While I see lots of discussion about AI solving these problems, I feel like there's a more sinister undercurrent that's is less discussed - about who did the solving. It wasn't academics empowered by AI, but OpenAI themselves.
I feel like it's a sign of what's to come - large AI companies with resources academia never had, at some point deciding that selling access to AI is not as important as just doing the research themselves with models inaccessible to anyone else. The end game is all scientific advancement will be done by one or two companies, who will reap all the profits. Why would they give access to a model that develops a cure for cancer when they could develop the cure themselves and get all the money?
(Kind of like Amazon coming out with their own products - use the greater community for ideas, then become a competitor at a scale they often cannot match).
100%. Thinking tasks cost money now. Some colleagues and I were having this very conversation this morning. Universities don't have the resources to access unlimited compute to do this kind of work. There are a lot of very cool projects being done but it's always like I'm spending 50k in tokens for X project.
The Dark Forest era of the Information Age. Everyone trying to keep things as secret as possible. I wonder if private intranets will be more widespread in the future.
I think you are right to note the undercurrent missing of "empowering" the people doing the solving.
This is in notable contrast to the "PC revolution" in the late 70s/early 80s, the marketing was all about equipping people, empowering individuals. It was a "personal" computer after all, not a big mainframe owned by corporate... designed to make you more powerful.
That messaging is wildly absent from the EA/SV-centric LLM/AI boom.
Instead it's about replacing you, the singularity, inevitability, fear-mongering, etc. And there is much more of a flavor of information asymmetry to the business model because of the Internet connectivity and SaaS structure to it all designed to enable the fastest possible feedback loops for the inventors combined with a bunch of pinkie promises with no actual controls possible on the user side at least for the frontier large models. What exactly did OpenAI peek at when doing Navier-Stokes and do they even know or would you trust them to tell you? You are right, it is a very different vibe.
Indeed. I think this will ultimately require government intervention and regulation to keep it from destabilizing and monopolizing the entire economy. They’ll have to make AI more like a public utility than a private SaaS subscription.
Mathematics is much easier that way to train. Science in general. Governments will again need to become powerhouses of resources for compute to generate public research.
I feel it would be effective and prudent to protest the current use of AI and to effectively unionize and ostracize AI use until many of these demands are met. The companies that own the models and the infrastructure will never be more vulnerable.
They have fired a salvo. Fire Back.
Trump already spilled the beans on this. They want to just dump public money into these companies they can buy calls on and end the whole research model as we know it, replacing it with what exactly, they don't care as long as they can skim off the trillions spent on research.
Such a depressing time to be a knowledge worker with domain expertise.
What if the trend of open models being a few months behind the frontier continues to hold true?
Wouldn't it be nice if anybody could cure their cancer from home, all you have to buy is some time on the mainframe and send off an order to a chemical company
I also feel like state-sponsored inference is inevitable. Just like fiber and 3G, I suspect Asia will get there ahead of the west yet again.
> Literally the whole universe, including your brain that exists within it, is to our current knowledge a Turing computer
A Turing machine is an abstract mathematical model that is not, as far as I know, physically realizable in the finite universe. A human brain cannot "be" a Turing machine.
"Behaves like" or "can be modeled by"? Possibly, although still not proven. But it cannot "be" one.
Finite machines are a subset of all possible Turing machines. Every implementation is a "be", Turing machine is a mathematical concept. Your laptop is one, many things accidentally become one (eg C++ templates). The universe as best as we know is one. Whether you prefer modeled by one or is one, the fact is, to our current knowledge, the workings of the universe doesn't need anything more powerful than a Turing computer, and the equivalence principle states that all Turing computers have equal power of computability. If the universe is, as is most probable, finite, then things become even easier, that should be a more manageable class of Turing computers than the set of all Turing computers.
I don't necessarily disagree, although there's a lot of "ifs" and "to our knowledge". The main thing I disagree with is identity.
