If you ask an LLM to solve a math problem, something they recently have gotten good at, they will use chain of thought and produce a ton of tokens they don't even show you. That kind of prompt can result in a lot of text being generated. If you ask it to produce a summary of a single URL page there's a lot less computation going on. The paper compares to work on smaller models than the ones that are used in say Google's Gemini app. I'm not sure that the results are realistic.

Nice article, except this is not a foolish attempt to save money. This is an attempt as all Fascists regimes do to denigrate the use of facts. Once a people become unmoored from a perception of reality it is easy to get them to do what the regime wants.

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Corporations are for making money. They are not organized for political causes. They make a profit, which can be distributed to people, who are then taxed and who can then give money to political causes. Scotus's ruling prevented me as a stockholder from deciding whether I wanted to join some cause, unless I want to give up my investment. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that the drafters of the first amendment, intended that corporations, which only in Latin mean person but does not in English should have free speech. SCOTUS should have given deference to Congress in determining this, but as the Guardian points out, Roberts is an umpire who has chosen a side.

Billionaires want everyone to pay the same income tax rate, instead of our current progressive rates. How can they convince people who would pay more so they could pay less? By making it seem complicated for them. If you could just push a button and your taxes would be paid (automation anyone) their whole argument would go away. In Japan apparently you just sign something that fits on a post card. One of my Japanese colleagues didn't understand why our system was so much more complex. So let's get rid of any automation and make the process as needlessly complex as possible. Let's also fire a pile of IRS workers so that they can't audit the more complex returns, filed by those same billionaires. We can say we're saving money even as the government collects much less money than is actually saved. Argh.

People used Geiger counters to generate random numbers decades ago, and sensing radiation is based on quantum effects.

I did a quick web search and found this: https://miamifruit.org/product...{sourceid}&g_merchantid=&g_placement=&g_partition=&g_campaignid=17435653585&g_ifproduct=&tw_source=google&tw_adid=&tw_campaign=17435653585&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA8q--BhDiARIsAP9tKI0IcNK4b44i9SKGq6c7QvxaExNUqQaLK6kdKXFyX-JYPH0X1miF0wEaAmL2EALw_wcB

Finnish National Bureau of Investigation lead investigator Sami Liimatainen says he wasn't contacted by WaPo, which published a story earlier today claiming that an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services holds that recent Baltic seabed cable damage was accidental.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20137924

And the Finns should have the most informatoin

Several things have changed that have made the US less competitive in science.

We have the best universities in STEM. We used to allow people with advanced degrees to pretty easily immigrate. We've made that harder by shrinking the pool of various visa types -- mostly as part of an anti-immigrant fever. And if the color of your skin is not white or you speak with an accent, there are lots of places you don't want to live.

A lot of our politicians reject science. Something like 1/3rd of congress is on record as climate change denial. Many reject the premise of evolution. When I was growing up being a rocket scientist or an atomic scientist was something people really looked up to. Even working in plastic was high prestige as we know from The Graduate. Politicians of course communicate their attitude to their constituents and are also a reflection of those views. Hence the life of a scientist is not as pleasant. After the soviets beat the US to space and after we ended the war in Japan by building a bomb, there was a huge rush based on national security to have more scientists.

Relative to other fields, science doesn't pay as well and the job security of a scientist has diminished.

Here's some facts: Training an AI model uses a lot of compute and a lot of electricity. It can be done on thousands of GPUs in a distributed fashion. You can stop and restart it. You can run it when electricity is cheapest. There are really two costs ignoring the programming costs, 1) the capital cost of the GPUs, or the rental of those GPUs on the cloud and 2) the electricity. Where I live, electricity is very cheap at night and can be very expensive at peak time. If you skipped training at the times the natural gas guy wants to sell you electricity, you'd only miss a small fraction of the day.

For inference costs, using the trained model, you can have various data centers around the world. At any hour there will be some that are not in a peak period. The amount of data sent and received from inferencing is tiny.

In short, the guy wants to sell gas and peaker plants and has no idea what he's talking about.

If you go to the PNAS study this is all based on, they make a distinction between smart charging and I'll call it dumb charging. They really only analyze current dumb charging. They assume that the cars can't do anything to smooth the load as a simplifying assumption. The authors of the study say this is a first step, and then proceed to ignore that this is a simplistic assumption. They point out that most cars start charging when they are plugged in. I have my car set up to charge so it's ready at 8am so it may be a bit warmer in the winter before I drive it. That's just a tiny amount smarter. My car is connected to the internet, it could determine when electricity was in lowest demand and charge them -- perhaps the utility could offer an appealing slightly lower time of use charge incentive. I live in NY and rates are tiny between 12 and 8am, which is when I charge. The grid is massively underutilized at all times during that period in NY. California may have a different time that it's underutilized. Without much infrastructure charges at all but some cooperation from the cars the grid utilization can be much smoother than it is now and most grids are set to deliver in the hottest of heat waves in the middle of the day for A/C and have lots of capacity at other times.

The article to make their job easier assumes that charging patterns will not change.

By the way the article observes that electricity costs are likely to go down as a result of EVs because they will shift all electric use to cheaper production which will help even non-EV users.

The Luddites were not low skilled workers but actually were among the most highly skilled artisans. Somehow no one ever complains or perhaps no one ever rebels when low priced workers are displaced, but when highly paid ones are, watch out. Some of what AI can do may replace highly paid workers like radiologists.

Perhaps this means we need more ML people and fewer physicists? Both are STEM fields. I'll bet that to make a good ML predictor of the weather you need to design a NN topology that can efficiently compute some of what the physics needs. Weather prediction has gotten better, but it's a field that can always get even better. When I was a kid it was hard to know whether or not to wear a rain jacket to school that day. Now I'd like to plan whether I should see friends in the city on Saturday or Sunday a week from now.

There will always be a value to better weather prediction and it will need STEM skills because even with ML its going to require massive computation and a better more efficient model is always possible. It just might need a different STEM field.

I agree. What are large language models really good at? Spewing well written fact free copy. I've used it occasionally to re-write text for me, something an English major might be better at than I am, where I provide the STEM content. LLMs are getting better at answering simple math problems, but where they really shine is well composed, but possibly nonsensical prose. What else is AI good at? Anything that's pattern recognition that can be trained on a very large corpus. Some parts of health care fit that bill. It is possible that in the relatively near future, they will be able to do reasoning, but at the moment that seems the final frontier for AI. It seems the suggestion is exactly backwards?

Maybe he's waiting until he empties all the bitcoin wallets in the world before publishing? I don't believe it.

W-2's go to the Feds already, companies are required to send them over. Similarly all stock trades are sent to the government and banks send the interests and loan info. Remember that filing taxes is not on the honor system. There are some exceptions about income that is not reported but it's few and far between (if you make a profit on a drug trade you are required to pay taxes or they can get you the way they got Al Capone -- but that doesn't apply to most people). In Japan you get a post card and I think you can agree to pay what the Gov't thinks you owe. There are two groups that want to make it hard to file. Intuit, HR Block have an obvious incentive. But there are politicians that want to shrink the government and one prime way to do that is to make it difficult to file forms. In the 60's there were many income tax brackets and taxes were better for the middle-class and worse for the very rich. It wasn't possible to say we should tax the middle class more, but it was possible to say we should simplify tax filing. I never found the multiple brackets took more than a few minutes to figure out, but of course a computer makes that whole argument nonsensical. Hence we can't allow free computer filings because then there might not be a reason to make the tax code fairer. Why am I not surprised that it's the Republican's who are objecting to this.