Totally agree. It is more of a rant than reasoning. Anyone who claims to know how this will end (good or bad) is extrapolating beyond their own knowledge and is vastly oversimplifying what is likely to be one of the most transformative technologies of the last 100 years.
In the last 50 years, only the creation of the Internet compares. Like with the Internet, nuclear, television, etc. it will probably be a mix of good and bad.
Very thorough write up. Clearly a lot of performance improvements across their stack. As if it wasn't detailed/long enough already, I would have loved to see some application-level benchmarks that gave a hint of the cumulative performance gains we should expect.
Same when sometimes you talk about AI with people and they say ChatGPT is absolutely horrible, gets everything wrong and never can keep track of more than 3-4 messages and so on.
Then it turns out they were on the free logged-out version, writing the most obtuse, confusing and contradictory prompts, and they're trying to do "real work" like this.
We're all having very different experiences with AI right now, and when people talk to each other about it, we're not nearly specifying what environment, tools, weights, etc are used, for these discussions to actually be valuable, because people are comparing apples to oranges everywhere.
Who should we believe? People who say AI scaling makes it a more dangerous threat than thousands of nuclear warheads? Or the ones who, whenever a new model comes out say "AI has already peaked. Not any better than Opus 4"?
Both parties are convinced that their take is so blatantly obvious as to not require justification. It feels like the only thing these kinds of takes justify is the point-of-view that nobody knows how this is going to play out.
Based on publicly available evidence, we should believe the former because AI models have made continuous advances that have been measured. The idea that the continuous advances will stop currently has no evidential support. I'm not saying it's not a possibility, just that it seems unsupported conjecture right now.
By the way, there seems to be a new form of AI skepticism emerging in the US that comes from general opposition to data centers, and in my experience the AI skeptic part of it is wholly irrational. I've met people online who suggested, without providing any evidence, that AI is useless and nobody wants it. That's a very implausible take.
As a technologist, I can use my imagination. There are incentives in both directions, but I am less afraid of being overly cautious and preparing for the potential harms.
AGI doesn't mean it'll be top 5% in everything. Half of people are below average intelligence. Most people couldn't profitably run a business. We could get to AGI and still have something that is as dumb as the average person on many things.
>Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.
One problem in your analogy, for McDonalds, the franchisee is the one who actually operates the business.
For the Cybercab, Tesla is the one operating it via "Full Self Driving", their app, and the Tesla rideshare network. As the owner, the only thing you do is own it, insure it, have a place to park it, and take on the risk of what happens if the vehicle registered to you is in an accident. Clearly, a pretty one-sided assignment of risk.
Actually, while I still like your point there really is still a lot of operational work.
You need to clean, inspect, repair, insure, secure and charge the cars. To do so efficiently you will need to custom develop premises full of chargers and efficient charging and cleaning infrastructure.
That absolutely is operationally intense. Premises, permits, construction and then significant operations.
Maybe? It's how McDonald's runs things too. They make the food centrally and ship it to franchises. They take on brand risk, food logistics at scale and so on. Franchisees deal with local demand, operations, hiring, local laws and so on.
It's not an exact 1:1, but that seems to be the model here. Tesla does the things that can scale (FSD, manufacturing, etc.) and operators do the things that can't.
I think a more apt analogy is iPhone. You pay Apple for a brand new one, they make more money when you make in-app purchases.
Another really important issue is depreciation. You own the car for a few year and eat a cost of depreciation, and then figure out how to dig yourself out of the hole the way Hertz did. Similar to iPhone- you use one for 2+ years and then get a new version- you're also responsible if the phone breaks.
They could, but running local operations isn't his forte, preference or interest, it seems. Even if he had a massive fleet of these, he'd have to navigate local laws, demand, operations and logistics.
His revealed preference is to run things centrally and at massive scales.
> They could, but running local operations isn't his forte, preference or interest, it seems. Even if he had a massive fleet of these, he'd have to navigate local laws, demand, operations and logistics.