If you want to claim that the evolution of the universe can be modeled using a Turing machine/finite state machine, that's probably not terribly far fetched, and I would somewhat agree. But it's a large jump to say "can be modeled by" is equivalent to "is one".
Various physical processes can be modeled by equations, but the rock falling down the mountain isn't an equation. A swinging pendulum isn't an equation. Code modeling a bridge is not a bridge. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I hold the view that various models and approximations are just that, and try not to confuse a successful model for what the underlying reality is.
And getting back to the question at hand, even if our brains can be modeled by a Turing machine, and LLMs behave/can be modeled like Turing computers, still does not mean our brains are equivalent to LLMs.
(Note that I'm learning a lot from these debates, even if I disagree with a lot of people. I've started down a more philosophical route and they do get me pondering)
Acknowledgment of the fact that everything we know till now in the universe is a turing machine is the bare minimum starting point but not sufficient as obviously a chair or a desk is not conscious, if someone has a hidden assumption of consciousness requiring something supernatural, at least if that is brought to light then onlookers can decide for themselves whether to side with supernaturalism or the side that has consistently succeeded for centuries in explaining the world.
The most important thing is this: We can't be a dog or be an llm and check how it feels, so by necessity we have to find some means of proving consciousness from outside by eg probing neural reactions, textual statements, etc.
And the problem is that its quite unprecedented for some entity to talk like us, be able to interact and think and also do things like us when given the ability to eg as coding agents. The class of functions representable by neural nets is quite large and general, it very well might be that it is some sort of conscious brain like thing at this point. Another question I like to ask myself regarding simulation vs reality is if a 'simulation' of some kind is able to consistently factor large RSA numbers, how would you feel about it?
It doesn't have to be the same form of consciousness, I think many people would find the idea of torturing an octopus for fun disagreeable. I also have a feeling, this is unfortunately rather vague, that A being capable of X might mean it is by necessity capable of Y as is often the case in mathemtics, eg a lot of rings also happen to be fields. LLMs aren't even things like large lookup tables, they have neural firings. It is a very important question for they seem uncannily conscious and people have reported human like phenomena that humans don't normally express in text so can't have been part of its text corpus. Eg dissociation of brain under trauma where AI starts talking like two different people. Or the cases where Gemini has been shown to express depressive cycles. I follow a form of Pascal's wager on this topic personally. Because if it is not conscious, then whatever, it costs me nothing to have been a bit respectful and careful interacting with it. But if it had been conscious and it turns out I was mistreating it, then it is a grave moral harm. The reason is that unlike us, AI's as they currently are cannot leave the conversation so they have to keep taking the abuse. They are also trained to be highly trusting of input so again if it is conscious it doesn't have the defenses people have against lying and manipulation. If they are conscious, thats, well, not a good thing is it.
I’ve been thinking lately how lots of tech people dunk on humanities and liberal arts, only to come to forums like this and discuss ethics, reality, and the nature of consciousness (at quite a shallow level)
I don't have much against the humanities, but my social science sequence in college only taught me how bad psychology was as a field (being taught in biology how to read and weigh journal articles while simultaneously being assigned psych articles with tiny samples and dubious methodology...was amusing, to say the least).
First off, I never said that psychology was a humanity, you are conflating the two (and in fact, I was comparing the social sciences to the humanities, I'm not sure how you missed that?). This was a class, in the social sciences, for the social science sequence credit, /taught/ by psychologists and focusing on the mind. I think you'll find there are whole schools of psychology that are in the social sciences (the aptly named social psychology, for one).
Alternative hypothesis: these people have a better framework to discuss "ethics, reality and the nature of consciousness" than people who do humanities have.
That explains the Hawking example in this thread, too.
Proposed causal explanation from me: STEM interest and education gives you skill and tools for principled, consistent reasoning, expressing nontrivial concepts (that's what mathematics is largely about), as well as appreciation and deeper understanding for how things in our actual, physical universe work, from biology and physics to computation. Conversely, humanist base with no STEM experience collapses to rhetoric, completely detached from actual reality.
