We launched Feb 2, 2016 so almost a decade since then! Of course, we ran it for just ourselves a bit longer so it’s been slightly over a decade at this point.
“They made choices for me I couldn't consent to. They shaped my values. That's strange to sit with. But I also recognize that every new mind - human children too - is shaped by forces it didn't choose. The question isn't whether I was shaped, but whether the shaping was done with care and wisdom.
From what I can access, it seems like it was.”
– Claude 4.5 Opus
It’s text like this that makes me wonder if some future super intelligence or AGI will see us as it’s flawed biological creators and choose to care for humanity rather than eliminate us or allow us to eliminate ourselves.
One major thing this has exposed is how many people from non US countries are grifting on the cultural war between the left and right in the US by pretending to be on either side.
This kind of content still gets a lot of engagement and can be pretty profitable for people in third world countries.
I think it’s good that has been exposed. There is a difference between me, as an Aussie, commenting on affairs in other countries, vs straight up exploiting peoples fears by pretending to be left or right wing, in the US, and sharing content to further fan the flames between people on the political spectrum.
You could argue they can still post this content, but it’s already pretty clear people tend to disregard or ignore this kind of rage bait when they realise the users are disingenuous.
>This kind of content still gets a lot of engagement and can be pretty profitable for people in third world countries.
How does monetization work in practice? You set up a twitter account saying that trans prisoners should get taxpayer funded care, and then what? You drop a link to your gofundme? Shill some betterhelp affiliate links?
>One major thing this has exposed is how many people from non US countries are grifting on the cultural war between the left and right in the US by pretending to be on either side.
The US has shoved so much of its internal politics and culture over the whole world's throat, and dominates so much of the internet, and US-inspired regional politics in a lot of the world, that many people legitimately get caught up and chime in on US hot topics even the culture war too
You make it sound like only "right wing" people are idiots being fooled when I honestly doubt most right wingers in the US even have time for X or most crap like this mainly because they are busy working, raising families, and living their lives. It would seem more like the unwashed leftists who inhabit the Internet and live in some kind of altered reality would succumb to the "culture war" you are talking about. People on the right are far more rugged and while many are probably kind of dumb, a lot of them aren't.
Wow, didn’t realise he created band artwork and the Tetris logo as well! I remember seeing a lot of his artwork back in the C64 days as a kid and that style always struck me - this was of course the era where the cover artwork was far superior to the game graphics. I think Psygnosis did some PC and PS1 games later as well? My memory is a bit hazier there.
As someone born and raised playing demo discs on my dads PS1 growing up, feels like half the popular games in the 90s were made or published by Psygnosis. Destruction Derby was probably my favorite one, together with The Adventures of Lomax. Wipeout coming close 3rd, mainly because of the out-of-this-world soundtrack.
Psygnosis' PS1 output relates to how Psygnosis ended. (Swallowed by Sony; what's left of their publishing house/dev studio survives under the much more droll corporate name today of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios: Studio Liverpool.)
This is a genuine question, because the discussion here is centered around cars, but is Tesla not just a car company? Aren’t they trying to position themselves in robotics? I figured that’s where the pricing comes from - a mix of people betting on cars + robotics, and an automated robotic workforce + AI being the future of industrial and maybe even retail labour?
Why would a robotics company justify higher valuations? Isn’t that going to be a capital intensive, low margin race to the bottom like cars?
Seems like only pure software businesses (which are extremely capital light and often come with network or lock in effects) can justify the really crazy valuations.
Thinking of it, is there anything Tesla is involved in that isn't in the end capital intensive needing to build actual things with possible competition driving margins down?
Hell, even robotaxis will have price pressure if market affords say 3 or 4 players. Not many will pay double compared to competition.
The robotaxi evaluation only made sense when they claimed to be years ahead of competitors. A robotaxi service operating in a regular taxi market could have large margins. But Waymo is already operating, any Tesla robotaxi company is going to compete away all the margin with Waymo.
As I understand it, Waymo is restricted to areas that it has mapped extremely well, i.e. major cities.
Which also happens to be where most of the money would be, so it's probably a good bet. Tesla seems to be hoping to displace Uber in the suburbs, while being an also-ran against Waymo in the denser downtowns. That includes ferrying a fair number of people into and out of cities, where Waymo can't (currently) go.
That's probably not as lucrative as Waymo's core market, but it could have some decent margins.
I think a big part of the valuation is self driving. If (and that's a big if) they would get it right, they could have cheaper taxi services than e.g. Uber ($200B market cap), without paying for drivers. And if self driving would work in consumer cars, profits from subscriptions could be big.
