It doesn't matter who wrote it, it got picked up, had a good argument and affected market opinion. The execs now need to respond to it.
Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more hours from developers.
The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.
> The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.
It is hard for me to imagine a statement more out of touch with history than this. All geopolitical history from WWII forward is profoundly affected by the development of the bomb.
I don't even know where to begin to argue against this. Off the top of my head:
1. What would have happened between Japan and the US in WWII without Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
2. Would the USSR have fallen without the financial drain of the nuclear arms race?
3. Would Isreal still exist if it didn't have nuclear weapons?
4. If neither the US nor Russia had nuclear weapons, how many proxy wars would have been avoided in favor of direct conflict?
The whole trajectory of history would be different if we'd never split the atom.
The whole trajectory of history would have been different if a butterfly didn't flap it's wings.
The bomb had effects, but it didn't change anything. We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control.
For a moment, stop thinking about whether bombs, AI or the printing press do or do not affect history. Ask yourself what the motivations are for thinking that they do?
"nuclear weapons are no big deal actually" is just a wild place to get as a result of arguing against AI risk. Although I guess Eliezer Yudkowsky would agree! (On grounds that nukes won't kill literally everyone while AI will, but still.)
Nuclear weapons are uniquely good. Turns out you have to put guns to the collective temples of humanity for them to realize that pulling the trigger is a bad idea.
It's too early to say definitively but it's possible that the atomic bomb dramatically reduced the number of people killed in war by making great power conflicts too damaging to undertake:
I'd actually guess those casualties would be quite less than WW2. As tech advanced, more sophisticated targeting systems also advanced. No need to waste shells and missiles on civilian buildings, plus food and healthcare tech would continue to advance.
Meanwhile, a single nuclear bomb hitting a major city could cause more casualties' than all American deaths in ww2 (400k).
That's really only true for the Americans, the Russians still don't seem to care about limiting collateral damage and undoubtedly the Americans wouldn't either if their cities were getting carpet bombed by soviet aircraft.
We have an LGD on our hobby farm and figuring out socialization is really hard. Despite raising her in the barn among goats, I did give her a fair amount of affection and now she is very people-motivated. What I realize now is that if you want the dog to be an employee then you must treat the dog like an employee. What makes this difficult is withholding the human desire/instinct to treat the dog like a pet. This is especially hard when friends and family come over and want to pet the big fluffy dog - telling them that they can't makes you seem like a monster.
Depending on the breed "people-motivation" may not be much of a problem, especially if your hobby farm is on the same land as your home. In practice if the dog is around people a lot it needs to be socialized for their safety. Also, certain breeds (ahem, pyrenees) are just people-motivated regardless and need to be explicitly trained to stay with the animals. (We selected pyrenees for this reason as they are far safer around family than most other LGD breeds.)
The pressure-release paradigm is helpful here: use her people-motivation to your advantage. Give her attention and affection around the goats, praise her when she runs off "threats" (even birds), but if she abandons them and (for example) comes to beg for food from your picnic be very gruff and cold until she returns to her charges.
One final note is that a dog on watch may look "lazy" or like they are not watching their charges, but dogs rely on different senses (less sight and more smell and sound) and have their own alert threshholds. Our LGDs sit on our patio all day unless something comes around, and then they are immediately alert to it and running it off. At night, they are patrolling.
Disagree. What you have in mind is already how the masses interact AI. There is little value-add for making machine translation, auto-correct and video recommendations better.
I can think of a myriad of use-cases for AI that involve custom-tuning foundation models to user-specific environments. Think of an app that can detect bad dog behavior, or an app that gives you pointers on your golf swing. The moat for AI is going to be around building user-friendly tools for fine-tuning models to domain-specific applications, and getting users to spend enough time fine-tuning those tools to where the switch-cost to another tool becomes too high.
When google complains that there is no moat, they're complaining that there is no moat big enough to sustain companies as large as Google.
Just because you can do fancy math doesn't mean you understand how to play the game.