[padolsey]

There's no going back on this. This is putting a very capable intelligence in the hands of the masses. Private companies in the US are aching for Trump's protectionism but it'll do nothing. The hardware needed to run this is ofc prohibitive, but actually putting it out there feels like a 'RSA source code on t-shirt' moment for humanity.

[edot]

No, luckily private companies in the US are aching for this to NOT be banned. NVIDIA, Microsoft, etc. just released that letter. We’re saved from the trillionaire companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) by the other trillionaire companies acting in self-interest (hosting and hardware).

[efficax]

I don't know if the masses can quite afford the 500k in GPUs you need to run this

[supjeff]

a "moment for humanity"? as if this shit isn't going to generate 99% slop at the cost of all we have left as a species?

[asdewqqwer]

The only uniqueness of humanity is intelligence. If there is really AGI, human definitely is more close to it then other animals.

[api]

Sometimes I’m not sure who is more unhinged: the total AI kool aid drinkers who think this will make us all into immortal demigods (or take over the world as it goes “foom”), or the AI doomers and haters who exaggerate everything potentially negative about it and react to it the way a 1980s Christian fundamentalist reacted to rock music.

It’s a new fundamental innovation in math and CS that allows large scale lossy compression of natural language another data formats in a way that is semantically queryable and cross-referenceable. It also manifests some form of emergent intelligence, likely evidence of the long posited link between intelligence and data compression.

The tech is awesome. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen in over a decade. The industry is kind of shitty, which is not unusual. The discourse around it is almost universally insane, crazy people arguing with crazy people.

Oh and get off the AI eco bullshit train. Look up the energy cost of AI queries vs driving or running a home air conditioning system. Feel bad about using AI? Skip that DoorDash order. You probably just saved the energy of 1-2 days of heavy Claude Code use.

[supjeff]

We've had frontier models widely available for general use for 5-6 years now. Despite the promises, we haven't revolutionized anything; not society, not government, not engineering, not the environment. The only thing we've done is revolutionize the pockets of AI purveyors, suppliers and charlatans. We haven't cured disease, ended hunger, or achieved time travel. Sure, the tech is cool. But it's cool at 1b, 8b, and 30b parameters at a size that fits on consumer hardware. Hyperscale AI that's built for no purpose in particular, at any social/environmental cost, is everything that's wrong with society. That's not Christian fundamentalism or doomerism, that's recognizing the sickness at the core of the tech industry. We let the tech-billionaires delete their ESG pledges, and abandoned the fight against climate change so we can generate celebrity porn.

[mwcampbell]

To steelman the haters, I think their view is that the industry is so uniquely shitty that it's unconscionable to help the industry at all by using the tech, which is a product of that industry.

[api]

It’s far less shitty than the social media industry (except where it overlaps) but that’s IMO.

Still kind of shitty. But if you really hate it use open models hosted commodity.