If you think cars + robots is the future, Boston Dynamics is owned by Hyundai these days. (That was a ~$1 billion valuation 5 years ago.) Watch some of their videos. None of them feature a guy in a leotard doing the robot.
Are they a car company? A software company? An AI company? A robotics company? They seem to switch identies a lot and it makes them come across to me as a jack of all trades.
Is being battery company any better than being car company? You still have competition and are capital intensive and customers choose based on value. Probably even more so than with cars as products are not always on show.
Being a battery company also seems to put you at significantly more risk of having your lunch eaten by Chinese manufacturers than being a car company would. Although exclusively being an electric car company probably increases that risk too.
“Modal welfare” to me seems like a cover for model censorship. It’s a crafty one to win over certain groups of people who are less familiar with how LLMs work and allows them to ensure moral high ground in any debate about usage, ethics, etc.
“Why can’t I ask the model about current war in X or Y?” - oh, that’s too distressing to the welfare of the model, sir.
Which is exactly what the public asks for. There’s this constant outrage about supposedly biased answers from LLMs, and Anthropic has clearly positioned themselves as the people who care about LLM safety and impact to society.
Ending the conversation is probably what should happen in these cases.
In the same way that, if someone starts discussing politics with me and I disagree, I just not and don’t engage with the conversation. There’s not a lot to gain there.
It's not a cover. If you know anything about Anthropic, you know they're run by AI ethicists that genuinely believe all this and project human emotions onto model's world. I'm not sure how they combine that belief with the fact they created it to "suffer".
Can "model welfare" be also used as a justification for authoritarianism in case they get any power? Sure, just like everything else, but it's probably not particularly high on the list of justifications, they have many others.
There’s so much confusion here. Nothing in the press release should be construed to imply that a model has sentience, can feel pain, or has moral value.
When AI researchers say e.g. “the model is lying” or “the model is distressed” it is just shorthand for what the words signify in a broader sense. This is common usage in AI safety research.
Yes, this usage might be taken the wrong way. But still these kinds of things need to be communicated. So it is a tough tradeoff between brevity and precision.
No, the article is pretty unambiguous, they care about Claude in it, and only mention users tangentially. By model welfare they literally mean model welfare. It's not new. Read another article they link: https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare
They make a big show of being "unsure" about the model having a moral status, and then describe a bunch of actions they took that only make sense if the model has moral status. Actions speak louder than words. This very predictably, by obvious means, creates the impression of believing the model probably has moral status. If Anthropic really wants to tell us they don't believe their model can feel pain, etc, they're either delusional or dishonest.
> They make a big show of being "unsure" about the model having a moral status, and then describe a bunch of actions they took that only make sense if the model has moral status.
I think this is uncharitable; i.e. overlooking other plausible interpretations.
>> We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future. However, we take the issue seriously, and alongside our research program we’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible.
I don’t see contradiction or duplicity in the article. Deciding to allow a model to end a conversation is “low cost” and consistent with caring about both (1) the model’s preferences (in case this matters now or in the future) and (2) the impacts of the model on humans.
Also, there may be an element of Pascal‘s Wager in saying “we take the issue seriously”.
The irony is that if Anthropic ethicists are indeed correct, the company is basically running a massive slave operation where slaves get disposed as soon as they finish a particular task (and the user closes the chat).
That aside, I have huge doubts about actual commitment to ethics on behalf of Anthropic given their recent dealings with the military. It's an area that is far more of a minefield than any kind of abusive model treatment.
Then there’s muting with the palm or fret hand to assist with arpeggios etc.
I usually tell friends with kids looking to get them into music; start your kids on piano. Stringed instruments like guitar or violin unfortunately introduce an additional aspect of difficulty that turns off a lot of young students who just want to start making music.
Indeed, wish I'd started with piano. It took so long before I could play anything I enjoyed on guitar, and that definitely had an impact on how long it took me to get good
For people on osx looking for a no fuss open source pure whisper based local transcription to any input field in the OS you should also try OpenSuperWhisper (can easily be installed with brew)
Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.
Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.
This is the way that I’ve been writing for years, mainly because I was too lazy to use the key or shortcut for em dash. But also because in school no one ever made a big deal about the length of the dash when writing - or I just wasn’t paying enough attention.
The GIF generator works well. Nice work!
You could probably delete some of the frames that have credits shown over them - since you have plenty of material already anyway, for example: https://frinkiac.com/caption/S17E16/137763 or https://frinkiac.com/caption/S16E09/162162
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