I suspect Demis 'gapped' you structurally (upbringing, early decisions, luck, positioning), moreso than via intelligence, which doesn't actually vary that widely in humans.
Even if you take IQ, a 2-sigma event on that distribution is 'only' around 130. A 130 outpaces a 100, sure, but it's hardly full on dominance in most tasks.
Certainly much less powerful than just having rich or pushy parents.
> The CV of e.g. IQ is only 15%. That's in line with other 'natural' attributes of humans, but not compared to something like family wealth or background. From a quick Google, wealth is 700% in the US? Income also same OOM.
I'm generally suspicious of IQ but still - 2 standard deviations above average would include about 2.5% of the population. Hassabis is in a significantly more exclusive slice.
His parents weren't particularly wealthy. More likely: he is exceptionally intelligent, hardworking, visionary, and grew up in an environment which fostered those attributes in a precocious child.
The CV of e.g. IQ is only 15%. That's in line with other 'natural' attributes of humans, but not compared to something like family wealth or background. From a quick Google, wealth is 700% in the US? Income also same OOM.
I think you've just got perceptual tuning for the human to human context. It's like how human faces that are 5% different can be very obvious to us, but it's much harder to tell (for example) two cats apart at the same difference level. All of your adaptive pressures are pulling in that direction.
But at a system-scale view of intelligence, humans are squashed together and it plays a pretty small role on outcomes. You should much prefer being rich than smart if your goal is 'success' by most metrics.
"I think you've just got perceptual tuning for the human to human context"
Not at all. I have to learn how to talk very differently to people on both ends of the IQ range. Wealth is a terrible proxy for IQ because it doesn't actually correlate very much due to accidents of birth and interests. Just look at Terrance Tao vs Trump's idiot sons.
What exactly is 'merging' here? Existing formal knowledgebases with LLMs? I don't think that's anywhere near human knowledge and thus ability to make novel connections. And autoformalization is... basically not happening soon, so we're still ultimately bottlenecked there.
Had to read that sentence twice. You really think that there's more people getting scammed via "please tap the build number seven times and then go to extra settings and enable untrusted installs and then go to this website that I will dictate the URL of and you should ignore that install warning" etc etc etc. to install an apk to run software that can barely access more than a simple webpage could, than there are people (like HN'ers) who install apk files from github and f-droid?!
(Also note that "crapware" describes basically every app you find in google's store. I try on occasion, when nobody made an open source this-or-that, and it's such a minefield. If that's the thing you're trying to avoid, I don't know how you could possibly feel positive about a requirement to only use the Play Store for the tech-illiterate)
> more people getting scammed via "please tap the build number seven times and then go to extra settings and enable untrusted installs and then go to this website that I will dictate the URL of and you should ignore that install warning" etc etc etc.
I don't really understand. You seem to be against the 'annoyance' of the protections, but that annoyance is precisely why the scammed count is lower, no?
I certainly believe _more generally_ that the market for scam victims is much bigger than the market for sideloaders, for example.
What I'm against is the mandatory registration to get a key signed by a party we don't elect, who controls all (soft-mandatory^1) devices that aren't controlled by the other party we didn't elect, and both are controlled by a government that we have no say in and is acting increasingly hostile towards everyone but fellow belligerents (Israel, Russia.. seeing a pattern here).
Your "it's just a bit annoying" argument seems irrelevant compared to that, even if it would reduce scams, which I have seen no evidence for or against. Did you find or come across any evidence for it?
> the market for scam victims is much bigger than the market for sideloaders
That makes no sense. Of course the market for "scam victims" is current-earth-population.com minus one (the person doing the scamming); this is a universal constant you're comparing against
If you mean the number of people who would potentially get scammed by being told to do a dozen steps to install some app which can barely do more to aid the scam than a webpage could, then I'm interested in how you end up with those figures!
Given that maybe every 20th person is decently tech-literate and that I have yet to come across a scam where installing software on your phone is a component of it (including via google's; just any kind of mobile software installation), the way I figure the "market sizes" are about 400 million to somewhere around nil
The scams this directly targets are well known and common. Someone gets a phishing message, they have someone install some sort of malware on the device, then their bank accounts are drained into some offshore account never to be seen again.
That's why there's a requirement for restarting the phone and waiting 24 hours.
The restart ends the connection for any remote-access software or phone call that might be driving the operation -- and the 24 hour wait period breaks the "urgency" part of the scam that prevents other people who know better from stopping the vicim from continuing.
I think this is a good way to test a certain kind of capability, but as to whether LLMs would pass such a test, I'm guessing almost certainly not. If you've ever used one for research, it's very 'in' the current literature, whatever that may be. It's an incredible retrieval tool, and it will glibly evaluate any novel ideas that you feed in, but analyses are often incorrect when there's a paucity of directly relevant training data.
Relative to other government contractors, Palantir is pretty good. More so because the bar is typically so low, though.
But that's priced in.
Them featuring in conspiracy theories is just because there's a cultural treadmill for all these things, isn't there? You can't harp on about Raytheon forever. Those are the villans of the past. Back when Bush was the great evil, or something. To get engagement, you need to frame things in the current meta.
Americans who don't like Palantir think (correctly) that the surveillance might affect them. Far fewer seem to care about war crimes committed against people in other countries.
Right but was Booz Allen not dealing in mass surveillance too? There's something that's narratively appealing about Palantir in this context. The name, Thiel as a key figure, the mission statement, the branding. It may even be that they have an image of effectiveness that others don't.
> I don't think any single person I know would say they would exchange replaceable batteries for a 1mm thinner phone, waterproof up to 100m instead of 10m, or a $5 difference in price.
Well, yes it's quite easy to argue against strawmen. I don't know anyone who would favor a built-in shoehorn over a replaceable battery either.
Although on your waterproof point, that's just a single dimension metric used for comms. It's not really about specifically descending to 100m. A 100m rated device responds better to water. In a general sense, it's more robust. Even if I don't go diving.
If your battery is replaceable, you can still decide to throw the phone away and add to the pile of e-waste.
The legislation allows both choices, at the cost of higher prices.
Having a higher price is an incentive to using the phone you have a bit longer by replacing the battery. It’s certainly better than having them be guaranteed e-waste.
reply