Bro, are we reading the same book? The book is totally uncritical of the subject and paints him like the second coming of christ. It feels like GDM wanted a canonization of Hassabis, and the writer simply obliged. Also, how does everything that GDM did keep coming back to some vague ideas in the guy's thesis? He is a great leader, no doubt, but him winning the Nobel Prize was just a huge joke.
Out of all the heads of AI orgs out there, Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.
Not a “bro” (there are women on this site you know), and perhaps you’re missing the British understatement in my “maybe a little too uncritical of its subject” line. Obviously the book is totally biased in favor of Hassabis and Deepmind. That doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting read and that doesn’t mean the connection between his experience in the games industry and Deepmind’s early success isn’t there. And I think the book does highlight his most critical skill, which is projecting a Reality Distortion Field to get other smart people to believe in things he has in mind that are still very speculative bets.
Like I already said, bias is inevitable in a book where the writer gets access (to the point of interviewing Hassabis in a North London pub every month), but the benefit to readers is that you do get a lot more insight into what makes the guy tick than you would in a book written by an outsider. I certainly learned a lot and just because I did doesn’t mean I’m buying into some cult of tech hero worship.
Oh wow, you blow my mind with your linguistic erudition; I had no idea it was possible to use male-gendered terms in a generic way! Well, all is forgiven, then.
Seriously, just... don't? This isn’t some woke political thing and I dislike excessive policing of language but damn it, there are limits. "Guys" I'll let pass no problem, maybe even "dude" too on a good day. At "bro" I will take a stand, thank you very much.
You're just showing your age. I can't stand it but my daughter says "Bro" to me and my wife. As a 40 year old Californian I've come to accept it as this generation's "dude" or "man" (as in "man, that sucks"), sadly.
I'm genuinely fascinated and confused by what's going on in this thread, as apparently British and American English speakers misunderstand each other.
If I understand correctly, we've got:
libraryofbabel says "maybe a little too uncritical" ... but that was supposed to be British snark that actually meant "it's a big problem that it's not at all critical"
Then, moab says "Bro" as a pejorative, because he took the original "uncritical" comment as literal rather than sarcastic...
And then libraryofbabel objects to "bro" not because it was used as a pejorative (which maybe she doesn't understand that it is in this context?), but because she interprets it as gendered (which maybe it is in British usage?)
I think libraryofbabel and moab are actually in agreement about the book, and but have both misunderstood the other's sarcasm. Maybe we really do need the /s usage.
I am still in my bed of pain, and you summoned me from the after-public-life of attempted recovery.
> I had no idea it was possible to use male-gendered terms in a generic way
This is just sarcastic, right? "Male gendering" is just a use, no gender is involved in plain terming (outside the obvious exception of intentional gendering)... "Wo-man" specifies "/sensitive/ man", but there is no gender in "man", in "having a mind"... "Human", i.e. "heartly", is not gendered - yet some languages typically correlate derivations like French "homme" with male in default understanding... This should be clear, but just to be sure.
> bro
To the best of my recollection, in the IE roots "brother" is "who assists in the rites" - not necessarily gendered. (Some add that the idea is "supporter".) The suggestion from the term is that of the "brotherhood" - which is not gendered (the idea of fraternity is not gendered). "Sister" should instead mean "welcome" (to some studies): not gendered in this case; others interpret it as gendered ("one's girl" - this is what Etymonline proposes).
> "Guys" I'll let pass no problem, maybe even "dude" too on a good day
That's odd. You wouldn't mind being called "a generic Italo- or possibly French ("Guido" or "Guy")"*; you wouldn't mind being called a "doodle", which has a connotation of "simpleton" - and you refuse "brother", which basically means to imply "getting close to you" (as an opening from the speaker)?
* Edit: Yes, also the explosion of the term and the non-national derivation from "Guy Fawkes" (from the celebration that involved displays of Guy Fawkes ragdolls) should be remembered. Still not precisely complimentary, I'd say.
Language is intersubjective (its meaning is in the minds of the participants). Referring to the history or composition of a word is interesting but entirely insufficient to justify its use.
I often quote what we do in the server-client relation: interpret loosely but express correctly.
It is not just a way of communication: language is one of the factors behind thought: hence, its care must be cared for and promoted.
Sure, also the context and the communication need have a weight. But without compromising into conformism (as in, "doing it wrong because people do").
> its meaning is in the minds of the participants
Awareness has its benefits (the greatest understatement I have ever written); licence has its costs.