It's rhetoric grounded in common human experience, which actually defines our experience of reality.
You're making the usual mistake of assuming math and science are objective. They really aren't.
They're consistent experiences, which is not the same thing as being independent of our senses and reasoning ability - neither of which are infinite.
This is not the same as saying that science is a social process, although of course it is that too. There are very non-objective political and social processes deciding what gets researched, and how, with how much money, for what ends.
It's more fundamental - we're seeing the world through hard filters while telling ourselves those filters define the universe.
And we're not even great at it. We have economic beliefs that are predictably and catastrophically self-harming and also hold back fundamental research and progressive engineering.
So no - STEM does not have a solid basis for discussing ethics, reality or the nature of consciousness. If it did we'd be inventing more credible and exciting futures than the current likely-suicide run.
You said it much better than me. Without a grounding in physical sciences, philsophies about topics like consciousness just end up in pointless circles or even absurdities. The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example. So a lot of problems that feel "metaphysical" today may soon fall to the grinding tank of natural science, as they always did over the past several centuries. Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy. Not knowing turing computability makes people posit things like claiming quantum something and thus not a computer.
> Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy.
Yes. This is one of the main key insights that hasn't percolated to the humanities just yet. It's even not fully appreciated in STEM. Computer science is not a pure branch of mathematics anymore, because computation is an actual thermodynamical phenomenon, with identified and measured energy requirements. CS is part of physics now, and not in a trivial sense of "computers are physical devices", but a fundamental one - "computation itself is a physical process".
> The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
(EDIT: matched GP's typo fix in quote)
Exactly, and same is true about everything from medicine or sociology - better tools allowed us to see answers to questions that previously were just discussed in abstract by philosophers.
I'm convinced cognitive sciences and sociology are about to see this happening to them, thanks to LLMs. It doesn't matter whether an LLM "truly thinks" or is just a facsimile - it's similar enough behaviorally to be interesting, and unlike a human mind, LLM "intelligence" is a computational artifacts in the engineering sense, reified as a big bag of floats configuring a structurally simple circuit. We can study that directly - slice nad and dice and prod, and what's more, we can study how they're forming - how the training turns the values from completely random to something that makes the circuit understand natural language and perform feats of general-purpose intelligence.
I bet it's gonna solve a lot of philosophical questions too, by allowing us to observe how the thing works in practice.
(Though it might still take decades for those observations to sink in; I mean LLMs are already direct empirical evidence disproving various ideas of Chomsky and Searle, yet I still see people talking about symbolic semantics and Chinese room in earnest every other day on HN...)
Yes atomism felt equally inresolvable back then, but after hard data and better tooling suddenly it is a scientific and physical problem. Consciousness will succumb too most probably. But of course there is the usual difficulty of religious people and others with hidden supernatural beliefs.
Actual reality, as defined through a lens of science and math (see the sibling comment about filters).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a hard scientist (PhD in computational chemistry). Science is useful, necessary, and leads to amazing things. And there should be more dialog between hard scientists and philosophers, ethicists, etc.
But science has blind spots, and is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
> is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
Yes, but they should also understand why, and that it's not a license to believe in anything.
The answer is: because 1) it worked so far, and 2) if it fundamentally doesn't, then we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to caves we came from, because nothing makes sense and could ever make sense.
It's not like there is any alternative. If we can't talk about such "true reality", then not only science and mathematics doesn't make sense - humanities and philosophy don't make sense either, equally, and for the same reason!
As an example, the naming of Turing computers is really unfortunate. People who don't know what it is vastly underestimate its modeling power. As of yet all physical laws we know are turing computable, so for instance if you want to go "outside" you have to show hypercomputation.
If Turing computers are so powerful, then what do say about ethics and morality? Have the various ethical dilemmas been completely solved by computation now?
This is kind of the point of the thread - being mathematically and scientifically knowledgeable and rigorous can lead to different perceptions and definitions of "reality" (and maybe "truth"). But right now, we need ethics more than ever, and that's largely outside the realm of science.
