Comment by arjie
8 hours ago
Why, though? I have half a terabyte of VRAM in cards in a datacenter and it’s absolutely not clear that anything I’ve learned using these to program or inside an app has taught me anything significant.
I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.
And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.
I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.
It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.
Then move on. The library is dust.
There is a tribe in Ecuador, the Huaorani. They were only brought into contact with the world 70 years ago. Because they live at the equator, they never needed to think ahead to store food over the winter. They could see that the oil companies were destroying their land by polluting it with spoil from operations, cutting down swaths of the forest, etc, and they became activists pushing back against this; but a good hunter who can hand out food to others is very highly regarded in their culture, so they would queue for handouts from the oil companies and became dependent on them, doing low-wage work. When I read about this years ago, I thought that people from modern cultures would not be so naive, but I see that I was wrong.
How does that allegory apply?
The parent is preaching to not become dependent (like the Huaorani).
Further, should the Huaorani also not use the most advanced technology and retain obsolete scaffolding?
Edit: eek! don't think these people had it better off prior to modern contact
>The Waorani may have the highest rate of homicide of any society known to anthropology. [0]
[0]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2688884/
The GP is preaching not to become dependent; the parent seems to be saying it's pointless to try, although perhaps I have misinterpreted them. In any case, many are rushing to become dependent.
No analogy is perfect; I don't argue that the details of the Huaorani's situation are a guide here.
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I haven't used an Anthropic model, or GPT heaviliy in a year. And I have access to both, I dont support either of those companies. I think they're both led by genuinely evil people.
Agreed. Same. Except for work where I can use GLM, so I Opus 4.8
Care to elaborate why "they are led by evil people", and what AI companies are "not led by evil people"?
Sam and Dario came from the EA-rationalist space. Their ultimate goal is to create an all powerful ASI before anyone else does and make sure no one can do it again. Of course it will be aligned, to their interests as a group and their moral philosophy.
In real life they "just" want to capture the US economy, replace most workers with AI, become trillionaires, then control the world by making ClaudeGPT influence peoples opinions and write backdoors into code. And they need to get open models banned in the process.
The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. Mistral and BFL want to prove Europe can still innovate. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people.
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Brockman is one of the biggest donors to Trump.
Can you share your reasoning about Antrophic being genuinely evil?
This was all fake then?
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
> This was all fake then?
Yes. They sell to Palantir which does all the things Anthropic claims to disapprove of.
Sounds amazing offering the departement of war to create more reliable weapons.
> We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems
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