Mobilization turned out to be extremely unpopular, so they can't just do that without some exceptional cause.
That cause would be NATO attacking Russia. So they're engaging heavily in hybrid warfare, doing stuff like that in Europe. They're tying to provoke some small retaliation from NATO countries.
If that happens, they'll declare that the barbarians are at the gate, and they need a huge mobilization of troops.
But they have no interest in actually fighting against NATO. It would end disastrously for Russia, any way you slice it. Kaliningrad would be completely cut off and surrounded, their Arctic and Baltic sea routes would be hostile.
As a bonus, a potential real war with Russia would increase far-right isolationist popularity in Europe.
Personally I think this is all a play to mobilize a ton of soldiers, send them to Ukraine, and expand their occupied areas before a peace deal comes to the table.
I follow most of what you're saying, but not so much the increase in the popularity of far-right ideology. Surely Russia explicitly positioning themselves as a common enemy of Europe (rather than the current cold war status) would galvanise Europe? Most of the far-right personalities across Europe are very soft on Russia, to say the least.
As it happens, pretty much all far right nationalist parties are friendly with Russia. It would take a huge effort to change that discourse, or to build a new far right party from scratch - and now even without russian botnet support.
Yes it’s complicated. Nationalists aren’t necessarily right or far right. Until a few decades ago, the left were anti-migration and anti-globalisation due to the downward pressure on wages and working conditions. In this current political zeitgeist, the left have abandoned the working class and the right is happy to take their votes.
In a war with Russia, I imagine parties aligned with European strength would fare better. Parties which have previously suggested using kid gloves with Russia will fare worse. I think this implies that some right and left wing parties will not do well.
Lavrov had said it would be a short war if Europe attacks, suggesting they will use nuclear weapons immediately. Russia knows it cannot win a conventional war with Europe.
They don't need a war with Europe for conscription, just to declare war on Ukraine instead of a Special Military Operation. There is pressure on Putin to do this to finish the war quickly, but he is resisting.
My sister discovered that she had a couple of genetical conditions related to her teeth. Amelogenesis imperfecta, and another one. A specialist noticed this when she was doing some other tests, which required that her teeth be dry.
In any case, said dentist that discovered this told her that she should urge any siblings to also get tested. I've bee absolutely meticulous about my teeth, but I've always had problems with them - they simply seem to break and crack far too often, among other things.
I've gone to three different dentists since that, and they've all been completely uninterested finding out more. All told me "I recommend that you go to the dentist that diagnosed your sister".
It should be said that where I live, Norway, you get heavily subsidized treatment for damage related to such conditions - so we're potentially talking about quite a lot of money.
Other than that, I've been quite happy with my experience (with dentists).
The people making bank are those creating these startups.
Their startups get acquired, or they get acqui-hired because of the founders and core people, who in turn have some pedigree which send strong signals.
If you look at the pattern, it is roughly:
- Top ML/AI researchers from the past 10-15 years
- Top ML/AI engineers from top labs or companies
Those above people were hired by FAANG companies or AI startups.
But most important of all, it isn't a overnight success. Many of these have been going at it for 10+ years now. Of course some are relatively young, as in having joined Anthropic or OpenAI more recently (past few years), and launching their own startup after 2022.
You'd be surprised how many people, and I'm not talking about 80 year olds, have a hard time using search engines, or general knowledge of finding information.
If you're not careful, it is also super easy to extrapolate your own skills - and your peers skills - to the rest of the population.
Try being technical support to some non-tech people over the phone, it'll really open your eyes to the general computer knowledge of people.
Before I went to college, I worked as an electrician apprentice. One of the guys I worked with was 50+, and had worked many jobs over his life. He told me that from 18 to to his late 20s he worked a factory job. Then, one year, they stared rolling down production. The company had decided to move production to China.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
Historically I agree with you, but considering how many people reacted negatively to the mathematicians' concerns about development in ai, and people calling them hobbyists, it seems to me someone is trying to create infighting as always. Seems like the reaction may yet again be the mentioned aw-shucks, but they'll find something else to do
I have, too, observed some sense of schadenfreude in the comments on recent headlines about layoffs in the white collar sector.
It is hard to know if it is just bot traffic to sow discord, or if plenty of people are genuinely delighted that office workers are finding themselves unemployed.
Certain sectors and jobs will last much longer. Like healthcare.
But, I think the cold hard truth is that if you're a professional worker, with a six figure salary, the idea of going back to school, and working with something completely unrelated to your interest - all while taking a steep pay cut...it is unthinkable for many.