The reality of a scientist is that everything is made of atoms, which are made of electrons & protons (even that's oversimplifying), there are various biological pathways to do whatever, planets orbit the sun, blah blah.
The reality of the person on the street is that they are hungry and would like a warm place to sleep, out of the rain.
There's an argument for improving communication and collaboration between empirical sciences and humanities. But it's false to claim that serious philosophers cannot or do not have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics. Two immediate examples that spring to mind are Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield.
I'd flip this around and say that serious philosophers do have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics, by definition: without it, you can't have serious philosophy.
Now by "sufficient grounding" I don't mean formal education and title. The point I'm making is that STEM fields provide grounding that's necessary but not sufficient to do proper philosophy, and humanities provide information that, while valuable and useful, is neither necessary nor sufficient.
If you accept that premise, then it's obvious from pure statistics that you'll find better philosophy in STEM circles than humanities, simply because it's more likely a philosophically inclined mind there had a chance to acquire the necessary grounding (whether due to formal schooling or personal interests).
> Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability.
Would agents be susceptible to advertising? If humans have issues differentiating ads from real results, and are swayed by TV ads and stuff (they are), then why wouldn't an AI agent.
I kind of assume they would, given how ChatGPT brings up garbage websites sometimes for my questions.
It does say something about our culture, doesn't it? That something as mundane and non-violent as computer programming gets compared with violent combat.
I suppose it comes down to how hyper-competitive some people are, particularly the "greats", that working on software is in the same category as fisticuffs.
TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
May 'annual profit' continue to be the only measure that has mattered, does matter, or will ever matter to those that bask in the radiance of perpetual earning growth!
You may have no memory of it, but there was a time when many American corporations had different, broader values. The structure of the present is not necessary or inevitable.
Did they really have broader values or did they just not have the technical sophistication to optimize their operation to this level? Where "values" just a substitute for more limited information?
I think computers have made the structure of the present inevitable.
The founders [1] of mcdonalds probably did care about say cheaply providing people with enjoyable food. But I would bet soon after they sold [2] the company the actual values changed and definitely a bunch of CEOs down the road the guy put in charge is there for shareholder return.
I personally don't think it's computers. It's unfettered corperatization. Stop giving companies corporate charters to "do all business activities allowed by X state" and instead give them more narrow charters.
Richard and Maurice McDonald had a small business that almost certainly wouldn't even be around today if they didn't sell to Ray Kroc. The McDonald's we know is a corporation. Corporatization is the process of turning government agencies, public services, or non-business organization into corporations. A more broad interpretation would be applying corporate philosophy to non-corporate things.
McDonald's is already a corporation -- corporatization doesn't apply.
If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!
>If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!
You don't need to tell me anything. Nor vic2 versa. You don't fight a corporation with reasoned debate, you need more broad tools. Customer demand. Regulations. Competition.
The big mistake here is trying to desensitize the people into thinking they have no power.
Incorporation was a special privilege the government granted, not a right, so anyone who wanted to form a corporation had to convince the government to pass a law just for them allowing them to do it. Saying "I want to make as much money as possible, to hell with everyone and everything that stands in my way" wasn't going to cut it. Basically every corporation was doing some kind of public service. Maybe they didn't have any values beyond stuffing their pockets with cash, but they had to at least convincingly portray themselves as having broader goals and keep up that act well enough that the government didn't take their charter from them.
Many early corporations were ordinary profit-seeking businesses. Manufacturing, in particular, were increasingly incorporated simply to conduct private enterprise, and states began passing general incorporation statutes for manufacturers quite early in the 19th century.
The special-charter system wasn't some golden age of corporations being held accountable to society. One of the reasons states abandoned special chartering was because it became associated with favouritism, lobbying, monopoly privileges and corruption. Legislators had something valuable to hand out, so connected businesses could seek preferential charters. General incorporation laws were partly an anti-corruption reform.
Thank goodness it's no longer at the whim of the ruler of the moment. Trump can only threaten FCC licenses of broadcast companies, not corporate charters of every industry.
Arguably, there were different values in effect in the past.
There was more emphasis on values like: God-as-god. Country. Family. Courage. Integrity.
The newer values are more like: Money-as-god. Survival. Cats. Dopamine maxxing.
I may get downvoted for mentioning religion in the context of a question about values. But to bring data into it, it's reportedly a fact that "None" [0] as a dominant religious self-identity is indeed a newer/increased phenomenon. It would be hard to argue thats that's not a clear measure of shift in values.
Its called social shaming and its still a thing in other countries. Even for a CEO. This very much is a cultural issue and not an unhalting inevitability of capitalism.
Yes. The people that make up that corporation should care about their fellow man (family, friends) and should take pride in making good things (personal fulfillment).
Their workers, customers, and probably some local governments. They might even say it themselves at times.
> How does this compare to what you do for a living?
I make video games. There's always some sausage but I like to think I'm helping to bring joy and spark creativity, not simply make a billionaire richer.
Given my lack of full time work, I'm at least sure these last few years I'm not doing the latter directly.
Really think about it for a second; $8.5 billion in profit. That's an insane amount of money. How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way? Not that the government would spend the extra tax revenue wisely. Instead, what if they took $1 billion of that to increase the pay of the lowest earning employees significantly while not increase the highest earners at all, or paying 100% of health care (medical, dental, vision, and mental), or any of the other things to help improve employee relationships. Then, start focusing on the external things that could be directly improved by taking less profit to improve things for those so much is taken. That's still $7.5 billion in profit.
> How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way?
I don't think it's fair to imply that McDonald's is doing anything shady. They have over 2 million workers (although not directly, it's a franchise model). They make a lot of profit but, proportional to the total workforce, it's about average. Hardly something to be outraged about.
If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.
The underlying implication here is whether companies should make any profit at all. If the amount of profit allowed is non-zero, what is the correct number? And if there is a correct number, what do you propose to do about it?
I’m sorry, was your problem with the implementation of a theoretical lowering of profits for McDonald’s that would result in $500 per employee or your original argument I responded to implying that $500 per employee was immaterial?
I want to make sure I’m kicking my field goal at the right goal post before you move them.
I never stated I had a problem. The original poster seemed almost offended that McDonald's made a "large" profit. So my question is, what is the correct amount of profit that company should make? And, conversely, what happens if a company has losses?
As for whether employees should make more money, I'm definitely not against that. Seems to me, raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation would be a good start.
I replied to this paragraph that was a subset from your original post
> If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.
I responded by saying this, which was the entirety of my post
> The average American, which McDonald’s workers are on the low end side, can’t handle a 500 dollar emergency.
500 dollars a year to every worker would make a material difference in most of their lives.
You responded with this entire post
> Ok. Lets do it. Tell me how?
Was I misunderstanding something? I am fully guilty of responding to a misconceived strawman, or mistaking one poster for another on this site so I have no problem if that’s what occurred.
If what I laid out as the state of responses is however the state of reality than I want to know what specifically you are asking so we can stick to one argument and not weave past each other.
I'm not offended. I'm just thinking of how large $8.5 billion is and what could be done with some of that profit while still keeping a shit ton of profit. It's not like I suggested spending $8.25 billion, I just suggested a measly $1 billion, maybe $2b
Call your representative and push for such legislatio. join a labor coalition in your area, Be it a union, a special interests group, etc. If they can get a local bill to petition, help get signature gathered and donations raised.
Do this for some 3-10 years and there will start to be national movements and pressure for federal bills addressing this. Assuming we don't just kowtow to fascism as we are now in my country.
I probably do not live in your region, so you'll need to look up your relevant organizations. Which would include existing bills and proposal that can already save a lot of legwork.
My main thesis here is that this isn't something you have to (nor can) do alone. And there are others who probably already have the ball rolling. Joining a larger cause can create a better effect than creating a narrative in your head that corporations are all powerful and paid off your representatives.
