I’ve never been more baffled by an Apple event in my life.... We in Norway are part of the first batch of the rollout for the new AI/language feature?!??!?! Something’s fishy. Somethings up!
If the fold make up 4% of sales, but with 2x or more margin vs mini, it might be worth it for them. Seems like a product that MIGHT survive due to that.
+ the pricing anchor drags the others models up and makes them look "better value" ... vs a lower price model selling 4% but anchoring the price downwards.
For anybody wondering what this is about... It’s a newspaper article about a famous old artwork coming back to London from France for the first time in 950 years, with some musing about how history gets distorted over time (history is written by the winners and all that).
I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
The problem is that, as A/I themselves explained (https://www.inventati.org/who/collective), they worked hard to ensure that they do not possess any evidence of or data about who is using their infrastructure.
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
You go from "I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information..." to "That’s at best a simplistic framing."?
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars here in the Czech Republic, so "blood free" actually seems like a good characterisation. Sometimes the system just works.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
It is strange. I certainly wouldn't think your house, having been isolated from western society over decades by a communist regime and heavily-patrolled borders, would respond to social activism in foreign countries. But maybe there's just some secret house mycelium for sharing progressive ideas that I don't know about.
Theoretical aphorisms can't override the facts of recorded history. If the harsh border control and cultural isolation of the East Bloc ran counter to Marxist principles, then you can complain to the dead leaders of the USSR, but that's about it.
Check the history of the different communist movements. Maybe an entrypoint would be this: today there is the Fourth International. The USSR was born out of the Third International with Lenin, and the Fourth International opposed/opposes the USSR's practices and because of that the USSR hunted them down using their agents whom eventually killed Trotski.
People who want bloodshed tend to say this… It’s melodramatic.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
I have not glorified violence nor called to do violence to anyone. You seems to have misunderstood: I wish for violence to stop. It was always the oppressed's blood that was spilled by the establishment through police force every time they protested in the streets, and every time they were uncomfortable. Take the workers day as an example. It's egregious to me to call a protest violence.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
Interesting quick read/take. Especially the LinkedIn analogy. Even though I am WAY high on the AI fanboy and low on the LinkedIn side of the bell curve, I can see what the author mean.
I read the title and thought to myself, "The chance that this is a well-grounded, unbiased, and robust design is close to 0." So I started reading...
And having read it, what a terrible piece of science slop this is!
There is no observed adoption dataset used to establish that this mechanism explains LLM use better than alternatives such as usefulness, falling prices, workplace requirements, or independent discovery. The behavior they talk about could describe many socially adopted technologies or practices. Its applicability does not identify anything distinctively viral or harmful about LLMs.
The cognitive decline is assigned, not measured or independently derived. They calculate population competence by averaging those assigned scores across the groups. Consequently, moving people into lower-scoring groups lowers the average by construction. The dramatic fall from 1 to approximately 0.425 in their example is a model output conditional on those choices, not evidence of a 57% real-world cognitive decline.
They explicitly define competence as what the human can do when external support is withdrawn, excluding the total capability of the human/AI system. This cannot settle whether the technology improves overall performance or human welfare. And they provide no measurement protocol clarifying exactly which supports could be removed for a fair comparison (for instance, how does this compare to Wikipedia or electricity). They don’t do this because of an agenda, so allow me to assert something with just as little evidence as the authors provide for their conclusion: This is obvious bias, and they are designing the study to get the result they want, and they don’t care about scientific truth, just about getting their paper published and attracting attention.
And the “runaway” stuff is just not supported by the model. The language about equilibrium as a parameter changes is not automatically evidence of an imminent, rapid societal collapse! it is PURE conspiracy-level rhetoric. Just put two things in the same sentence and hope people think they are related. This is misleading language at best, and willful manipulation at worst.
This is a BASIC failure of the minimal requirement for something to be called scientific. If there had been even a trace of a genuine attempt at Popperian falsification, the current research design would never have gotten past review. This is cargo cult science, it LOOKS like scientific research, but it’s not even close to scientific.
EVERYTHING I hate about modern research on full display! And I am losing respect for the HN community more and more, because only terrible studies with sensationalist claims and titles get attention. This is tabloid-level quality, just with a direct link to the article instead of a dumbed-down intermediate write-up. If anybody read the actual paper, this would not get posted ANYWHERE. But “LLMs are a cognitive virus” is what gets posted.....
