We must have mass surveilance because CHINA!

How easily the "land of the free" becomes what it claims to oppose. I guess it's not the first time.

BTW, we have always been at war with EastAsia.

I expect it comes from Sam Altman not wanting all his employees to quit and get jobs at Anthropic, Google and Facebook.

Currently the kill decisions are entrusted to sleep deprived teenagers on speed so maybe not so much of a difference. Mass surveilance by something trained on edgelord Twitter should be interesting though.

Well, the link compares troops and material.

No, your link is great. Thanks for sharing it. I was referring to the American habit of comparing everyone's military based on their exhorbitant spending (on their credit card).

Unfortunately that would require people (including Sam Altman) to actually learn things. Facts are inconvenient and numbers are scary.

Opinion is a causal connection to reality unless you're suggesting that everyone who buys or sells stocks is insane.

It makes sense that big fiction releases would affect the stock market. Someone makes a feel good blockbuster movie about something and things related to that something are likely to sell better. Vice versa for the converse.

Sort of. The secret someone in your example goes to a bunch of effort to make the one ball not in S a green one while all the other balls are red. You're colour blind so you have to sample the balls as you say. The QC is not color blind, and has been told in advance it's looking for the green one, so it can just grab it. Except it gets it wrong most of the time so you actually have to do some sampling anyway.

quantum computers are not just faster calculators, they sometimes need far less data to do a job.

No, the QC isn't a faster calculator (typically it's much slower) and it doesn't need less data (usually it needs much more). It can, however, perform specific types of matrix multiplications very quickly, so if you can contrive your problem to take advantage of that the computation might be faster. It depends a lot on how much contriving is necessary. It's much the same as how a big pipe with a fan on one end is really good at doing fluid dynamics computations.

There's no magic. It is literally just simple matrix multiplications.

The OMG quantum is weird crowd like to talk about entanglement as if it's some strange situation. Rather, massive entanglement is the norm. The strange situation is when some monkeys with lasers come along and very carefully disentangle a couple of electrons or whatever from everything else in the universe then let them just barely become entangled with each other.

The GP used "observe" but it's entirely unnecessary.

The reason the world doesn't do any of the "weird" quantum stuff IS that it's massively entangled. We can only get the weird stuff by setting up very delicate, very special cases. Then, when we "observe" them, i.e. entangle them with a giant measurement device of some kind that is itself massively entangled with the rest of the universe, the special delicate state "collapses" into an ordinary massively entnagled one.

So surprising.

Fortunately he has a nice shiny law to use, which the summary mentions he already threatened.

The other possibillity in his threat, listing Anthropic as a supply chain risk, means that any company with Anthropic anywhere in their supply chain is potentially banned from government contracts. In the US that's pretty much the corporate death penalty.

He'll go with direct force though.

There's no such thing as "instinctive equilibrium." All organisms'* populations increase until they reach their environment's carrying capacity. That's the point at which their death rate equals their birth rate. The feedback isn't instant so usually the population oscillates around the actual carrying capacity, i.e. feast followed by famine.

* Except one, maybe. Humans did just as all other organisms do up until recently. It's called the Malthusian trap. Every increase in food production capacity was just eaten up by increased population, then right back to famine and disease. Recently, fairly developed countries (not "the west") seem to escape the trap, primarily by educating women.

I think Anthropic named two for you. Okay, the second one isn't a national security threat, it's a desire for a tool to deal with them.

The process names haven't actually indicated feature size since about 1997 (~250 nm). It's supposed to indicate the "equivalent" of a 90's era transistor. Leading edge EUV machines have a resolution of about 10-15 nm, and most actual features are considerably bigger than that.

You CAN push around individual atoms, and you can do some really cool stuff that way. It's impractically expensive though, and impractically slow to make anything that's not a tech demo.

Yes. Efficiency depends on both what the numerator and denominator are. Your boss doesn't care about your other outputs. You do.

Yes, and the human is probably doing the work at a computer anyway, using a significant fraction of the electrical power it would be using if it were running a model. Probably more electricity overall because the human takes much longer to complete the task.

The point is that Sam Altman is not wrong... on this specific point. AI in general is quite efficient. Paradigm shifting efficient in lots of cases. The wild energy needs Altman keeps talking about are because he wants to be the first to make AGI and he can't wait for algorithmic improvements so he just wants to throw unprecedented amounts of compute at it.