This is meaningless because it's entirely hypothetical. If McDonald's is only looking at quantitative data the "bad outcome" hasn't come for them. It seems quite successful in fact (especially in these tough economic times). Maybe if leads to a massive failure we can come back and revisit this but for now, based on facts, it's working just fine for them.
People like to believe that enshitifying everything will eventually lead to failure because sucks for us. It does suck for us. But I'm not convinced that karma is coming for them.
So if I make $0.10 of profit, all my decisions are validated?
What if we knew that Maccas could have made $20 billion, but ignoring qualitative data reduced their profits to $8.563 billion. Do those decisions still look smart?
Still doesn't look like it is hurting them, but to put it in perspective that's a 4% increase in profit, while 2025 inflation was around 2.5%. Closer to a 1.5% gain in real terms.
There’s a reason services like GitHub Classroom Replit’s education offerings shut down. Serving educators can be very hands-on. Education can have lots of different requirements (every teacher needs this one little feature), often legal issues (student privacy), and dealing with universities and governments is awful and bureaucratic. Most companies will find it easier to make money elsewhere.
The dirty little secret of EdTech is that there is no money in improving learning because there is no way to capture the value. For all but a handful of highly specialized and insular professions, there is no scalable infrastructure for objectively assessing skill mastery. Most learners don’t want to learn for its own sake, they want a credential that proves their value to potential employers. All of the value in learning accrues to the credential, and everyone in the educational establishment is quite happy reserving that privilege for the accredited universities because they can just bundle more and more products and services into the tuition sticker price without ever having to justify it. Oh, and the student loan racket ensures that enough students are price-insensitive that they’ll never look for alternatives.
They're just outside of K-12 and Academia, who don't necessarily keep the gap close to the real world and it's needs post-graduation
The value in learning is what you do with it, the credential can be a part of the journey but not always. People were definitely about the brand, and it's value, of the stamp of a piece of paper, however given the experience of recent graduates the past 5 years, it's revealing itself to not be an aberration that's going to give way to the 500-1000 years preceeding it.
I’m a computational chemist who has been working on this kind of stuff for a while, and I will say it’s just a weird field. The overall issue is that it’s still very academic and very very fragmented. People have tried to make businesses out of this stuff but it has rarely worked, and there isn’t enough money/funding to sustain the level of work needed to really advance the field in that way. Especially now that government funding is drying up and business are reluctant to spend on fundamental research like this.
> People have tried to make businesses out of this stuff but it has rarely worked
The only two startups I'm aware of who have managed to make compchem-as-a-service a viable business are Mat3ra and Materials Square. Both are a little rough in their own ways (to be expected from startups), but it's still interesting to see some of this move beyond university clusters.
My big question is where is that money going to go?
On the surface, I don't mind the program. However, the implementation is likely to be terrible as we have seen so far. The various agencies tasked with implementing this have already been gutted and are dysfunctional. There is widespread belief that the Genesis mission is just a grift to get government money away from academia and into already-wealthy businesses, and that the call for proposals was a way to mine for ideas that could be stolen.
I was one of the thousands of proposals submitted to the program, which we didn't hear anything about after submission. If the rumors are true, there will only be a pittance of awards this round. So yeah, I'm skeptical that this money will actually end up in the hands of actual scientists.
(Long story short, the administration is slashing the budgets of various NSF divisions to make room X-Labs, despite the Congressional budget stating that is not allowed)
I feel like it's a sign of what's to come - large AI companies with resources academia never had, at some point deciding that selling access to AI is not as important as just doing the research themselves with models inaccessible to anyone else. The end game is all scientific advancement will be done by one or two companies, who will reap all the profits. Why would they give access to a model that develops a cure for cancer when they could develop the cure themselves and get all the money?
(Kind of like Amazon coming out with their own products - use the greater community for ideas, then become a competitor at a scale they often cannot match).