Dude... Do you even know what a position paper is? Do you even understand that there is more to science than just the empirical part? That there is a huge side of ruminating concepts, connecting them with existing literature, etc.? This paper did not pass peer review, indeed; it is a preprint. Do you even know what that is? The authors uploaded it to a preprint server as is routinely done with millions of papers every month. It was not publicized by any of the authors. It was autonomously circulated by the whole online community without the authors even trying to push for it (that, in an ecosystem in which attention is bought with deep pockets). The fact that attention on this paper skyrocketed comes from an actual interest in its content from the community, including scientists.
If you don't like it, don't consume it. And spare us all the hatred from your ill-calibrated understanding...
This comment and the one above from astrobiased feel like coming into a messy codebase, and it’s more work to sort it out than it would have been to write it from scratch.... And since I actually do intelligence testing as a clinical psychologist, I have experience with this in both practice and theory. So now I’m going to waste an hour because I just have to respond to “something is wrong on the internet.”.
Chollet's distinction is useful. High performance on known tasks is not the same thing as efficient adaptation to a novel task. Prior knowledge and training data can buy skill. That is a central point of On the Measure of Intelligence. But it does not follow that current frontier progress is only "coverage-driven competence." That is a hypothesis. It is not a result established by Chollet's framework.
"Overfitting at scale" is also the wrong term. A model that learns broad representations and applies them successfully to unseen examples is generalizing. The relevant concern is whether apparent novelty is actually inside the effective training distribution, not whether the model is "overfit."
There is also an unstated premise here: that adding broad knowledge and skills cannot improve the machinery used for novel problem solving. I do not see a basis for assuming that. Learned representations, abstractions, reasoning patterns, and cross-domain analogies can themselves support transfer to new tasks. Whether this becomes sufficient for general intelligence is an open question with insufficient data. But its a perfectly valid hypothesis right now that, given enough domain knowledge and symbolic reasoning examples, LLM COULD maybe "Grok" AGI at a certain critical threshold.
And ARC-AGI-3 was specifically designed around novel abstract environments that require exploration and adaptation. Astra scores 99.9% with OpenAI's context-preserving Provider Adapter, and ARC reports that Astra constructed compact symbolic models of unfamiliar environments. That does not prove AGI, but it points in that direction more so than the other way around.
Gc roughly maps to acquired knowledge. Gf roughly maps to reasoning in relatively novel situations. Naming those two categories does not tell us whether increasing acquired knowledge and learned abstractions in an AI can improve Gf-like behavior. That causal question is exactly what is disputed.
And "Frontier models probably have maxed out crystallized intelligence" is just obviously wrong, unless you think they have been able to dig up every a scrap of paper with knowledge/information on it in the entire world, AND that there is no more useful knowledge to be generated left in the universe.
And the statement that intelligence and creativity are independent is simply wrong. A meta-analysis of 112 studies and 34k participants found a positive correlation of about r .25 between intelligence and divergent thinking. It also found that using g, Gf, or Gc did not eliminate that relationship. Creative achievement has a smaller but still positive meta-analytic association with intelligence, around r = .16. These are distinct constructs, not independent constructs.
And this is just a bad take: "AIs are terrible at creativity". At best that depends on which creativity, and I think its straight up wrong. On divergent thinking tasks, the operationalization behind every ADHD study you could cite, LLMs score above most humans, with the top humans still ahead. If you means Big-C, paradigm-shifting creativity, that is a different construct and none of the ADHD evidence transfers to it.
And if I where to say what I subjectively feel and see.... I have ABSOLUTELY no idea how people can say that we are not seeing sparks of creativity from AIs already. If a PERSON produced some of the music, solutions or deductions that I have seen AIs do, people would have NO problem celebrating it as extremely creative.
And finally, the ADHD claim is also, at best, overstated and just as often debunked. There is some evidence that higher subclinical ADHD trait scores, often survey studies only, are associated with better performance on some divergent-thinking measures. But a review of 31 studies did not find a consistent creativity advantage for people with clinical ADHD, and it found no evidence of better convergent thinking.
Okay, I’m done… And nobody noticed that I’m not doing my job here.
For me a basic test of A.I. creativity is give the A.I. chapter 1 of a novel it has not seen and ask it to write chapter 2, then compare the quality to the original author's chapter 2. The A.I. is always terrible at this in terms of matching the author's level of quality.
I would think that’s the opposite of creativity. Rather, I would label that as pattern matching and prediction capability.
Why box in creativity basically as the ability to mimic someone else who is creative? Why not choose something that better matches the definition of creativity (the ability to make new things, think of original ideas, or show imagination that is novel, useful, or pleasing)?
