wlxd
4mo ago
Yes, DOGE efforts are highly irregular, and massively disruptive to government agencies. That’s kinda the point. Your analysis of the email thing is somewhat superfluous, because we already knew that the DOGE exists precisely to get the government out of the ruts it’s been stuck following. And, of course, nobody is surprised that many employees don’t like it.
wlxd
4mo ago
Commercial surrogacy is illegal in pretty much the entire Europe, and altruistic surrogacy is illegal in most of it.
wlxd
4mo ago
You say:
Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them.
You also say:
It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing.
How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?
I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive.
No, you quoted an article that was citing figures from job postings. Those figures are not there to sound impressive, they’re there to satisfy legal requirements California imposes on job postings.
wlxd
4mo ago
To quote myself again (and to respond to /u/2rafa)
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that Grok 3.0 does in fact do all of this with the Johnny Cash song. All I'm saying is that it could.
All I'm arguing here is that "Grok couldn't have done that, because the answer came very fast, and speech transcription is slow" is a completely invalid argument, and I also argued that implementing this feature wouldn't require Grok developers to do anything special, because it would have came out of multimodality combined with internet search. I'm not saying that Grok actually does all of this (and I'm leaning towards thinking that it doesn't). My purpose here is to clear your misconceptions as to how the technology works, and what is possible.
No, I don’t have strong opinion one way or the other, I’m just saying that “transcribing a song is expensive so there is no way Grok is doing that to answer a text question” is a very bad argument. Grok could do that if it was trained with audio modality, but I don’t know if it actually does.
wlxd
4mo ago
In case it wasn’t clear: it took 67 seconds to transcribe an entire 171 seconds long song on my home CPU. You don’t have to wait for it to finish either: it produces output as it goes. It takes less than 20 seconds to process the entire song on my 9 year old gamer GPU. It would take less than half a second on a single H100. On 5 H100s, transcribing the entire song would take less time that it would take you to blink an eye. X AI reportedly has 100,000 of H100s.
But it doesn't, and the fact that it responded instantly is evidence of that.
How is it any evidence? Responding to the question is at least an order of magnitude more computationally demanding task than transcribing the entire song.
Do you really think Grok is spending resources (mostly dev time, really) to add features allowing the model to answer weird questions about song lyrics?
That’s the amazing thing about multimodal LLMs: they wouldn’t even have to add any special feature, with multimodality you get it for free. For a multimodal LLM model that is trained on sound tokens as well as on text tokens, understanding the words in a song, and analyzing accents etc is literally the same task as answering text questions. When you ask Grok a question, it searches web, fetches websites, and processes the contents. Fetching and processing song is, again, exactly the same task to the multimodal LLM as processing text.
which typically are borderline on lagging at 1x speed.
That's just not true. You see them running at 1x speed, because they only ever need to run at 1x speed. Running them faster is a waste of resources: what's the point of transcribing video in its entirety, if you are going to close the tab before it ends?
This is running on my home PC:
main: processing 'johny-cash-gods-gonna-cut-you-down.wav' (2739583 samples, 171.2 sec), 24 threads, 1 processors, 5 beams + best of 5, lang = en, task = transcribe, timestamps = 1 ...
(...)
[00:00:38.360 --> 00:00:52.120] Go tell that long-tongued liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the backbiter, tell him that God's gonna cut him down.
(...)
whisper_print_timings: total time = 67538.11 ms
That's 2.5x transcription speed, and it's just running on CPU, not even using GPU.
Look, guys, processing your stupid-ass text questions on a frontier LLM takes way more resources than speech transcription. Whisper on my CPU can do 400 GFLOPS, so the above 67 seconds run used something like 26,000 GFLOPs. For comparison, running a transformer model on a single token requires something like twice the number of parameters of the model worth of flops. So, for example, GPT-3, a junk tier model by today's standards, has 175B parameters, so just feeding it the lyrics of Cash's song would need 150,000+ GFLOPs, and that's before it even produces any output.
In the instant case, it would also need that algo to make some sort of judgement on the accent with which some of the words are being pronounced -- which is not a thing that I've seen.
Modern speech transcription models not only make judgements on accents as a normal course of operations, they actually understand the speech they are transcribing to some (limited) extent in the same sense as more general LLMs understand the text fed into them. It would actually be a pretty cool project for a deep learning class to take something like OpenAI Whisper, and fine tune it to make it into accent detection tool. It's all there inside the models already, you'd just need to get it out.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that Grok 3.0 does in fact do all of this with the Johnny Cash song. All I'm saying is that it could. The frontier LLMs are all multimodal, which usually means that they can process and generate image tokens in addition to text tokens. There's literally no technical reason why they couldn't add audio token type, and some of them probably already do that.
wlxd
4mo ago
You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.
Going public provides easy liquidity, which is good, especially to small stockholders, but private companies of the size we are talking about also usually provide liquidity options to stockholders. SpaceX, for example, had a tender offer a couple months ago. This event allows individual SpaceX stock holders to sell their holdings to institutional investors, in case you don't understand what that is.
To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).
However this says 188k - 440k
These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.
I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team
There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.
wlxd
4mo ago
No, parsing bits from a video file does happen practically instantly. Download a video file to your local disk, and play it from there, you’ll see. Even on YouTube, if you rewind back, it will have to represent the bytes again.
The reason it takes a while for YouTube stream to start is that this is what it takes for YouTube to locate the bytes you asked for and start streaming them to you.
wlxd
4mo ago
Unlikely. When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
wlxd
4mo ago
This is easy to solve: just flip the script. Have the recruiters and hiring managers reach out to people. All you need is a job market clearing house, where job seekers advertise their interest, and companies make the first move. Clearing house verifies identity of job seeker, to prevent creation of multiple profiles, and charges companies a fee per contact, so that they don’t spam people indiscriminately.
