Unfortunately, COP28 is taking it seriously, seen here with “both sides” reporting from the NYT.

Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that

It’s not a research paper; it’s a report. They’re not researchers; they’re analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word “research” for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI “research” that’s just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin’ paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I’ve written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would’ve noticed that it’s actually junk science.

I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can’t change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks “I wonder what happens then,” and while I’m sure that there’s a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here’s their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.

Yeah but I can tell you if something is a crosswalk

I’m not sure if that article is just bad or playing some sort of 4D chess such that it sounds AI written to prove its point.

Either way, for a dive into a closely related topic, one that is obviously written by an actual human, I humbly submit my own case study on how Googles ad monopoly is directly responsible for ruining the Internet. I posted it here a week ago or so, but here it is in case you missed it and this post left you wanting.

Yeah absolutely. The Luddite had a guest write in and suggest that if anxiety is the self turned inwards,nthe internet is going to be full of increasingly anxious LLMs in a few years. I really liked that way of putting it.

Don’t be too impressed. So far I’ve only taken in a couple bucks.

But seriously, that’s why I do The Luddite. There are some good tech journalists and commentators, but they’re usually professional journalists or opinion-havers. I code for a living. I think that perspective is often missing. How many people who write about the app store have actually submitted an app? Or like this post, how many have made and then monetized a website?

The point of the post is to talk about it because I care about the internet and don’t want it to be filled with generated trash.

lol I’ve always been bad at titles.

I am the dude. Fair enough, but your summary misses the point. The original website was a useful tool that people use, but it didn’t qualify for adsense. I draw an analogy to recipes. Recipe sites used to be useful, but now you have to scroll through tons of blogspam to even get to the recipe. Google has a monopoly on ads, and like it or not, ad revenue is how people who make websites get paid. Google’s policies for what qualifies for AdSense have a huge impact on the internet.

The point of the post is to show how direct that relationship is, using an existing and useful website.

Yeah, I think this is more likely. Our jobs will just become increasingly joyless and miserable.

We’d have to hammer out the exact numbers, but I’d bet against that quote I pasted claiming that marketing, sales, software, and R&D are going to be automated away.

Past automation technologies had the most effect on low-skilled workers. But with generative AI, the more educated and highly skilled workers who previously were immune to automation are vulnerable. According to the International Labor Organization, there are between 644 and 997 million knowledge workers globally, between 20% and 30% of total global employment. In the US, the knowledge-worker class is estimated to be nearly 100 million workers, one out of three Americans. A broad spectrum of occupations — marketing and sales, software engineering, research and development, accounting, financial advising, and writing, to name a few — is at risk of being automated away or evolving.

I’d take that bet, even at outrageous odds. I’ve now won over 700 dollars betting against self-driving cars with people in the tech world, and another couple hundred against crypto. Some of that even came from my former boss. I think I’ve won over a grand betting against tech hype in the last 4-5 years.

Business Insider, in the unlikely event that you read this, DM me. Let’s make a bet.

Yes I agree. I meant the fundamental problem with the idea of LLMs doing more and more of our code, even if they get quite good.

The real problem with LLM coding, in my opinion, is something much more fundamental than whether it can code correctly or not. One of the biggest problems coding faces right now is code bloat. In my 15 years writing code, I write so much less code now than when I started, and spend so much more time bolting together existing libraries, dealing with CI/CD bullshit, and all the other hair that software projects has started to grow.

The amount of code is exploding. Nowadays, every website uses ReactJS. Every single tiny website loads god knows how many libraries. Just the other day, I forked and built an open source project that had a simple web front end (a list view, some forms – basic shit), and after building it, npm informed me that it had over a dozen critical vulnerabilities, and dozens more of high severity. I think the total was something like 70?

All code now has to be written at least once. With ChatGPT, it doesn’t even need to be written once! We can generate arbitrary amounts of code all the time whenever we want! We’re going to have so much fucking code, and we have absolutely no idea how to deal with that.

The US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study is a joint collaboration between a group of independent external academics from several institutions and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram

🫠

They investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing.

I believe the term is platform capitalism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_capitalism