If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who's actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of "at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we're being productive."

Chinese models are open source and open weights, so even if they put in all kinds of ideological filters into their models, these filters are easy to remove if you run the models on your own hardware. If Slashdot stands for anything, it is to root for open source alternatives, which now - weirdly - means rooting for China's AI projects. If the CCP get spooked and ruins this good thing, that would be bad for all the people, not just for the Chinese people.

Let's go Slashdot oldsters, with our low-six-figure account numbers, making Monty Python jokes! Maybe 37 is not old, but we are! Hahahaa! Has it been The Year of Lunux on the Desktop yet? Maybe 2026 will be it!

What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

Right now, we're noticing that Chinese companies are offering us exploitative deals, and we don't like it, and think that tariffs will fix it. But with tariffs in place, we will find that now it's American companies that are offering us the exploitative deals, but they can charge more now, because they're insulated from outside competition. What I'm saying is that intranational capitalism is just as sleazy and brutal as international capitalism - only less efficient, because it's less competitive.

I agree with you about NATO states paying for mercenaries to defend Ukraine. There are many experienced fighters in Africa and the Middle East, and it's likely that their services could be bought at a reasonable price. Without more soldiers in the field, Ukraine's front is doomed to collapse.

I love AI and I would and could pay for it if I had to, but why would I pick OpenAI to pay? Their product is not really better than their competitors' products, and sometimes it's clearly worse. They have the advantage of being the first mover in their field, and that gives them inertia with low-information customers - the new AOL.com. But apart from that, they have huge debts and not much else to distinguish them. Their best employees had left, and their former partners have become wary of the way they operate. Projections of their future profitability must be based on the expectation that their AI will figure out some better business plan than what the OpenAI humans have come up with!

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!

I'm lazy, but even I would do a daily backup if hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.

Hundreds of millions were not at stake the day the hard drive was lost. He could have easily replaced it back then at a much lower cost.

The drive was lost in 2013. In 2013 the price of 8000 bitcoins ranged between $400,000 and $8,000,000US.

Even at the low end of that estimate, it's still more than the value of my house. Not doing basic due diligence like keeping good backups is massive negligence. Yes, his girlfriend shouldn't have thrown his hard drive away, but he was the one who put himself in a situation where he could lose that kind of money from a single mistake.

You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Most people don't even have landlines anymore, so you'd make 911 mostly useless. Not to mention that there are many valuable uses of 911 on mobile phones, like calling for help after being in a car accident. The big thing is not to let people spoof their call's origin. There are actual use cases for fooling caller ID, but the damage caused by spammers and scammers far outweighs the benefits. If we make caller ID a reliable indicator of the source of a call again, it would make people wary about using their phones for illegal activity like calling in bomb threats.

This gets both parts of the solution: don't have emergency services overreact, and find and prosecute people who make false calls. Overreaction- sending in the SWAT team with hair triggers- is a key reason this is worse in the US than elsewhere, and we need to stop letting our police shoot first and ask questions later.

We also need to do something about malicious calls. This is not a harmless prank. At the very least it's harassment and abuse of government resources; at the worst it's (attempted) murder. If we start devoting serious resources to finding the perpetrators and prosecuting them, people will mostly stop trying this stuff because they'll fear the consequences. Of course it would help if we made our phone system harder to spoof, since faking the source of the call is part of the way perpetrators think they'll get away with it. Making calls harder to spoof would have a huge number of other benefits, too.

Yes, we did need a formal study. In the absence of proper scientific studies, it's easy for people to confirm their preexisting beliefs. If they a true believers that AGI is just around the corner, they claim the success of LLM proves we're almost there. If they think AGI is a pipe dream, they dismiss the success of LLM as fooling people with a souped-up autocomplete model. A scientific study can't actually answer the question of whether AGI is coming soon, but it can answer questions like whether LLM have done subsidiary tasks like building a coherent model of the world. When we learn that it hasn't, it affects our beliefs in whether AGI is coming soon or not.

Regularly changing your passwords makes sense if you're worried about people stealing the hashed password file and cracking it offline, especially back in the day when password length was restricted. Of course the main solution to that is to let/require people use longer passwords or pass phrases, which fixes a lot of password problems simultaneously.

It's a conveniently vague time interval. It's short enough that everyone needs to plan for how to incorporate Altman's company's services into their business, but not soon enough that he can be held accountable for it failing to show up on schedule. Also, hopefully long enough in the future to give people time to forget the prediction when it turns out to be wrong. In other words, it should be ready in time to use on our fusion-powered Mars colony.