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
Same for supporting issues. If the "other" party proposes something, people are automatically against. As soon as "their" party supports it, they are all in.
The MAHA movement is a good example. If democrats had said something about the problems with high sugar food or additives, republicans would have shouted "nanny state". Now that Kennedy is talking about it, they support it.
And stood in front of a TV camera during Obama's administration and said that Republicans would not support bills that objectively made Americans lives better because their goal was only to make sure Obama was a one term President.
Since 2024, Democrats went from being the most trusting (57%) to the most skeptical (91%), bringing all groups to within 10 points of each other on the question.
This is not a "both sides" situation: Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics. There is no universal implication here IMO, this is just Democrats joining the 80-percenters, i.e. everyone
>...Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics.
This is not surprising; a big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years. No real evidence of that was ever uncovered, but it didn't stop Fox News and every Republican leader from constantly referring to the accusations as if they were true. One the other hand, Trump is openly accepting huge payments from foreign governments, and never even bothered to separate himself from his companies. Republicans were at 87% due to general distrust of government and the rumor of phantom corruption, while Democrats (who tend to be more trusting of government) rose to the same level only on clear evidence of real corruption. The authors don't break it out by parties, but the overall level during Trump's first term is about the same as Biden's. Since the article notes that Republican skepticism is higher in general and more consistent, this implies that Democrats' perception of corruption is much higher in Trump's second term than his first. Which makes sense, the Republican leadership was much more responsible in applying guardrails in the first term than the second. Trump is getting away with a LOT more in his second term.
Well, obviously not an appreciation for the distinction between evidence and opinion. The fact is that there is clear, uncontroverted evidence that Donald Trump has profited directly from his presidency, and no clear evidence that Joe Biden did. Not everything is symmetrical in politics, and it's not always "both sides."
The implication is that even if I might agree with you, we ought not be subjecting each other to incoherent rants in lieu of substantive arguments. Just don't say anything, if the only thing you have to say is They Watch Fox News.
Even if you're inclined to believe the conclusions, this should recognizably be a silly rant and I don't want to live in a world where we justify sloppy arguments if we agree with the conclusions. If it triggers your defenses to the point where you can't see that this is a poor rant, it could be instructive to copy/paste it into an LLM and ask for an analysis or some counterarguments.
> Trump actually isn’t corrupt? Or Biden was actually secretly as corrupt as Trump is?
Incredible to me that you could think this is anywhere implied. Maybe you understand something better than I do, but I submit that it's brainrot to think my comment was somehow "Trump is not corrupt and/or Biden is equally corrupt".
However, the question of whose corruption rises to the level where a person is morally suspect if they don't speak out, is one that certainly cuts conveniently, isn't it?
> Maybe you understand something better than I do, but I submit that it's brainrot to think my comment was somehow "Trump is not corrupt and/or Biden is equally corrupt".
I don't really think you realize how that initial post comes across, because I'm re-reading your previous and struggling to come up with any other interpretation besides "both sides are bad".
If you are intending to say something different than that, maybe try stating it directly rather than sarcastically
When you vaguepost, you shouldn't be surprised when you receive follow-up comments asking for clarification, which was what I was doing. The most charitable interpretation, as another commenter noted, was that you were essentially saying "both sides bad".
> Even if you're inclined to believe the conclusions, this should recognizably be a silly rant ... If it triggers your defenses to the point where you can't see that this is a poor rant, it could be instructive to copy/paste it into an LLM and ask for an analysis or some counterarguments.
It seems to be triggering your defenses as well, to be frank. The primary claim:
> "A big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years."
Is essentially how I'm keeping my sanity living amongst people who voted for Trump. The only way I could find it justifiable is that somehow people believed that corruption wouldn't be this bad, or it was just as bad under Biden. I also know that there's a large contingent of nihilistic, psychopathic, "libertarian", chauvinistic technocrats that probably had no problem voting for Trump because they genuinely believed they would be able to make more money under a Trump presidency rather than a Harris presidency - but I choose to believe there are more people who were misled about relative corruption levels rather than pure psychopaths.
