Right, so you could make a claim like "all mathematicians leveraged (say) 95% prior knowledge". If OpenAI similarly leveraged 95%, and "discovered" the rest, it'd be (at least somewhat) legitimate to say "OpenAI invented a new theorem".

But, if OpenAI actually leveraged 99.9% existing knowledge (remember, my post said ""95+%"), then it's NOT fair to compare it to a human discovery. If a company claims as much, they're dishonestly promoting their product.

Again, I'm not a mathematician, and I did not read the paper. But given Altman's history of deception, I think any disinterested observer should lean towards assuming that he is falsely promoting the competency of his product, before assuming he's invented a machine that can out-invent humans.

I don't think anyone is contesting that. What they are contesting is a sociopath's claim that his tool solved something humans couldn't ... when really 95+% of what it did was just leverage existing human knowledge.

Caveat: I'm not a mathematician and I didn't read the paper ... but Sam Altman is VERY well known for lying (constantly), so everything he says should be taken with multiple bags of salt.

Honestly, I think the more everyone in the system talks about it honestly (and that includes calling humans "human capital", which is what we are in the economic system) the more informed everyone in that system will be.

You can't get people fighting for government to ensure they have a livelihood (ie. becoming socialist) if no one understands that we're all just capital, and we're being replaced with a different kind of capital.

Also, many popular online games (like EverQuest, WoW, Star Wars Galaxies) have proved they can live on decades after they stopped being supported by their maker. This includes games that ARE still supported ... but an earlier version of the game isn't ... so fans have made servers to support that earlier version (see Project 1999 for EQ or "Classic" WoW).

I just wish this bill had a requirement that, if a subscription game ended, the client had to be open sourced within X months. Even with the current legal risk from not having that, we've seen that the community will step in for popular games to create a fan-hosted solution. All that's needed is to remove that legal risk.

Look, I never said I had this problem: I don't even keep most subscriptions (e.g. I cancel TV subscriptions as soon as I sign up).

But again, so many people DO have this problem that the stupid phone app can advertise nearly 24/7 on every channel I watch! There are lots of people who have subscriptions they've forgotten about ... and more generally, even more people that just don't have a good understanding of where there money goes.

A safe/trust-worthy AI could be an amazing partner to help improve everyone's "financial literacy".

Let's not forget: personal financial management/analysis is hard!

Have you seen those ads for that stupid phone app that finds and cancels your five different Netflix subscriptions? Obviously most people don't have five subscriptions with any provider ... but there does seem to be enough people willing to pay for this stupid app. It's because wading through your bank's records of all your purchases (and actually making sense of it) is challenging: many people can't even (easily) determine what subscriptions they have.

This was what was so great about Mint ... but now Mint is dead, and even before it lacked the intelligence to categorize many purchases, so you wound up having to hand categorize them. LLMs are the PERFECT solution: with the right MCP I have zero doubt that Claude could compile an easy-to-understand report of all my spending for me, and even suggest what I might want to cut (like my five Netflix subscriptions, /s).

So yes, Altman is a pathological liar, and that means you can't trust anything from OpenAI ... but the core idea, of having AI help you understand something that's hard for humans to understand ... is an incredible one!

"There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure -- especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same, ... We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)

How did you not build a rat's nest BEFORE AI?

AI increases output: it magnifies existing issues, but it does not magically create new ones. I strongly suspect when you had hundreds of other programmers hand-writing code (without a good system of review and testing) you ALSO were building a rat's nest ... you were just doing it more slowly.

This is Amazon, not ... you know ... a good company.

I doubt the Canvas people are bribing educators and education administrators.

The truth is likely far more banal: Canvas is one of those "crappy but checks the boxes" products, like Jira or Slack. In other words, it's a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" kind of product.

Crazy people are a real and serious problem (in California or anywhere else). Nor only do they lose their own lives to their illness, they cause crimes against others at far greater rates. Getting them the medication they need is the best solution for everyone, including the crazy person.

Source: I would be a crazy street person if not for medication, because I have a serious mental illness. My wife's best friend just went from being a normal wife and mother to being a crazy street person who abandoned her child (and got arrested, multiple times, when she never had interacted with a cop before in her life) ... all because she didn't get the medication she needed. But she has the exact same condition as me, and absolutely could go back to taking care of her son (who desperately misses her) ... with medicine.

Now look, I'm not naive: I know that here in America we value individual sovereignty VERY highly. And here in California, specifically, we have a history of violating individuals' rights and locking them away in mental institutions simply because they were "abnormal". We don't want to go back to that.

I don't agree with Newsom on everything, but I di think he and other politicians should be looking for ways to respect individual rights ... but also get the mentally ill the care they need.

Stop believing everything every conservative pundit tells you!

Iran has a massive, multi-decade history with America. It dates back to when we supported an absolutely awful bloody/ruthless dictator known as the Shah ... directly against the interests of the Iranian people. Nukes are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of everything between the two countries.

Go Google employees: best of luck to you!

It won't work: Google is a for profit company, and there are A LOT of profits to be made in the made from the military. They will stop operating in the UK before they give up that much money.

It's almost like there's some sort of complex set up between the military and industrial sides of the equation, designed to drain US taxpayer money from citizens and into the that military industrial complex ...

But still, keep fighting the good fight!

Yeah, it's doing great on education (ranked 16th in the nation) ... but being a child there is still horrible (50th in the nation on child health, 47th in economic well-being).

And that's just talking about kids, not all of the state's other issues.

I truly don't believe that. Politicians want votes ... well, really they want to keep being politicians ... but that requires votes!

In our democracy, campaign contributions buy votes, but at the end of the day votes are the goal, not money. If Schiff learns that the money he's getting is losing him more votes than he can buy with it, he'll reverse his position as quickly as Trump can say "TACO".

https://www.schiff.senate.gov/...

If you live in California, please take a moment (as I just did) to tell Schiff exactly what you think of him selling out the nation's children in exchange for more $$$ from OpenAI. He may be (ok, no "may") a corrupt politician ... but he still cares what his constituents think of him.