TechTakes

thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like "OpenAI" and "google deepmind," their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.

also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was "the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs."

finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it's like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

The Death of the Junior Developer

Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there's no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we'll have AGI by then and it'll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer's time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

Microsoft's AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding, there's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you're bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I'm featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt

... which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast

According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value

tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren't foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it

I might have been wrong on the capabilities of ML, this is very impressive. (twitter link), was I wrong and Yud right?

nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer