I’ve never read it but I did look up the Wikipedia summary after your comment.
I don’t see the similarity? It’s a dystopia run by a maniacal computer and everyone is forced to live underground until the machine collapses for some reason?
> I don’t see the similarity? It’s a dystopia run by a maniacal computer and everyone is forced to live underground until the machine collapses for some reason?
I read that same summary. The similarity is pretty clear: the first step was letting a machine take over all economic and intellectual functions, leaving humanity useless and dependent it.
The question, of course, is why should it inevitably lead to that kind of world, rather than The Culture? Or, to give a more realistic and likely example, something like the Colligatarch from Alan Dean Foster's "The I Inside".
> Everything therefore becomes a hobby or a game. People do things because they enjoy them for their own sake, or because they are endeavours used as vehicles to socialise and enjoy others’ company, or because a shared social belief exists and is cultivated such that doing such and such a thing confers social status.
And the mother in the story:
> Vashti is content with her life, which, like most inhabitants of the world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing second-hand 'ideas'. She enjoys talking to friends but uses her work to defend herself against their invitations to be more social, remaining in her ‘room’ where all her basic needs are met.
She's basically something like an academic reduced to something more like wikipedia researcher while something else has the first-hand ideas, communicating with her circle through facetime/vision pro persona.
They already exist. Glasses used to have heavy (at high prescription numbers) glass elements instead of plastic. HUD glasses can already fall in that weight envelope, with better weight distribution.
World locked rendering isn't a requirement for smartglasses. Some existing ones in glasses for factor do have more limited visual positioning systems. In more obtrusive formfactors they have positioning suitable for world locked.
Of world locked rendering is just a huge waste of power at this point.
for assistant glasses to be useful, you need to know who, what, when, where for each operation that the user cares about. In the experiements that I ran, that took about 35 watts continuous on the headset (using a jetson) and at least 2 big GPU machines in the backend. This was in 2024, so perhaps its not quite as heavy now. but its nowhere near 130mw
In the xreal form factor it is pretty viable. It just needs a bit more resolution, and for more immersive gaming a bit more FOV, what it has FOV wise is fine for screen replacement.
> OpenAI themselves has admitted a weak version of this (that prompts might inadvertedly end up improving the model).
2023:
"The approach also aligned with the company’s broader deployment strategy, to gradually release technologies into the world for people to get used to them. Some executives, including Altman, started to parrot the same line: OpenAI needed to get the “data flywheel” going."
I didn't see his video, but after many years I finally figured that out independently and felt like a fool for it taking so long to realize. That's a real game changer.
It's also possible he shared drafts of the work with someone else, who asked chatgpt to explain it to them with training on. Tao seemed to know lots of details of the work before anything was published, though also worked on the problem in the past with big results so maybe just guessed.
They've pretty much said their own work was heavily agent driven. Levent is in a particularly bad place here because while he probably had a lot of background in the Jacobian Conjecture problem, he made the solution to that one sound like someone asked the question and he just fed it to Fable during the world cup. Whether that nonchalantness was to just seem hip or was to promote Anthropic, which he has stock in, or was just the truth I don't know though. But it makes this one seem similar, when they might have had really had nearly a year of very valuable feedback to the models.
I was referring to the overall pattern of apparently sniffing around for recent mathematical progress then setting the AI on it to see if the problem is now easy enough to solve (if you have the money).
Terrance Tao has lamented this practice as being unhelpful for mathematics, and likely to lead to humans working in private to avoid this.
Tao has also noted that many of these AI math proofs don't really help mathematics (nor does it seem they are intended to), since for many of them the proof was never the point, it was the math expected to be needed to be developed along the way, which the AI solutions don't provide.
> has lamented this practice as being unhelpful for mathematics
A related point is that the actual solution approach is never revealed. What was the role of humans guiding the agents ? was it fully autonomous ? etc. It is in the incentive of the AI labs to trump the powers of the LLM, but in practice it is humans guiding the agents on the overall approach, This is never admitted. For example, in the announcement on NS there was only an output artifact given but no indication of how it was arrived at, and not even a writeup. This is what disappointed many folks as it was done purely for one-upmanship. As other have noted, the benefit is in the journey or process and not in arriving magically at a destination.
I don't think it's as bad as that sounds; in math people work all the time with conjectures they aren't sure if true, and work out a lot of other interesting math based on whether it is or not. Something like Turing's Oracle machine gives lots of interesting math just assuming one could exist, even if it couldn't. It may be that there are things proved we can never come to a human understanding of, but still keep getting interesting math that relies on it that has aspects we can appreciate and enrich our knowledge from.
The vast majority of major global automakers program their vehicles to automatically unlock the doors immediately following a severe crash. I think they just weren't eliding the context and posting the full notes, not as criticism of this: nowhere in the commentary mentions it.
> Which seems to be referring to the unique ability to move the car, which other cars don't have.
Most cars with keys in the ignition/keyfob in the car after a crash have the ability to be moved if they are still operational (a requirement of this one too). I'm not sure about Waymo, the Jaguar one does still have a physical steering column though and isn't fully drive by wire.
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