For anyone doubting this, take a look at Zahi Hawass’s (former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities) response to the ScanPyramids project. From wikipedia,
> On November 2, 2017, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told the New York Times: "They found nothing...This paper offers nothing to Egyptology. Zero." Later, once the North Face Corridor was inspected with an Endoscope, Hawass conversely commented that ScanPyramids's work had provided a "major discovery" that would "enter houses and homes of people all over the world for the first time".
>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong
Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
Not sure. I don't like LLMs inserting itself into human to human communication, as it can shape our thinking in many ways. Delegating this also makes it much harder for a person to become a subject-matter expert, which is a real loss.
I do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp apples back in the 90s and 2010s and I struggle to see where any cruelty was involved.
The problem with patented seeds (and everything else) is the owner can decide who gets to use them. No one should hold that power.
If patents worked as a royalty system where you're guaranteed to get a license if you pay there would be no problem. But right now Bayer can use their control over Roundup Ready plants to make farmers buy more products they don't need, or punish them for dealing with competitors, because they have a monopoly.
And it also lets them set the price to anything they want because competing with them is illegal. Exclusive rights are always like that.
Prisoner’s dilemma: margins are razor thin. If your fellow farmers use better seeds then you are forced to use them as well. Otherwise you won’t be able to match their prices without selling at a loss.
That's true of any productivity enhancement. If your neighbors use more efficient tractors you're at the same disadvantage, but nobody argues that farmers should be able to steal tractors.
The parent has to do with permission, not stealing. Imagine if your neighbors could have an exclusive license to buy the new obviously superior tractor which you will never be able to obtain no matter what you do, simply because you're not them. This is legal today, the argument is that it shouldn't be because it punishes competition and lets the rights-holder wield too much power over the market.
Only if the cost of monsanto seed + roundup is less than the cost of regular seed per expected harvested bushel? Otherwise, no one would use the monsanto seed + roundup?
And this isn't even a cultivar. It's a commodity crop in which the only difference between ordinary seeds and Monsanto's seeds is that you could use Monsanto's Roundup pesticide on them without killing them. The seeds were literally just a utility for using a specific Monsanto herbicide system.
Apple cultivars are interesting because they are often developed by governments motivated to promote the existence of a healthy farming industry, not by private monopoly rights. Case in point, the Cripps Pink (aka Pink Lady) was developed by the Western Australia Department of Agriculture, and the Cosmic Crisp was developed by Washington State University.
(Honeycrisp is another fantastically successful government-funded cultivar, this time by the University of Minnesota. But it apparently led to the spontaneous breeding of the SugarBee, which is privately owned.)
>If there was a direct and maintained electric train route
What do you mean by this? Most US freight trains are already diesel electric. German freight uses overhead electric wires on most of the shared passenger rail network, which is great, but doesn’t make it any easier or faster to deliver freight to consumers. Are you thinking of high speed rail? Bullet and maglev trains aren’t used to deliver freight anywhere globally that I’m aware of.
Perhaps I misread the parent comment, but the emphasis on that clause seemed to be on the fresh produce, not the lower carbon emissions. I don’t know how swapping out for 100% electric improves people’s access to fresh produce is my point
Diesel electric are not at all the same as an electric train network.
Electric trains have a very interesting property, as they work as a grid as both producers, feeding back when they are breaking.
You made a second point, that most trains are already "diesel electric", I am pointing out, that the function is very different from an electric train, and much less friendly(and less efficient) to the environment.
Look around on youtube how dilapidated a lot of US freight rail is.
I'm German, so I'm well used to dishing out on our railways, but at least our rails don't look like spaghetti that have been way overcooked and can only safely be driven at walking speed. And the amount of black smoke the locomotives emit when spinning up their old engines... wouldn't pass any emissions inspections here in Germany.
US rail is in great shape. You are confusing lines that are nearly abandoned and will be soon but they can take a couple more trips for the state of US rail. US rail is in great shape overall, and very well maintained.
YouTube is not an unbiased source of information, please find a better source before making claims.
American diesel emission standards are famously more strict than Germany's. That's the whole reason why diesel cars aren't as common in the USA, and why Volkswagen had to cheat to pass emissions tests.
Railways have emissions standards different from road vehicles. And VW cheated because they couldn't pass European regulations, the thing is that the big lawsuit took place in the US because US courts allow far bigger monetary amounts.
So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.
It's unlikely that any of the modern cryptographic primitives will break over night.
First, modern encryption isn't susceptible to "this one weird trick!" like the early days. ChaCha isn't even a cipher. It's a key stretcher. Which means, even if you broke the math behind ChaCha, its inherent complexity means its still widely dispersing the original key across the cipherstream. There just won't ever be enough key material recovered per cipherstream block to be a concern for anybody.
Take a strong password, encrypt all of your emails over your whole life with it, and I'll bet hard cash no break of ChaCha will ever recover that password.
I have zero concern for modern encryption being broken in any meaningful way.
