Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

Destroying the originals in no way cancels out the fact that they made an unauthorized copies. They're two separate things. Copyright is literally and only about the right to copy. Buying a book doesn't give you that right; it only makes you the legal owner of that hard copy.

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

If he is an American citizen, he is not compelled to give up his passcode.

The Fifth Amendment starts with "No person ..." not "No citizen ..."

Bernie Sanders has proposed LLMs are using the collective knowledge of humanity so the people should own 50% of each LLM company.

The problem with ownership is that you also have to absorb the losses in addition to profiting from the gains. I don't see what problem ownership solves. We already have a way to get a slice of the pie for successful corporations: corporate income tax.

Eric S. Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which inspired Mozilla to make their browser open source. For some reason, this means they name their extended support releases after him.

If you brake, that which was traveling forward wants to keep traveling forward. If anything, I'd expect the outer edges of the door to fly forward, i.e., more open.

Even if you were right, it probably would work only if the door is very open, but not ajar.

Yet traditional cab drivers don't monitor their passengers to make sure they are awake and alert and not reporting any distress the entire trip

Of course not. That's not the scenario. The scenario is waking the driver upon reaching the destination. A taxi driver could physically shake the person.

I can't currently imagine what that would be to get me to go along with the idea you have any claim against them.

Somebody, somewhere can.

The point you're missing is that they don't have to get to an emergency room since an ambulance, unlike an autonomous vehicle, has trained medical personnel on board that can start administering procedures immediately upon arrival.

Also, FYI, despite what you may think, ambulances DO have to follow the speed limit.

It varies by jurisdiction, but no, they don't. At least in California, they can legally exceed the speed limit:

(b) Speed Restriction. In no event shall an ambulance driver exceed a speed of 15 miles per hour while disobeying any official traffic control stop sign or stop signal.

So that means that while going through, say, a red light, not only can they legally go through it, but then can, at most, exceed the speed limit by 15 MPH while doing it.

While NOT "disobeying any official traffic control stop sign or stop signal," they can generally exceed the speed limit even more (but, again, it varies by jurisdiction).

Here is the relevant law for Hollywood, FL:

No ambulance shall exceed the speed of 40 miles per hour except in cases of extreme emergency.

Which means they can exceed the speed limit by 39 MPH for "non-extreme" emergencies.

In New York State:

1104 Authorized Emergency Vehicles - (b) The driver of an authorized emergency vehicle may: 3. Exceed the maximum speed limits so long as he does not endanger life or property;

No specific maximum speed is mentioned.

The autonomous car would have to drive the speed limit and stop for all lights on the way to the hospital adding minutes to the trip.. minutes a passenger who is actually having a medical emergency might not have. The passenger will likely get life saving medical attention faster if the ambulance (that can legally exceed the speed limit and run red lights) travels to the car.

Because if they're actually having a medical emergency and are unconscious and die, the family will sue for negligence, wrongful death, or who knows what.

Gig workers close the doors, not emergency personnel. But yes, there should be a way to close the doors without human assistance.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Most US population centers are in places east of the point in their time zones where the sun is overhead (or due south) at noon, and being a bit west is better than being a bit (or very, for New England) east. This means that DST is mostly the right UTC offset for the wrong reason: Boston should be on Atlantic Standard Time year-round, but Eastern Daylight Time is a name for the same clock setting that is already used there sometimes, so that's easier to legislate. Of course, the people who live west of their true noon line don't think permanent DST would be good, but the fact that we should have no DST and a different map is too nuanced for the position that there's got to be a single simple answer as to how to fix everything, regardless of the situation.