istewart

By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates.

tick tick tick tick

(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)

The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable

or flooding the zone?

With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.

Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!

...damn, it's not really very impressive. at all.

I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he's studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will... but we must always remember that that doesn't say whose consciousness, nor whose will.

Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging "well, what can ya do?" attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization.

I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy's been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he's willing to indulge these days.

I think the rationalist beliefs are quite pervasive among mathematicians

Unsurprising, it's quite flattering to believe that your area of study is what generates The One True Ethical Code!

The sweaty desperation on both sides is hilarious: both the Forest City developers for getting in bed with a dodgy hustler like Balaji, and Balaji for signing up with such obviously desperate people, whose reputation in the region has already been fairly well torpedoed.

For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they're handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who's ever scammed $5 in venture capital

I am not retreating from public writing

That's OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.

I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can't let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. "Lack of compute for customer inference" is ultimately a red herring. If I'm a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

The rest of his "accelerationist"/"decelerationist" drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

daniel self-flagella, more like