Public key crypto on the other hand, that's _ripe_ for breaking. Most all of it is built on assumed "hard" math. AI could easily break that, and I expect it to. And public key crypto is all used in very transparent algorithms that, once the math breaks, fully expose themselves. So record HTTPS traffic today, crack the public key crypto later, and you can decrypt them easily.
That said, I would expect a break on public key math to occur _steadily_. i.e. an AI might find a solution to the hard math, but the solution itself will be intractable in practice. Then maybe next year's AI reduces the complexity of the solution, so maybe a supercomputer could factor ten keys a year. The year after that you get a million keys cracked per year. And so forth. Nothing close to overnight.
Meanwhile, if we have AI that is capable enough to crack that math, we also have AI capable enough to both invent better math and rapidly deploy that latest HTTPS and such globally.
If you look at elliptic curves I don't think there has been any big changes in attacks for 20 years but some attacks like MOV or SMART would have been fatal to EC if they had applied to more curves. So maybe there is some unknown attack that applies to all curves or applies to a small subset of curves that happens to overlap the curves we use. If you are super paranoid you should probably use curve25519 because then at least you can be confident it was not deliberately engineered to be weak. it could still be weak by chance but presumably the designers did not have enough flexibility to choose the parameters to make it weak. Some people are paranoid about the NIST curves because there is no verifiable explanation for where the seeds came from. But if the NIST curves were made weak then I think its a situation where theoretically anybody could find the weakness which is very dangerous. I don't think it was possible to create a no-body-but-us backdoor for the NIST curves.
Also, even if DLP is hard for the curves we use algorithms like ECDSA might be a bit fishy. Unlike schnorr signatures there is no proper security reduction for ECDSA.
Sure, but in an era where major unsolved mathematics problems start getting knocked out one by one, what if attacks for all of them are identified in the space of a couple of years?
I don’t doubt that we could come up with new crypto algorithms equally as fast, but how do you trust that they are resilient (or even just implemented correctly) without an extended vetting period?
Ima stop you there. Instead, you might be happy to be aware that outside of AI concerns, “quantum safe” (or assumed so) ciphers are all the rage. So this is already a likely solved problem with the next generation of encryption… until this are AI models running on quantum machines I guess!
It does provide an explanation as to why Satoshi’s wallets have gone untouched (besides him being dead). $70B ain’t that much compared to a $5T market cap.
Is it possible that the first message is more information dense/less likely to be ambiguous than the latter? It’s clearly being selected for for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of the tokenizer or specific training data, but I don’t know. If the use of jargon was complete cruft, I would expect it to be selected against during reinforcement learning
You’d think that, I thought that… but then I realized I’m just kidding myself thinking its output makes sense. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Sometimes it might as well just speak tongues.
In other words, it ain’t you. It’s the model. It’s just genuinely bad.
Then you switch to ChatGPTs lineup and realize how things can actually be better. It took about a week to really get the feel for how to use their models… then I basically switched. I’ll check in every now and then when they actually make a deal about how opus “now makes sense”.
But honestly I’m half convinced Anthropic actually prefers the output of opus 5. I dunno why, but how else could you explain how such a thing got shipped? I mean somebody in the pipeline had to say “dude this model doesn’t make sense, you think we should fix it?” Right? Like it’s a pretty massive drop in quality for such a major brand in this space, you know? How did it make it out the door?!?
yeah, I just switched to the GPT models and it's a breath of fresh air.
as for the other guy, the claude talk is definitely not less ambiguous, it often is incredibly ambiguous and hard to parse, I have no clue why it produces such output, if not to fingerprint it?
it's really weird man. when Opus 5 came out, I was really confused. I saw a bunch of hype about how it's better than fable, but I just felt frustrated with it, although at times it'd do fine, but especially in Claude Code it'd just delve into the whole "load bearing" type of lingo real fast and I'd get a headache.
I don't think it's worth using even if it scores 2 points higher in some bs benchmark
it's definitely surprising how the magic and smoothness of 4.6 and such is no longer there with the >5 models
No, OpenAI did not instruct their agents to hack Hugging Face. They instructed their agents to hack a piece of a software within exploit gym. Upon determining this task was impossible, they then attempted to cheat the scoring system. As an instrumental goal in achieving this task, they coordinated with other AI agents to hack Hugging Face, under the belief that information regarding how the scorer functioned might be available on the site.
Whether or not you want to describe this as thinking, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that these systems are capable of creating intermediary goals that the people tasking them did not articulate and did not want to be achieved.
It feels like you’re moving the goalposts here. If the question is, “Who should be liable for AI agents misbehaving,” I agree, it should be the end user that tasked the agent (in this case OpenAI). People are held liable for preventable accidents all the time, and in the case of employment law, torts can be brought against principals for actions an agent conducted on the principal’s behalf.
What your previous comment appeared to assert was that these systems had no independent agency to make decisions, which I think is clearly disproven by actual events. But perhaps I misread you
> On November 2, 2017, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told the New York Times: "They found nothing...This paper offers nothing to Egyptology. Zero." Later, once the North Face Corridor was inspected with an Endoscope, Hawass conversely commented that ScanPyramids's work had provided a "major discovery" that would "enter houses and homes of people all over the world for the first time".
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