This works, because this model has been very common on the tech industry. In my dozen+ of years in this industry, I only ever cold sent my resume to one company, for an intentship. I got that job, and from that point it was always recruiters reaching out to me.
wlxd
4mo ago
I didn’t say it will be easy. What you describe are real problems. However, they are not as insurmountable as AI was 10 years ago. 10 years ago, there was relatively little investment in touch sensors, because even if you perfected them, there was little you could do with them. Now it is different.
My point is that AI advancements allow us to leap over solving problems by designing tool paths and configuration spaces, and onto solving problems by telling a robot “we need you to cut chicken, look how it’s done and imitate”.
wlxd
4mo ago
This will come for blue collar jobs pretty soon too.
Consider meat processing: parting out chicken or pork carcasses is something that’s hard to automate. Every carcass is slightly different, and the nature of the tasks makes it hard to build a machine that will do this with good enough accuracy and low enough waste.
Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans. Current AI tech solves the image recognition problem, so that the robot understands the carcass like human does. It also solves explaining the purpose of the task, so that the robot understand the actual purpose of separating thighs or breast, instead of just mindlessly following the programmed moves. Lastly, it solves the reasoning part, so that the robot can plan the task independently for each carcass, and adjust to conditions as it proceeds.
All that remains is integrating these into one performing system. This is by no means an easy task: it will still probably take years before the finished product is cheaper and better than illegal immigrant. However, 5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.
wlxd
4mo ago
I do agree that he likes China, but I don’t think he wants it to defeat US. The way I read him is more like “if China defeats us, it will be deserved, because they’re doing a lot of right things, while we are just fumbling while being insanely overconfident about our abilities, and seriously underestimating China”.
wlxd
4mo ago
"Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" The correct answer is yes, or so I'm told.
It’s not true. You need to also assume that the original space is locally compact. For example, if you one-point compactify the space of rational numbers (which is obviously Hausdorff), the resulting space is non-Hausdorff. That’s because the only compact subsets of rationals are discrete, and thus finite, so open subsets that contain the added point at infinity are exactly of the form Q plus the extra point minus some finite subset. This means that it intersects every other nonempty open subset (because all open subsets of that space are infinite). Thus, you cannot separate the point at infinity from any other point by two disjoint open sets, because there are no disjoint open sets from the ones that contain the point at infinity.
wlxd
4mo ago
The point is that this answer is just incorrect. There are non Hausdorff one point compactifications of Hausdorff spaces. You need additional assumption of local compactness for it to be true.
wlxd
4mo ago
Syria and Lebanon are outside Europe and thus outside the responsibility of the EU anyway.
Imagine what the world stage would look like if US shared this attitude.
wlxd
4mo ago
The Zoe Post was the turning point for me as well. Before that, I bought into the whole progressivism. After seeing them eviscerate Eron, who obvious victim of abuse, I understood that actually we are the baddies. It really changed my entire perspective. What really sealed the deal was Untitled, though.
wlxd
4mo ago
A typical use of cancer funds is a grant where you GMO some bacteria to produce some protein, which you then concentrate, crystallize, then do some X-ray crystallography to analyze its structure. What does it have to do with cancer? Oh right, that protein may lead to a cancer drug, maybe. But, you know, it might also lead to AIDS drug! Who knows.
You don’t need to move any funds. You can study AIDS on cancer institute funds. You can study it on kidney institute funds. You can do it on infections diseases institute funds. As I said, the way the system works is that NIH has enormous amount of discretion here. The only way to prevent it would be to literally have executive tell the underlings explicitly to stop funding AIDS, or have Congress pass explicit law prohibiting them from doing so.
Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.
I’m literally telling you how the actual system works in practice. You can keep talking about appropriations and chide me for using the word “earmark” in a technically incorrect sense, but it is you who has no idea about how biotech funding actually works. Doing biomedical research that only tangentially concerns cancer under cancer grant is not fraud, it’s a day that ends in y. Talk to literally anyone in biomedical research.
That’s not the case here at all. NIH, NSF and the like have enormous amounts of discretion where they allocate funds, even if it appears to be earmarked.
For example, huge chunk of NIH funds are earmarked for cancer research. The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify. I learned this from some of my friends doing biotech research. Literally all of them work under cancer research grant, but their actual research has very little to do with cancer per se.
How to study AIDS on cancer grant? Easy: AIDS causes cancer, so AIDS prevention reduces cancer incidence. Done. No need to reallocate anything in Congress.
wlxd
4mo ago
He makes sure to tax the wealthy more so they can't afford to raise an army against him and become the new king.
This confused me, because feudal monarchy worked on pretty much opposite principle. It was a duty of the wealthy nobles to raise and fund their armies when needed. This was something the king required them to do, not inhibited from.
wlxd
4mo ago
First, disparate impact doctrine has nothing to do with it. At best you could argue that it’s related to equal protection.
More importantly, this is a fully general arguments against any laws. Why prohibit theft if it’s just a bludgeon when the your political opponents are the ones controlling law enforcement?
How do you know that this is opposite? How do you know that it is not the best, or even not a good way to tackle this problem? This sort of argument would be more convincing if there was an alternative way of going about doing this that was clearly better. Do you know any? I don’t. On the other hand, I know that Elon Musk has a track record of using very similar procedures across his companies, and in these cases, they apparently have been very successful.
I think that we will find out quite soon whether this was a good plan or not.
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