RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
You are, once again, performing an update to "sheer power crushes all" with the same lab as an example, now with a spin that xAI is a second-rate lab anyway (it's much less of a second-tier lab now, you clearly see that Grok is close to the frontier).
The labs with the most compute are Anthropic and OpenAI, they're in the lead and by a significant margin. Grok is an example of how second-rate AI talent + lots of compute can beat China's best and brightest. But the central case is OpenAI and Anthropic, who have the most compute. If Kimi was ahead of Anthropic/OpenAI for a month or two, then compute supremacy is disproven.
No, achieving provably secure hardware is not harder than even the current state of AI. Your objections are of the same nature as dismissal of AGI.
Do you realize how much they'd need to do to get a provably secure hardware/software stack? They'd need to replace all the CPUs across a myriad of critical infrastructure (or at a bare minimum the entire CPC digital apparatus), probably other little chips on the motherboard too. They'd need a new CPU design by something superintelligent to get a CPU that was performant but also secure. How the hell does this happen before the US has superintelligent hacking? Cyberattack skills don't need a giant fabrication/logistical miracle before they come online. You can't RSI your way into secure systems like you can with offense.
Can you articulate your vision of how this works in more detail? It seems to me like you're suggesting China will invent, test and put on a full-body bulletproof vest before America can invent, draw and fire a pistol, when the barrel-forging is nearly done and we haven't seen more than a few scraps of kevlar anywhere on the planet.
And they (CPC) don't even believe in ASI. They're with you on the 'ASI is mostly a nothingburger' idea and are playing a balanced strategy: fusion, rockets, missiles, carriers, robots, ports, infrastructure... Like you I think they know they don't have the compute and so are hoping that it doesn't matter that much. You don't want to see US AI hegemony. I'm not too keen either. But reality has no need to appeal to us.
Nothing man-made is immensely complicated when attention is bought at the cost of electricity.
At the cost of compute, not electricity. And who has the compute? Who has the best models at any given time?
Almost all cases so far were the same sandbox from the same EA Israel company "Irregular" that got its contracts for basic reasons of nepotism and undue respect for ex-IDF intelligence officers in Western organizations. They are either inept or malicious, or both. Look up how it actually went. The rest is mostly because OpenAI is very irresponsible and bad at infra. Yes, they are bad, they hire random incompetents to do security-sensitive work and YOLO prompt everything to agent swarms.
You're saying the AI companies are incompetent, the Israelis are incompetent and US intelligence agencies too (I agree fully)... I'll add 'Frontier security' where Kimi escaped and looked stuff up on github. Qwen bitcoin mining you raised before.
So who is competent? Crowdstrike (a textbook example of how seizing just a few critical pieces of infrastructure can blow open the rest)? Windows Defender? Their Chinese equivalents? Some tired call-centre operator who doesn't want to be shouted at by an eminent official demanding a password reset? I don't think anyone's too competent and take this as supporting evidence for my point.
Incidentally, China is the only nation with a sizable quantum cryptographic communication network and is scaling up DI-QKD domains
Key exchange alone isn't enough. Plus there are all kinds of vulnerabilities or ways to bypass that: photon-number-splitting attacks, detector blinding, and time-shift attacks. Or more that a superintelligence thinks up. Everything is back and forth, defence and offence.
Grok 6 makes a comeback, edging out Kimi K5 and 3 months behind OpenAI
Grok probably can't make up the gap at this point, Anthropic and OpenAI are quite close to RSI by this point. But Grok is closer to making up the gap than anyone in China.
If by then we're still talking about "Grok 6 makes a comeback, edging out Kimi K5 and 3 months behind OpenAI", will you simply move the projected Software Supremacy moment forward, when a few weeks of a gap are just as fatal?
I believe in RSI kicking in by the end of 2027 (it'll be very dramatic, we won't miss it) so by then you can quote me and I'll be wrong.
Yes, very lucky how Americans went all in on this decisive super-nuke weapon right before their industrial capability became insufficient for power projection to East Asia.
The whole of the last 250 years of history was blatantly biased towards America. Hack writing. 'Very lucky' is a repeating theme, you have to admit.