And even then, I am assuming the premise that the original novels are good and creative, especially chapter 2. Most novels are not very creative.
If it could make 5 different versions of chapter 2, all with different directions for the story, and all with novel and interesting developments, wouldn’t that be a better definition of creativity than “can it read chapter 1 and be able to copy style and deduce/predict what the author is going to do in chapter 2”?
And also, that’s only a subset of creativity (storytelling). I’ve met plenty of people who are terrible at writing and storytelling but can come up with the most impressive and novel solutions to a practical problem instantly.
Final thought: I have been following the development in the anime AI generation scene for a while now. It’s not even close to anything anyone would call creative or even OK quality. But it’s also massively impressive that it’s moving in that direction really fast. And if you watch enough, you are going to start to see some truly creative sparks. And some of the mainstream stuff that gets created and labeled as creative… really... How many isekai series with the same story have humans not made already?
> If it could make 5 different versions of chapter 2, all with different directions for the story, and all with novel and interesting developments, wouldn’t that be a better definition of creativity than “can it read chapter 1 and be able to copy style and deduce/predict what the author is going to do in chapter 2”?
If I like the novel, an alternative version where things happen differently would be fine.
The problem isn't that it's different. The problem is quality.
A lot of Isekai stories are crap but you can still rank them in terms of the author's ability or inability to have a creative POV that elevates the material.
I think “what I individually like” is a poor measurement of creativity, at least alone.
And yes you can rank quality. My point was that if you made two bell curves of the distribution quality and creativity of all new manga, The one for “AI slop manga” allready started overlapping with “normal human manga”.
That’s just a fancy way of saying the absolute best AI slop is at the level of the absolute worst human creation.
The interesting thing is that the AI slop curve clearly is moving to the right every month. Where it will stop tho, impossible to say.
Is chapter 1 of a novel really enough context to generate a chapter 2 of sufficient quality to match up to an author who spent a good amount of time planning out an entire story and whose manuscript probably went through a lot of revisions?
I don't necessarily just feed it chapter 1. (And chapter length varies between novels).
And no I don't think asking the A.I. to write the next 2000 words would require it to have the entire novel planned out. Not all writers even outline in advance.
Here is the entire article compressed from 21k characters to 176:
It’s easier to get away with large margins and not spawn competitors if nobody scrutinizes you, and it’s easier not to get scrutinized if you are small or the domain is boring.
Not a knock on the article. It’s nice to double-click on a concept and explore it with examples and from many angles. But for me, it would have been easier to start with that framing, because it took way too long to understand the purpose of the article, atleast for me.
Yes, I did too, and I actually thought about "lossy vs. lossless compression" when I wrote the comment. That's why I said that I was not trying to denigrate the article, but when I understood that this was the gist of the article, it clicked better. So it was bad framing to call it "compressed to." I should have said, "I found this summary to be a helpful framing to read before the main article."
I cofounded a company that ultimately got rolled up (Matasano, into NCC Group US) and think this is not a really good summary of the article. Rollup strategy is interesting!
That’s why I had to summarize it. Because the article is a bit all over the place. It tried to jam in in way to many angles on one topic “invisible companies”.
I reread listened to the article now and looked up some research due to the things that bugged me.
The summary I made is what’s uniquely interesting about such firms. But from a rollup perspective it’s just one of potential mechanism for a firm to be on the cheap. And even if you think that is a usefull angle on the topic, it’s still covering just a the subset of such firms that are invisible AND has good margins AND the owner is willing to sell on the cheap due to ignorance of lack of buyers so they can’t get good offerings.
I could have expanded the summary with: “ and because nobody’s bidding, they’re cheap to buy up and consolidate, which is where rollups make their money.“
The problem with that is that it a claim, and it’s at best not well founded and maybe even wrong. There are many failures in the same industries the article celebrates. Loewen Group rolled up funeral homes and went bankrupt in 1999, the 1990s physician-practice rollups collapsed, Waste Management itself restated years of earnings in 1998 in one of the largest accounting scandals of its era. None of that is in the article.
And many of the article’s examples (marina software, niche aircraft parts) are markets too small to support a second firm at efficient scale. If so, nobody enters not because they didn’t look but because they looked and correctly declined.
So yea, the article is a bit scatterbrained and much more speculative than it pretends.
As a European, or in general, this make me happy. Since the more diversity the better.
Tho it’s hard not to not to think of this as a big fish in a small pond situation (when talking about best model in EU).
reply