I don't know how to say this except by repeating myself: I recommend you ask a thoughtful person, or a capable LLM, to argue against "a big reason that ... [ad hominem patronization presented without evidence]"
In the age of LLMs, it's pure negligence to let your perspective be this uninformed and low-resolution. And it's violence against the attentions of others to share it with them, to be hyperbolic.
If this is your honest, best faith rendering why 50% of the country votes differently than you, then I recommend you leave politics alone. If you won't try and understand why people are the way they are, and instead are going with "they're all too stupid to know they're being fooled, unlike me" then yes, this is an unhealthy worldview which can damage your sanity.
> If you won't try and understand why people are the way they are, and instead are going with "they're all too stupid to know they're being fooled, unlike me"
Unfortunately, being more aware than - and immune to being fooled than - the majority of a specific voting bloc is not a historical anomaly. Take, for example, the Jews who were privileged and fortunate enough to have the foresight to flee Europe during the rise of Nazism. They saw the writing on the wall, and were wise to the foolishness and depravity that was on the horizon.
Most populist movements are very much the case of “they’re all too stupid to know they’re being fooled, unlike me” - although I wouldn’t necessarily use the word “stupid” and I wouldn’t necessarily limit it to “me”.
"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
Everyone thinks they know better than others, and that's why their group and way of thinking should lead. Because of this, reasonable people ought to feel the need to present results, or at least make credible and compelling arguments, for why their way should prevail. All I'm seeing here is hackneyed, and very strained, WW2 analogies. And weepy moralization.
The only thing exceptional here is the gall you're showing, in suggesting that these tired, middling arguments are reasons why actually "the voting booth is wrong and I'm right, even though I (presumably) value democracy"
The most corrupt things Biden has done were:
1. Hide the extent of health issues. Par for the course in politics at this point for some reason. This is broadly just downstream of him believing he could continue before a precipitous health decline as election season began
2. Pardon his son who was teed up by the Republican world to be target number 1 for low level drug and tax charges.
Trump on the other hand has made literally billions of dollars since starting his presidency, not to mention the fortunes of his family and various associates. 100x is not even just a few orders of magnitude off.
There are immigrants who commit crimes. Sure, it's not _every_ Mexican is a rapist and we're probably talking about basis points of basis points here. But it's a foundation.
Hunter Biden did get money from people who wanted access to Joe Biden. Sure, Joe didn't actually help them out. But it's a foundation.
The problem isn't the unfoundedness it's that it's extrapolated beyond what the foundation supports.
>The problem isn't the unfoundedness it's that it's extrapolated beyond what the foundation supports.
The purpose of creating a "Biden crime family" was to implicate Joe Biden in the actions of his son without needing any evidence that Biden himself traded on his presidency (because there was none). I see the point you're trying to make, but evidence that Hunter traded on his dad's fame simply isn't evidence of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
Regarding immigrants, unless it is shown that they commit crimes at a higher rate than the rest of the population---and it hasn't---that isn't a foundation either.
I don't think you understand what a foundation is.
If I make the claim, immigrants cause crime and I show a bunch of mug shots of immigrants who were arrest for crimes. That's a foundation.
The solution isn't to pretend things aren't foundations. The solution is go expand the equal air-times rules so that if you want to argue for political change (official immigration policy) you have to allow the other side to show arguments of immigrants commit crimes below average.
Oligarchy has completely subverted democracy in the US.
In this era, venal actions are official actions. Nothing is even hidden anymore. Racketeering and thuggery are on display even during supposed negotiations.
The US is under mob rule. Sure sure, we gonna make a deal. Da best deal evah. Da deal is dat we won't whack ya.
In the last 50 years, only the creation of the Internet compares. Like with the Internet, nuclear, television, etc. it will probably be a mix of good and bad.
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