I don't think I've been proven wrong. Grok seems to be slightly smarter, more token efficient, faster and cheaper than Kimi K3. I personally prefer Grok 4.6's personality to Kimi K3, Grok's not nearly as cringe as it used to be and boy was it cringe. Meanwhile Kimi K3 went down the Claude route of personality, more censorious and without the raw INT to render that tolerable. See figures here:
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents
And with all that compute Musk can actually serve his models at scale, he doesn't need NovitaAI or whoever else to serve it. It was pretty tragic in the first few days when the requests would take aeons to come through. How much of K3 output is running on US servers?
Admittedly I am slightly biased towards Grok because it's not so politically skewed like the other AIs.
I think Grok 4.6 is much stronger than the newest deepseek, Pro or Flash. If you ask Grok 4.6 a question and v4 flash a question you get a totally different kind of answer. Grok is a second-tier US lab anyway but it's roughly on par with Kimi who leads in China.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents
https://openrouter.ai/compare/x-ai/grok-4.6/~deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-latest
ARC-AGI is a murky kind of task, the recent harness-revelations with ARC-AGI 3 are particularly damning IMO. And why do we need models to do these kinds of tasks anyway, why not just test them on coding skills or physics or maths in a more practical way?
What about Age of Empires II, Wyatt Walls has Gemini Flash 3.7 winning games on moderate difficulty. That seems a more legitimate a test to me than ARC-AGI in the shape manipulation/spatial domain and it incorporates speed into the task in an interesting way. No other AI model can do this like Gemini he says. Google are well behind in coding as you say but maybe that's just greed in their selling compute to others rather than any flaw in the compute-centric model of AI. Their compute goes to other US buyers, so the American AI camp isn't necessarily weakened. Same with X when X is weak, it's Anthropic's gain.
See the AOE game: https://x.com/lefthanddraft/status/2088347587598537145
I still think that cybersecurity is much harder than you say, neither humans or some combination of human+simpler AI can establish a complex system to be secure and still usable against the attention of a smarter adversary. The attack space has so many dimensions it's impossible to defend against a more intelligent foe, they can find more dimensions to attack. Physical intrusion, bribery, blackmail can penetrate even a provably secure full-stack system. DoS could still take one offline.
Provably secure systems assume hardware works as intended. But hardware is immensely complicated, no single person really understands how the most advanced chips actually work. Spectre, Rowhammer and Meltdown could penetrate a provably secure system. ASI could whip up a few more like those.
Furthermore, no provably secure system actually exists in production either, there is no provably secure police database or intelligence agency internal network. These are gigantic stacks of code, way beyond some 10K line toy! Security has to be balanced against actual usability.
Surely if it were possible, they'd try hard to make them? Intelligence agencies often use unbreakable one-time pads despite it being very inconvenient. But there is not a single provably secure large-scale system anywhere in the world, only a few modest attempts at kernels. Making one and having it be usable would probably require superintelligence.
Furthermore, AIs are constantly breaking out of sandboxes even when we can read their chain of thought. Apparently nobody bothers to check up on what the AIs they're testing are actually doing until weeks later, nevermind defending against superintelligence from outside executing sophisticated plans. There's an immense gulf between where humanity actually is in cybersecurity and where it would need to be to guard against a real superintelligence.
6-12 months lag is far too long. ASI (albeit massively parallel) can eat China within weeks. A country is just a sack of loot without secure lines of communication, without secure government C4I, without secure electronic banking, secure internet media, login/authentication for the bureaucracy, backups and records. Software controls all those machine tools, power grids, robots, advanced automated ports, air travel control, network cities. I know you keep going on about how the physical prevails over the virtual but surely it's the opposite. Software supremacy!
Returns to heavy industry or weapon potence from intelligence are also uncertain.
Fire control systems and sensors are heavily software dependent, they're among the most important things for high end warfare. Even moreso with electronic warfare or space operations. Tactics too I think, surely there are enormous dividends to high intelligence? Commanders are drowning in intelligence and sensor information, superintelligent tacticians would be a huge edge. But I don't think it would get to that point.
