This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is it so over for OpenAI? I just signed up for a Grok subscription for $7/month. Apparently the reasoning performance of their new model is on the same tier as ChatGPT-4o and Claude Sonnet. Image generation is best-in-class (using Flux). And of course it's much less neutered than the competition.
The miracles that OpenAI accomplished in the last 3 years now seem rather... commonplace. There's a lot of competitors at nearly the same level. Facebook's open-sourced AI, Llama 3.1, will commoditize the space. While it's not really feasible to run these models on your home computer (yet) it will be easy for smaller companies to buy compute and then sell Chat-GPT similar services. It will be a race to the bottom now.
OpenAI is running at a gigantic loss. I'm sure they were planning to capture a monopoly and then raise prices. That seems less likely to work now as their product is undifferentiated.
And the irony of Elon controlling a Chat-GPT similar is just too delicious. OpenAI management stole the IP of the non-profit for their own financial gain. Now open source is routing around the damage and rebuilding it all from scratch. I bet Grok's total development costs are like 1% of OpenAI's.
A part of me thinks that the high end of AI is now being kept behind closed doors. Surely OpenAI has been doing something other than making GPT-4 smaller and lighter in the nearly two years since they've finished it.
At minimum they have the ability to produce lots of synthetic data to train future models with, now they have this newer and cheaper model. And they have far more compute than before.
Same with Anthropic. Where is Opus 3.5? Hidden from us mere mortals.
I'll admit that this thought has occurred to me. But given everything we know about human nature, do you think anyone could keep something of this magnitude under wraps?
The criminal mastermind always longs to confess his crimes so we can marvel at how clever he is.
Probably not indefinitely, but it is at least possible to keep something of that magnitude under wraps for a long time and effectively enough that the few occasional whistleblowers get dismissed as cranks or ignored until finally one day something comes out that is too big to be swept under the rug. Take the NSA domestic surveillance program, for example. It was successfully kept secret from the public for many years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link