And when the power lines fall down in rural areas, how will people heat and power their homes? I guess they could buy some batteries, but then they'd sit idle most of the time. Maybe they could find some other profitable use and share the capital cost?
> The people buying the batteries and the government's capital.
The former should be allowed to make their own decisions. I agree that the latter should probably be kept out of this: government is usually not very good at making these decisions. But alas, in many places they play a huge role in the electricity supply and distribution.
> The former should be allowed to make their own decisions.
Yes, but that's how we arrive to local economical maxima that are much, much closer to the global minimum that to the global maximum. The personal decisions aggregate, after all.
People are buying the batteries with their OWN capital, not Govts capital.
You say Govt capital which only benefits private utlities and ALSO say govt/utility should to build out the storage. Not sure what you are trying to say. You sound pretty confused.
In a lot of places the power companies are government owned and the private companies get massive amounts of captial from the government for buildouts.
for single individuals to earn as much as (i assume US$) 150 a day means that the grid is horrendously unbalanced.
hell if I emptied my 30kw into the grid in my state/country at the most expensive time I'd earn AU$21.00
to earn US$150 means either HUGE battery capacity (and transmission capacity) or utterly rediculous power pricing... both mean really lousy power supply and grid design.
I'm all for indipendance but the reality is we live in communities and count on the collective to rise us all up together.
that sort of profit is a clear warning sign of a broken community.
It depends a lot on the market, but before there were lots of batteries this was extremely typical in the Australian grid. You probably just weren't exposed to it as a consumer! Massive price fluctuations were the impetus for one of the first large scale grid batteries in Australia, and the batteries worked really well to solve it. It doesn't happen often, and nobody is getting paid $150 every day for their home battery. It's just for the extreme events.
As more and more batteries are deployed the price swings will decrease.
It's not a "broken community" it's just end consumers being able to help out in times of great grid need and getting compensated fairly for it.
It's more efficient for the grid to be very unbalanced every once in a while, rather than building so much it never happens.
And it's not a sign of a broken community. Those batteries aren't making all that much money on a per-year basis. And the earlier batteries into the system are going to make the most money. The more batteries that get built the smaller the profits will be and the better the entire grid will be.
California rate payers are being forced to essentially pay for fire insurance for CA residents who live in tinderbox areas, by way of PG&E rates, and burying lines that serve widely dispersed populations. That's the big difference. The vast majority of US residents have much lower utility rates.
Be more explicit. What is wrong with this? It's not all the time, it's only in times of extreme need.
Variable pricing like this enables all sorts of cost saving technologies that bring down the cost of the grid and generating power for everyone, by spending a lot for a very short time, instead of building tons of extra large assets that sit mostly idle.
If somebody is providing a service that operates on the whole sale market, they deserve to get paid like all the other generators that are helping to keep the grid running in these times of need.
What’s the actual lock-in, in practice? Seems like the switching cost is minimal, compared to the old days of Windows vs Mac where half your stuff wouldn’t run on the other.
Taking the original of a painting from your house is stealing. Copying is only potentially violating the government-granted limited-time exclusivity that allows you to decide who can copy your work.
BTW I hereby allow you or your browser to copy this comment into your computer’s RAM.
It's telling that you need to fall back to non-creative information in your argument.
Clearly we're talking about the labor of creating a written or visual work, not the contents of your ram. I did not use the word copy either. My interpretation of the parent comment is that it was rationalizing by claiming all creativity is not fully original and therefore must have no rights.
Extrapolated further, this is a collapse of creative works as a profession.
You’re not rude for pointing out the obvious. The parent comment is complaining in bad faith because they want to have free service in perpetuity. Similar to the people complaining about YouTube ads but the options of either paying or not watching YouTube are unimaginable.
Literally every famous open math problem has had >1 mathematicians ask ChatGPT to solve it. Probably greater than >1000 if you count randos. There is no math problem that OpenAI/Anthropic can solve that didn’t have users already try it in Chat/Claude.
