no idea what will. I think Anthropic’s research in understanding how the LLM “brain” works is very compelling and might lead to new developments, but I don’t know what they are. Here’s an essay talking about what might be the next improvement to LLMs: LLM Daydreaming · Gwern.net. I think this is very interesting and Gwern is good at predicting this kind of thing I think. But it also requires companies to be invested in a longer horizon of profit, which they’re notoriously pretty bad at doing.

I also came across this article: Xi Jinping warns against China’s overinvestment in EVs and AI, which seems potentially relevant. It’s interesting that the US is saying nothing of the sort.

I mean, what if Chinese researchers (because let’s face it, a great novel breakthrough would most likely come from there) find out that there’s another way to do AI that has nothing to do with LLMs and does not require GPUs? Just spitballing here, but if that were the case, then how would the US government and AI companies pivot, now that they’re so heavily invested into this?

Yeah, I really don’t know. I mean I think that GPUs are likely in any future AI breakthrough because massively parallelizing computation is what they’re good at, and they’ve been a staple of every kind of ML breakthrough in the last long while. Of course, massive parallelization doesn’t equal AI, but it’s hard for me to imagine an AI breakthrough that doesn’t use massive parallelization.

I feel like the gargantuan sunk cost of billions upon billions invested in one particular technology is at least partially driving this monotonic search for ways to make LLMs better and better, rather than branching off in some novel direction. We’re at a point where NVIDIA stock prices are so central we’re not even going to pretend to do something different.

Yes, I agree for sure. I saw a hexbear the other day (sorry, can’t remember who) saying that they didn’t think it was a coincidence that the market shifted to LLMs right after the crypto bubble popped. There’s a lot of GPU capacity that was freed up by that, which conveniently feeds perfectly into LLMs! And Nvidia is ridiculously overvalued as a company for sure. That being said, I think that even if LLMs are a bubble, it will be one more like the internet than like crypto - still overvalued but based on a fundamentally compelling technology, and it’ll stick around even after the bubble pops.

First, if I need to find something specific online, I’ll sometimes go to ChatGPT and use its online search function to see if it ends up pointing me towards useful references, something that Google can no longer do most of the time. I don’t do this often at all, and it’s kinda helpful in that regard, but not very much. I’ll also use it sometimes for grammaticality checks since I’m not a native English speaker, but I take the answers with a grain of salt… what if it’s trying to suck up to me by saying my sentences are “not only beautifully crafted — they’re very deep and meaningful”?

Second, and this is what I do with AI 95% of the time, is I use Deepseek to study Chinese, confirming everything it tells me with my native tutor, of course, which is why I’ll gladly accept cheaper, more efficient Chinese models.

Edit: another thing I find LLMs to be useful for is to search for collocations. This is entirely unsurprising as a useful feature, since collocations are by definition a function of natural frequent association, and the entire concept of LLMs revolves around word associations.

Firstly, your English is very good. I never would have guessed you weren’t a native speaker.

Secondly, these all seem like good use cases of LLMs. In my experience, Claude and Gemini both have decent search tools, with Gemini’s especially good for academic research. I’m curious to see open source models get better at search, but also that might just be a function of access to search infrastructure, which obviously costs money. I also haven’t fairly assessed this yet I think.

Thirdly, using it for language-related tasks is probably its most compelling use case for most people. They’re getting really good at writing and editing. ChatGPT really likes to use very obviously AI language, but you can get DeepSeek/GLM/Claude to generate much less AI-sounding content.