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 -
Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.
Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.
What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:
Well, given that benchmarks show that we now have "super-human" AI, let's go! We can do everything we ever wanted to do, but didn't have the manpower for. AMD drivers competitive with NVIDIA's for AI? Let's do it! While you're at it, fork all the popular backends to use it. We can let it loose in popular OSes and apps and optimize them so we're not spending multiple GB of memory running chat apps. It can fix all of Linux's driver issues.
Oh, it can't do any of that? Its superhuman abilities are only for acing toy problems, riddles and benchmarks? Hmm.
Don't get me wrong, I suppose there might be some progress here, but I'm skeptical. As someone who uses these models, every release since the CoT fad kicked off didn't feel like it was gaining general intelligence anymore. Instead, it felt like it was optimizing for answering benchmark questions. I'm not sure that's what intelligence really is. And OpenAI has a very strong need, one could call it an addiction, for AGI hype, because it's all they've really got. LLMs are very useful tools -- I'm not a luddite, I use them happily -- but OpenAI has no particular advantage there any more; if anything, for its strengths, Claude has maintained a lead on them for a while.
Right now, these press releases feel like someone announcing the invention of teleportation, yet I still need to take the train to work every day. Where is this vaunted AGI? I suppose we will find out very soon whether it is real or not.
I'm afraid apps won't become lighter -- getting light is easy but there is little market incentive to, AGI programmer would rather create more dark patterns than
Still, I think we'll notice a big difference when you can just throw money at any coding problem to solve it. Right now, it's not like this. You might say "hiring a programmer" is the equivalent, but hiring is difficult, you're limited in how many people can work on a program at once, maintenance and tech debt becomes an issue. But when everyone can hire the "world's 175th best programmer" at once? It's just money. Would you rather donate to Mozilla foundation or spend an equivalent to close out every bug on the Firefox tracker?
How much would AMD pay to have tooling equivalent to CUDA magically appear for them?
Again, I think if AGI really hits, we'll notice. I'm betting that this ain't it. Realistically, what's actually happening is that people are about to finally discover that solving leetcode problems has very little relation to what we actually pay programmers to do. Which is why I'm not too concerned about my job despite all the breathless warnings.
When everyone can hire the _world's 175th best-at-quickly-solving-puzzles-with-code programmer at once. For quite significant cost. I think people would be better off spensing that amount of money on gemini + a long context window containing the entire code base + associated issue tracker issues + chat logs for most real-world programming tasks, because writing code to solve well-defined well-isolated problems isn't the hard part of programming.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link