But how long that "much longer" would be? 5 years? That is the time you usually need make at least some entry career. In the past you usually could say that career variants can be safe. But now is seems there are no safe variants.
Yes, but then there is a new industry to being in. This time it is different: there won't be any place where just having a brain that works is going to be a source of income.
I like that US Big-AI companies are M&A'ing startups left and right, while the Chinese competitors are hounding them incessantly. Just don't know how this will work out financially in the long term.
That's precisely the opposite of what Nvidia is trying to do. Nvidia wants open and local to succeed so that their customer base is as large and diverse as possible. Some commenters here can't see that because they're blinded with cynicism.
At least here in Scandinavia, the US is quite popular for the most ambitious and driven students that are interested in entrepreneurship. They apply to top US schools on either coasts via exchange programs, or a full degree, exactly because the schools are so close to the startup scene. Imposing a $100k fee to hire those, would effectively make such types of graduates very unattractive to startups.
One natural step of AI usage, the way I see it, is that even mediocre researchers can use AI as a harness to become prolific researchers.
So if you're part of a pure "human only" researchers that publish 1/10th of what the rest are doing, how are you going to survive?
The more prolific researchers will eat your grants for lunch.
This is exactly the same thing a lot of software devs are going through now. AI models have lifted up EVERYONES ability to produce code, so there's simply no premium anymore for those that will only code by hand. And the people paying their salary are asking why they aren't more productive, when even business analyst Joe is pumping out new products left and right.
People will pay good money for artisanal, hand-crafted clothing, or watches, or cars, or whatever, but I doubt that the market for artisanal mathematics is now or will ever be very large.
It's just stubbornness, in the end, that is manifesting as a kind of gatekeeping Luddism. I see the same thing in my Mastodon feed from folks in the software engineering world, particularly people who have a great love for writing code and hold it as a core part of their identities. I understand being irritated at a machine having been trained on (potentially, inter alia) your work with no compensation to you, and now it is perhaps better at (some of) what you do than you are; or maybe companies are now making a lot of money off of something that benefited from your contributions; but I find it extremely improbable that we will be able to refuse our way out of further progress now that so much money has been invested and so much momentum has been gathered.
I don't think I feel any discomfort about a machine being better at anything that I can do than I am at it. Maybe it's because I'm a mediocre person. I personally think that if there's something that I'm better at than a machine, then we need to build a better machine. Imagine what I'd be able to do if I used that machine!
There are many things you are better at than a machine. Giving love for example. I’d bet your dog or a child would rather spend 5 seconds with you than 5 hours with an LLM.
Every single day now, for close to 4 years, ever since ChatGPT 3.5 was released - there's been people dismissing AI progress. Every step of the way.
It is entirely possible that one day progress just stops or slows down, but with current evidence, I don't find that too likely - at least not in the near future. The sheer amount of resources being put into this (AI) race is mind-boggling.
So while past performance does not guarantee future results, I'm just going to kick back, and assume that many of the current issues will be fixed with future models.
The progress is clearly not uniform though, it’s shaped by how amenable things are to collecting data and verifying computation. I think writing clear and cogent prose is harder to quantify than formally verifiable logic, and this is why progress in coherent communication has been slower than raw problem solving ability
Maybe this is just a matter of what model developers choose to invest training resources in, but I don’t think it’s inevitable unless clarity is made a higher priority
only addresses it in a magical thinking "lines on a graph mean that tomorrow Claude will be so entertaining it'll make everyone on earth die in a stupor Infinite Jest style" sense. capabilities have increased while writing has either stagnated or gotten worse and more impenetrable. if you think quality of writing is going to fall to the bitter lesson that's fine you just actually have to make that argument, and how it squares with the fact that AI seem to prefer their own dross to human writing, and that RLHF is increasingly being replaced by RLAIF.
Mobilization turned out to be extremely unpopular, so they can't just do that without some exceptional cause.
That cause would be NATO attacking Russia. So they're engaging heavily in hybrid warfare, doing stuff like that in Europe. They're tying to provoke some small retaliation from NATO countries.
If that happens, they'll declare that the barbarians are at the gate, and they need a huge mobilization of troops.
But they have no interest in actually fighting against NATO. It would end disastrously for Russia, any way you slice it. Kaliningrad would be completely cut off and surrounded, their Arctic and Baltic sea routes would be hostile.
As a bonus, a potential real war with Russia would increase far-right isolationist popularity in Europe.
Personally I think this is all a play to mobilize a ton of soldiers, send them to Ukraine, and expand their occupied areas before a peace deal comes to the table.
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