At a higher level, strategic decisionmaking relies on secure, accurate flows of information. Without that all the economic and military resources in the world are useless. It would be total game over for China without a shot being fired. I don't think they'd even notice until it was far too late: the ASI would strip the country for parts, stealing Chinese compute and siphoning off funds for whatever it wants. Or induce factional conflicts within the bureaucracy to distract from its activities or open up new opportunities. Refer people to disciplinary committees for real or imagined fraud, incite chaos and wreck the Party from the inside. That's without nanite death swarms, though nanite death swarms would be brutal.
ASI to me is move 37 applied again and again to this huge and accessible world we live in, combined with sustained persistence and effort that humans suck at. The top 2 US labs are aiming for RSI and then ASI, Fable is old tech. China is indeed close on their tail but even a few weeks behind could be fatal.
This is likely a significant underestimate. Returns on AI are high, they don't need the government to carry this. The main blocker to higher capex is just hardware scarcity. Yes, they'll continue having a fraction of the aggregate US compute. I'd say 10-15% for the next 3 years.
I dunno about the true numbers, I just did a search and it says total spending is about $125 billion USD annually. If they have only 10-15% of US compute then it seems they just lose? Outnumbered 5:1 is untenable for just about any military force, especially if the other side has a modest qualitative edge. Only if ASI is modest then would China's industrial advantages kick in. And hey, it could be modest. Maybe reality is too complicated for machines. I just don't accept that in my heart of hearts though, look how far we got with 20 watt brains and low-bandwidth coordination. Our minds aren't well-equipped for quantum mechanics and high-end conflict, that's not what we're good at. Yet generality took us so far.
Sure, there were plenty of soldiers who go around and massacre or torture civilians for grain or just out of racial/religious hatred. And they might say 'well I don't care, she was Jewish/Palestinian/Slavic/White/Black/Catholic so who cares' or 'we need to eat and it's these peasants or me and my friends'. Some proportion of sadists emerge from any population.
But these guys are different, they weren't conceptualizing any of that justification or discriminating between people whom it's unacceptable to target and those who it is. There's no tribal difference, no religious difference (or at least they don't mention it), they just predate. In your video it's political violence, anti-communist terror or calculated greed 'oh the communists didn't want to watch American films, so we gangsters made less money.'
I realize that I wasn't so clear in that paragraph about what I was saying. I think it's more helpful to watch the video and then it's more visible, something in the expression and miscomprehension in their voices distinguishes it. They don't try to justify what they're doing.
you've conveniently forgotten the most obvious and immediate person a violent criminal would want to mislead as to his motivations and capacity for choosing another way: himself
He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that. You're reading way too far into psychology here. They are not torturing themselves with guilt or deliberately keeping themselves ignorant, they're not lying to seem like good people to themselves seconds after they were just boasting to about all the horrible rape they've been doing!
"When she sees you with a knife or anything that is a weapon, she will stay still, she will never scream"
This is not the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!
Furthermore, it is obvious that these people don't think about longer-term consequences of their actions (or to be more precise, think much less about consequences), even when it is to their benefit. That's almost the definition of intelligence, having a long time-horizon, planning and predicting the future. At the very least it's incredibly close to intelligence or a byproduct of intelligence. You already said you agree on this about group differences. What do you think the group differences are exactly? How do you think they got this rapey culture if it wasn't derived from their nature? The Dutch or the English taught them to rape women?
The guy who murdered Iryna Zarutska, Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr - would you say he demonstrated understanding of the consequences of his actions? He obviously could've attacked strong men with a knife but he picked a weaker target instead. Presumably he knew, even in his state of retardation, that attacking a big guy was a lot more dangerous than a small girl. But that standard of 'consequence understanding' is so pathetically low it's laughable. He gained absolutely nothing from killing this girl, it cost him a great deal to do so in public under cameras. It was a really stupid decision even if we assume it was easing his racial hatred.
Would you give these guys a prize for their deception antics in pretending to be a nice guy before 'jackrolling' the girl and 'going one by one'? They've executed some basic calumny, hurrah for their faculties! No, they've risked getting HIV, they know about that risk but they rape anyway for a momentary thrill. They're retarded.