> We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models . However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
Because the models are trained on hundreds of billions of user conversations, across more than a billion different humans. The conversations are anonymized and not easily traceable back to a specific user.
It's unknowable and not possible to prove if any one specific conversation contained the insights for solving Navier–Stokes.
We also don't know if the authors unintentionally provided data to OpenAI through alternate means, such as via alternate accounts or model feedback queries.
Anonymized doesn't mean there's no way to know whether it is in there. My ballot is anonymized, but it's known to be in the box because a checkmark was put next to my name when my ID was verified. OpenAI can trivially check their account settings to know what happened to their chats. The fact that they are being vague about this likely indicates that they have already done so and discovered that the data did go into the training set.
Further, given that this is all in the open now, they can search the training data. No way somebody is using some specific unique cutting edge mathematical approach to solve a fluid dynamic problem 99.9% of people have never heard of and it's not locatable. Considering they spent $15,000,000 already on this, they could afford to grep around to be able to state that their hands are clean.
No, it’s genuinely impossible to know how much of Buckmaster’s Codex data is in OpenAI’s training set.
First, the conversations are anonymized, so there's no simple way to inspect the training dataset and identify which specific conversations belong to Buckmaster.
Second, OpenAI uses these anonymized chats to generate synthetic training data, i.e. they fabricate new conversations based on specific conversation patterns where the model performs poorly, and uses these synthetic conversations as training data for future models. The synthetic data could potentially contain some of selections of Buckmaster's original chats, but it is unknowable how his specific writing could have influenced these synthetic data sets or what portion belongs to him. This information is untraceable and effectively double anonymized.
Third, OpenAI explicitly uses user feedback (the thumbs up or thumbs down ratings), as RLHF to train models. However, this feedback is anonymized and stripped of user identifiers. It's not possible to trace a specific feedback to Buckmaster, nor do we know if Buckmaster ever used this feature. I doubt Buckmaster recalls or can provide a list of every time he used this feature over the past year. OpenAI doesn't have one.
Note that the first and second only happen if Buckmaster "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled, which I find unlikely. But that doesn't exclude option three from this list.
Knowability and likelihood are almost orthogonal here. If I commit a crime and perfectly destroy the evidence, my deed may be unknowable. That doesn’t make it more or less likely.
> not possible to prove if any one specific conversation contained the insights for solving Navier–Stokes
It may be. We haven’t seen the researchers’ transcripts. We don’t know what Buckmaster or his co-author uploaded to OpenAI or with what permissions (or if OpenAI actually respects those toggles).
I think OpenAI desperately wants to make a blanket denial that they didn't look at or train on Buckmaster and Alpöge's chat transcripts, but know they cannot, because the data is anonymized.
The fact they can't make a blanket denial triggers everyone's bullshit detectors, and they're getting eviscerated over it.
Again, see the Apple lawsuit. OpenAI has never been constrained by facts in what it can and can’t say.
To the extent anything is setting off my bullshit detector, it’s in the idea that this time is different (Moreover, the idea that we should assume this divergence without evidence.)
OpenAI doesn’t have the benefit of doubt. They shouldn’t for anyone who’s honest and reasonable. That doesn’t mean they’re automatically at fault. But when the twentieth person comes forward and says a pattern is continuing, I’m giving them the preliminary benefit of doubt. It’s a bit extreme to conclude based on that. But it’s far more baseless to swing to the other side and claim we need to clear the table for a serial offender.
I understand that AI is not just cut and paste, but some documents will have more influence than others w/ power law scaling. I would be very surprised if this distribution were not extremely steep for arcane math
Their base model must have been trained with hundreds of trillions of tokens several months ahead, at this point of time, it is impossible to rule out the possibility the model had seen that session at one point of time, and it probably did, without any OpenAI personnels actually know about it.
That is correct. It is possible they didn't opt out and given the timeline and anonymization of data unclear whether a particular conversation would have made it into the training set if they hadn't.
Is it surprising that different groups are working on the same problems? With each new model generation, the LLMs get good enough to solve a new small fraction of open problems. Of course the problems that get solved are going to be the same subset.
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