> entirely insufficient to justify its use
Why. The competent will always use tools differently than the layman and the amateur. Again the server client (and always the need of good thought in the background): you will express as best as you can and try to be clear (communicatively efficient) within that framework.
Heh I thought like you until we had kids. The 6th graders now are all "bro this," "bro that." And it's not even the usual English "bro," it's a slightly Aussified "broah" like it has a weird umlaut. I resigned to just roll with it. "Begging the question," though, that's a hill I will die on.
Now duly supposing you are not ironic (all ages and paths come here):
You call people "brother"; "brother" means "supportive" (and is used for "openness", "closeness"); if you want to be close and supporting to people, if you want to be an asset (not a liability), you will have to cultivate yourself, to get the wisdom required. Erudition is not yet wisdom, but coupled with the good intention to learn the important things it surely helps.
>Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.
Wait, 'unrealistically sunny'? You better not be talking about Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, because we're all screwed if so.
Then again, the western AI landscape has become somewhat stale recently. Claude and Gemini may have cute names, but they all pale in comparison to The Golden God.
I'm not sure I agree. They're just essay prompts. One could write a bad essay that takes itself too seriously given the prompts, but one could also write a powerful essay starting from any of these prompts. I don't really see where you get the conclusion that students matriculating from these places have recently begun to be smoke-blowers that while possessing detailed knowledge of various arcana fail to produce anything useful.
It’s not about highly specific knowledge: none of these questions are justifiable for a graduate level program, they are better served as prompts for essays that Americans write in their college applications. With these questions you are not going to be engaging with anything particularly deep, but you may produce something that sounds deep. But sounding deep and having actual depth are very different things, and the latter can often look very boring or painstaking, whereas the former always appears profound—and it seems like all of these questions are meant to help the student produce something “profound,” not necessarily something thoughtful or difficult.
All Souls College doesn't have any students, graduate or otherwise. It's primarily a place where people can conduct research into any topic, most often in the humanities.
It frequently hosts journalists, politicians, lawyers, etc, who have had successful careers outside of academia and who may have no academic qualifications other than an undergraduate degree, and sometimes no degree at all.
I think the prompts being "easy" in this way is sort of the point. An applicant can demonstrate their mastery of language and the topics they select, producing an essay that goes far beyond the obvious leading direction (which most of the questions have).
The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.
Is anyone surprised? I'm reminded of how I felt during the NFT craze. LLMs are extremely powerful when used with deliberate care. Gas Town is the exact opposite of what is needed to actually do useful things in prod. I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.
> are extremely powerful when used with deliberate care. Gas Town is the exact opposite of what is needed to actually do useful things in prod.
This judgement feels premature.
We really don't have any idea what is possible. The wheels within wheels, epicycles within epicycles model of agentic loops hasn't really been deeply explored and we just don't know where they might go.
I too share your instinct that human steering helps, helps a lot. But I've found I can keep using less of it, as I setup better parameters, as I improve conducing the LLM into good paths. The idea that an LLM could sit up top and help try not one idea at a time but try many things, then pick and cobble together next goes: that is madly madly madly exciting to me.
I don't want to keep being the bandwidth limiter in this system: I want to scale out. I haven't been following close or trying but I tend to think while total hands off is not the way, having LLMs that can cover a lot of terrain, explore a lot of solution spaces and directions, then assess how to put it together & what to take forward, and other practices of agents watching agents, has enormous potential.
Deliberate care relies on pre-obtained wisdom, and often, the human biases kind of suck and aren't they good. We aren't great at burning down our systems enough, at Chad Fowler Phoenix Architectures. I think the AI's lack of over deliberation and it's ability to try vastly more could be a huge advantage, could show diversity triumphing over specific crafted intent.
this is why transparency matters with anything that touches cloud AI. if your routing user prompts through any API, users should know exactly whats being sent, where it goes, and whether it gets stored or used for training. Burying that in terms of service isnt good enough
> I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.
Shit coin aside, I don't get the hate for Gastown, we all know its theoretically plausible and he's giving it a shot. We get value either way, either we learn its not just theory or we get to watch it burn in the flames of a legal/financial/security/maintenance nightmare for its practitioners.
Because he should know better? Because it’s obviously a shit show but he keeps on being very vocal about his shit show? Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
> Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
It's industry-relevant. This is what the industry is now. All in two short years.
he's doing it in the open. Its instructive for us all either way.
> he keeps on being very vocal about his shit show?
I'm not really sure what this complaint is. You want someone doing something to not.... write a blog about it?
> Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
I think I've seen around 2 posts, one the original gastown one and then the gascity one. Is two posts in like a year too much or do I miss a midday rush where the front page is all Yegge?
Many people are trying to make this thing, this is the one we can all see. I'd rather have the visible one remain visible because it gives us a useful data point and/or entertainment.
I’m reminded of the Carl Rogers therapy app that was developed in the 80s.
People would type in their problems and how they were feeling. The application had very very simple logic that would follow up with a set series of statements or questions. Things like “that sounds tough” and “how does that make you feel?”.
People reported great satisfaction, even if they knew that the application had no smarts behind it. Because of course the whole time the magic of therapy lies in verbalizing your problems, with very little actively done by the therapist.
Now you can pay an LLM subscription for a service that likely produces worse results since it is tuned to be aggressively (and insidiously) sycophantic.
Digital goods- like digital rights for movies, games, etc. only none of the big players would ever give up their walled gardens/licenses instead of ownership for content etc.
"Muse Spark is available now, and Contemplating mode will be rolling out gradually in meta.ai."
How does one get their hands on these models? They are not open-source, right? I go to meta.ai, but it's just a chat interface---no equivalent to codex or claud code? Can you use this through OpenCode? Is meta charging for model access, or is the gathering of chat data a sufficiently large tithe?
If Microsoft is a select partner, maybe they could shove it into Copilot for VS or something, but yeah, I'm wondering the same, maybe Apple could be one of their partners too?
I appreciate that they build this stuff for their own benefit, but I don't want to feed even more of my private info. Hopefully the models will become public or lead to equivalent models from other sources.
That would be my question also. I like it when companies have easy to sign up for, pay as you go models. Being able to buy $5 worth of tokens and get an API key - in less than a few minutes - is ideal.
I hope "OpenAI" gets the proverbial sword in the nuts once we get a change of government in this country. Probably unrealistic to hope for. Can a company be more hypocritical after openly bribing the pedophile in charge of this country?
How does Brockman sleep at night? These guys used to seem like standup ethical guys. It seems no amount of intellectualism is enough to ward off the poison of wealth.
I've also noticed that he is the CTO of the one of the most important tech companies in the world, and none of his tweets are remotely technically interesting - just banalities.
You would think he might have something interesting technical to say... but no.
It's the other way around, people who are good people will "drop" from the race way before they get to this stage.
So it's more that only psychopaths will continue to push up the mountain when they already have many hundreds of lifetimes worth of wealth. Imagine being in that situation and still wanting to be involved in backstabbing power games rather than enjoy time with your kids.
I think he is mostly explaining the experience of many a student, which finds themselves, especially in the first few years, with very large class sizes and minimal interactions with professors. It's not that the professors don't do any teaching, but that your first two years probably feel like a scam, especially if there are many general requirements not tied to your major.
I've pulled a few thousand cups of long espresso from this guy since we bought it two years ago. Much, much nicer and lower maintenance than a boiler machine. If one wants, you can go deep down the rabbit hole of heat control, etc. but even as a "just boil water and make espresso" machine it works great, with no fuss.
Unfortunately, after buying this thing I can't justify buying other coffee objects that are beautiful but would probably make worse coffee than the robot, e.g., the Moccamaster and other drip machines.
This is a bad take. The article makes it clear that most of them will lose money on the venture, and the reason the prices are high are due to status-mining chinese elites and traditional-medicine paranoiacs in vietnam. It's a pretty dismal situation.
If everyone lost money nobody would do it. Are they losing money because it's fundamentally unworkable or because it's illegal which makes it hard to do in a "professional" manner and therefore incurs efficiency penalties?
Your average 22yo isn't doing something like this with his buddies. Between the equipment, expertise, consumables, etc, etc, it's clearly the kind of thing that's organized and financially backed by someone (i.e. like most small business). So while most may lose money, we don't know if it's a "send out three teams and one winner pays for two losers" type situation.
The way I see it these mammoth bits are far more likely to be preserved if used as home decor or whatever somewhere in China than if they wind up rotting away when (let's be real here, probably not an "if") the permafrost melts or in some mine's tailings pile when some other industry comes through. If this was all above the table there'd be more ancillary industry around it too. Sure the tusk might be cost prohibitive but why can't every highschool biology department have a "worthless" femur or jaw or backbone segment? Oh, because it's illegal so "less profitable stuff" (i.e. same reason the cartel doesn't move low density product) like that gets discarded, that's why.
Out of all the heads of AI orgs out there, Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.
reply