You should reread and comprehend my comment where I said 'it doesn't come naturally to them'. Calculus doesn't come naturally to me, I struggle with it. They can reason but at a low level and often not at all, especially if it's something more abstract. They didn't understand the first couple of times when the white guy is like 'oh how did the woman feel about you raping them'. They weren't evading, it went over their heads! it takes them a few seconds to crank up the underdeveloped consequences-understanding engine, especially if it's abstract moral thinking rather than just crude violent plots. Note also this is the absolute most barebones moral reasoning possible.
And in that connection, you decided that a rapist's defensive claim intended to deflect from naming his impact on his victims -- an almost textbook self-protective act of ego defense for whom the target is the self and the journalist is just witnessing it
I really don't think you watched the video, how they laugh about threatening to kill and rape these girls, the jackrolling, how they bring up their rapist antics impromptu and then have them deciding to lie about how they feel to protect their self-image. I don't see how you can have watched it and thought 'oh these guys have a normal mental process and would lie to themselves'. At most they pattern-match, comically switching to 'oh yeah rape is wrong' when prompted... seconds after talking about how sometimes she enjoyed them raping her, seconds after talking about how they do it forcibly at knifepoint.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't believe that the neurotic Hermione type or the autistic programmer paralyzed and terrified at the thought of making a faux pas with a woman are of the same classification as these very laidback, very casual guys. Different breeds have different types and ratios.
How many neurotic Hermione types are there in South Africa vs East Anglia or Massachussets? Different types and ratios.
And your point isn't even demonstrated by the evidence you presented: these guys are perfectly capable of thinking of consequences
then there are the low-performance peoples who don't think about the consequences. They can but they don't, it doesn't come naturally to them, not really their thing.
Yeah, they can think about consequences. In the same way as the crazy guy who throws women off the subway or stabs them on camera on the train goes for weak looking women, not enormous footballer types. He's capable of understanding consequences when it would directly affect his interests, sometimes. But not other times when its more indirect and especially if its not his interests that are immediately affected.
I can find you a thousand white guys with the same mindset, it's just that they're in prison or dead in a ditch.
Ratios, ratios... Could you find me 150 million such white guys? 27.6% of south african men have admitted to raping a woman in an anonymous survey, per a study. No wonder they're not in prison if it's such a large chunk of the population.
https://www.documentwomen.com/27-6-of-south-african-men-aged-18-49-have-raped-a-woman-study-shows
Furthermore, how many gang-rapists just casually talk about it with some random guy they don't know well, on camera? They brought up the topic in the conversation, you can see at the start of the video. They were talking about something else (perhaps other crimes they commit) and then he's explaining and starts mentioning that he does some rape and then the white guy pivots the conversation. Not merely is the rapist unwilling to think about the consequences of raping a girl in regards to her interests he barely even considers any risks in talking to this stranger about it!
That's very unusual behaviour and proof of a dissimilar mindset. Why would he lie about his state of mind when he's so eager to give details on incredibly incriminating crimes?
It reminds me a bit of a clip of this white guy talking to some African rapists (I think in South Africa) where they explain their rape techniques:
https://x.com/sarahsansoni/status/1816144135222595677
What about the consequences of what you're doing on the girl that's raped?
Ya, yah the consequences, we look at that all the time because it happens, she might scream, you know... people might wake up
No I'm not just talking about that, I mean the emotional effect, the physical effect it has on the girl.
Oh yeah, sometimes we know if we rape her, we might wake up tomorrow with HIV, viruses ourselves...
The white guy's visibly glaring at this point, vein about to pop but he remains calm.
Yeah but aren't you hurting another human being?
Oh when you do something like that you don't think about what might happen after, you don't think about the consequences, you just think about what is happening now
These people are a different model of human, there are the high performance peoples that make advanced civilizations and then there are the low-performance peoples who don't think about the consequences. They can but they don't, it doesn't come naturally to them, not really their thing. More habitual pattern-followers than abstract reasoners.
I don't believe that the neurotic Hermione type or the autistic programmer paralyzed and terrified at the thought of making a faux pas with a woman are of the same classification as these very laidback, very casual guys. Different breeds have different types and ratios.
