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They'll only get to claim a hollow victory because AGI is impossible to rigorously define. None of the regulating bodies of consumer products will be able to define it better than academics. They'll use marketing to make those claims and there will be legal battles that keep it in a gray area.

They'll go for that because it's easier than actually inventing the 'sci-fi' AGI, shareholders keep making money, and it keeps them getting paid to keep going. If any of them actually do succeed, then that little deception will be peanuts.


Demis' bar is high and he stated clearly multiple times: AGI should be capable of inventing truly novel things. Examples he gave included the Theory of General Relativity and the game of Go.

Just a taste of what's to come: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...

Anthropic's latest model also solved this 80-year-old problem that eluded many expert mathematicians, in a different way, according to one of its employees.

Remember we still have 4 years until 2030.


Quite frustrating to see all these cynical, borderline-irrational comments on HN. Maybe I should do what pg and other ex-HN contributors have done--avoid taking part in the discussions here.

The level of discourse here has dropped so much.

At least I should stop replying to people hiding under throwaway accounts.


Cheaper labor, for sure


Everything and anything that China does better than the west: It must be cheap labor.


It's not the only thing, but it's a big one


The "dark" EV plants making cars aren't using any labour, let alone cheap labour.

There's also that thing that made China what it is today - the USofA using China for cheap labour and a place to outsource all the dirty parts of high consumption.

China's moved on, US perceptions haven't.


They are most certainly using cheap labor to design, plan, operate and maintain those "dark" plants.

Very highly automated production lines (cars) have similarly moved along the labor-price gradient in Europe (~east) during the last decades, despite language barriers: You need some engineers, electricians, constructions workers, janitors, etc regardless, and those still scale with general labor costs, even if there's no human hands in the assembly line.


The perception gap is the assumption that cheap means dumb or low-quality.

Those dark EV plants were designed and built by engineers and technicians working 996 for cheap on an hourly basis.


And this is why the US doesn't have fully automated parts in drive out EV factories?


The US doesn't have those because we're not even trying.

China is capable of it due to the absolutely brutal grinding work culture. They're not superhuman, it's not Tony Stark building the Iron Man suit in an evening, they're smart and work extremely hard.


Most of the cost of batteries is in labor? So why not outsource them out of China where labor is quite expensive vs developing countries?


Because no one in their right mind will work the Chinese 996-esque schedule in the 21st century, except the Chinese?

They are actually importing Chinese workers to their Brazil factory, leading to the slave labor expose by Brazilian authorities [0]. They have the same trouble recruiting in Thailand, where workers have functioning unions and enjoy modern working rights, instead of 19th-early 20th century Industrial Revolution type stuff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...


Labor is expensive in China?


now yes, it's no longer 2005


Compared to their neighbors is SEA yes labor is very expensive


>Are those excess returns not work? What are they?

Normally you'd get a low percentage fee instead of getting all of the returns unless you got that capital for free (inheritance?), so yes, you are a worker compared to the person controlling the capital.


>In writing tasks Qwens hallucinations and bullshitting are much easier to spot because it doesn't have the sleek vocabulary and wordsmithing skills to disguise its ignorance.

Can't wait until we just remove the language from the LLMs for accuracy and efficiency


Imagine how accurate you could be if you could circumvent the coding agent and just type the source code directly into an editor all by yourself o_O Like a write_file skill but for humans!!!


"read code" and "debug code" will still be valuable and one of the ways you learn that is "write code". You might have gotten people who can only write code from cheap contracting places, but the companies choosing to go that route were shooting themselves in the foot with that decision before AI came along.

Even from offshore contractors, I still haven't run into anyone who can only write code except for someone just starting out.


I don't disagree with you, but this misses my point entirely. I was using "write code" as shorthand for the entire package.

What I am referring to is someone with meaningful knowledge outside of software engineering who can also apply software engineering skills to that domain. In particular I'm referring to domains outside of tech, but any sort of specialized knowledge counts here so even in the "software" world there's things like infosec, networking, etc


>But does it actually matter?

Probably not, because most of us are boring. Most of us don't have stalkers. Most of us don't have government clearances. Most of us aren't politically adjacent, significant, or know someone who is. Most of us are not wealthy. Most of us will not be a target by the relatively small pool of humans who could actually do anything with that data.

I might have a few chains where I do connect to someone important (degrees of connection to Kevin Bacon), but that isn't directly useful here.

The point is it's still private information and it must be protected, if only out of common sense or respect for your fellow humans. We don't need damages to defend this point.


>What kind of 'useful'?

Someone says it's useful to them. If you get a consensus where >50% find it useful, then it's probably useful.


Ok, that's empirically useful by argument of popularity.

By that same measure: correctness, maintainability, and efficiency are not that useful.

I wasn't saying usefulness is not important, I'm saying this post conveniently crammed the hardest problem of writing software into a fuzzy adjective.


>I think Sam Altman is an asshole and I prefer to spend my money elsewhere.

That's why he chose the OpenAI logo


And the Anthropic logo is a subtle reminder to stuff that ejected out of OpenAI.


If anything though, this shows that at least tech driven hype bubbles can stay around way longer than we think if we are looking at it from a product POV.

This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.


"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes


Sometimes I wonder if Keynes would under the current conditions see fit to differentiate "merely irrational" from "absolutely insane".


This is why the 'craft' should be left to open source for most commercial software. The business reality just doesn't care for it.

Only when you have a PR problem does the business switch back to signalling quality, like Microsoft, although it remains to be seen if they still have the quality part. Most of the craftspeople get to say 'told you so' but also it looks like a sinking ship to them. Once the PR problem is gone, it's back to shipping at the expense of quality.

This cycle conflicts with the idea of a craft, which is that you should do it that way all/most of the time. The business will stop caring about quality long enough that your skills will erode, making it a bad mix. Trying to practice a craft where you aren't in control of this cycle is corrosive to the spirit.


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