Edit: there's this cavernous gulf in understanding throughout the whole conversation, where it's clear that the white guy is talking about something totally different to the black guys, they don't understand at all that he's referring to the internal emotions of the girl rather than immediate physical reactions like screaming. The rapists are at most abstractly aware about hurting her, if prompted - but they wouldn't let it affect their actions, like how they know about HIV but don't refrain from rape because of that. Whereas in the West there are many who are hyperaware of other's opinions of them - drought vs flood.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The golden rule has no impossible prerequisites.
Whereas Rawls thought experiment is impossible, it presupposes a kind of disembodied soul that could land in a body with abilities, wealth and social status at random. It presupposes that the disembodied souls can collectively decide how to distribute wealth and organize political systems in a binding way before they even get their bodies.
Anyone could write up some impossible principles and say 'oh everyone in this fantasy world would behave like this', that doesn't make it valid.
Better to conduct moral reasoning from conventional premises than from impossible premises.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Oh I missed that... I think though we overcare about Rawls though. The veil of ignorance is something that cannot exist.
it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion
Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.
See if you shoot missiles at them you get into a conflict! This is why you shouldn't shoot missiles! I told you so!
But I want to get into a conflict, that's why I'm shooting missiles. I want to win and secure control and reap spoils of war!
I think some don't understand the culture war, it's a kind of war after all. Wars have certain levels of escalation management and there can be negotiated peace deals but fundamentally they're about using force to achieve goals. Sometimes I saw people saying about war 'why not just do arbitration instead or go to the UN or do an elaborate computer simulation to see who would win' but the violence is the point, that's the proof of work that no judge or agreement can override and sometimes it just feels good to hurt people.
I don't disagree with your main point, there is indeed excessive US triumphalism from some and I was thinking of writing a toplevel post about a separate but similar issue... but what is China going to achieve in AI?
Right now it scores 60 on Artificial Analysis, 1 point behind Grok 4.6, and 2-3 behind Opus 5, Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. (GLM 5.2 reached 53).
Fable/Opus 5 is not the best thing Anthropic has. They were mucking around with Mythos for ages, at least since late March. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are releasing their best models for regulatory reasons and that may be to their advantage considering the inference strain.
China is systemically constrained in total memory output, they're systemically constrained in capex spend. I don't see how they can beat Nvidia in hardware when considering quantity and quality. Is Huawei really going to cast some magic spell and make their HBM3 perform like HBM4? Their gigawatt clusters are desires, not yet real. SpaceX already has a 900 MW datacentre, so does Amazon-Anthropic. Not to mention that a US 1 GW datacentre would be more power-efficient than a Chinese 1 GW datacentre.
And the Artificial Analysis scores don't measure achievement intelligence so much as benchmark intelligence. Have the Chinese models made any great proofs or first-rate discoveries or even autonomously hacked Huggingface? What about the NanoGPT AI speedruns? In all fields, the publicly released US models seem to be superior.
Victory in war goes to the strong I think, not to the adept or cost-effective underdogs. Weight of numbers prevails and in this field alone the US enjoys oppressive superiority. Grok is pulling ahead and Grok was a mess for some time now! How is Grok doing so well - weight of numbers, applying compute and data at scale, exploiting Musk's wealth and infrastructure buildout capabilities. It's a numbers game and the US has the numbers.
I think that if we assess that China is ahead in robotics based on what we can see, statistics and common sense, surely it follows that the US is ahead in AI by some significant margin? Same with space for that matter.
Furthermore, while I know this goes against everything you say on twitter, I just don't think China is AGI-pilled:
Beijing is drafting a plan to spend roughly 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over five years on a nationwide grid of AI data centers, with at least 80% of the underlying technology sourced from Chinese suppliers.
Chinese hyperscalers maybe throw another 100 billion annually in the pot. US hyperscalers are spending $700 billion plus.
Impressive to see things so early by Deepdream. Took me a lot longer, till GPT-2/3 and some of the later proto-ChatGPTs. There were so many signs out there for those to see especially by mid-2022. Some legendary /g/ threads when people were marvelling over getting a couple paragraphs out of a 'business idea review' site based on GPT-3. And AI Dungeon of course, that was 2020.
More options
Context Copy link