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 -
China has a new AI system out taking the world by storm, Manus. It's an autonomous AI agent that, according to Forbes changes everything.
I've seen a LOT of hype so far about AI agents, but the claims from this one actually seem pretty impressive, if they are true. Forbes says:
Manus uses the by now common "stack" of AI models, where there's a master-slave relationship between a head model that looks at the problem, and then sub models which are more specialized to go and do specific tasks. I can't quite tell from a quick search what the key breakthrough Manus made is, as my understanding is other agent AIs already have a similar set up. There is talk about asynch cloud work, but again, I didn't think that was an entirely new thing.
Either way, similar to the DeepSeek R1 reveal, there are a lot of breathless articles coming out about China "taking the lead" i the AI race. I agree that this is a concerning development for the U.S., given that we now have two Chinese labs that have seemingly joined the leading edge out of nowhere. Of course, it remains to be seen if this press blitz actually reflects seriously impressive new ground, or is just a good hype campaign.
Anyone who has used this or looked more into the details - what are your thoughts about Manus so far?
I was rather suspicious about Manus when I saw a bunch of Twitter accounts who were this close to being unfollowed or muted on account of being breathless hypemen lauding it as revolutionary. A relatively unknown company? No previous releases? Little to no information about the system?
Then it turned out that Manus is a thin-wrapper over Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
Anything good about is almost entirely down to Sonnet. Which is a great model!
Well, at least it isn't a ChatGPT wrapper. This demonstrates slightly better taste, albeit execution that's a joke.
Claude 3.7 reasoning has been very disappointing for me. It tends to be a paragraph that boils down to
{{user}} has requested a reply, I should give him one.Huh. I haven't used it, because Anthropic doesn't remotely have the capacity to cater to what paying users except. Does it do this for tasks that actually require reasoning?
I'm quite happy with every other reasoning model I've tried.
I’m not doing maths or anything. I use it for schedule management, task list prioritisation etc. I would expect them to benefit from reasoning - indeed, that’s exactly what I want the reasoning for. Being able to do maths is nice but nothing to do with the majority of my use cases.
The contrast with, say, R1 which will produce a full set of reasoning for whatever you ask (and then go off on the wrong direction) is notable. Perhaps the truncated reasoning is meant to produce more tractable behaviour; fair enough if so but not an upgrade from 3.5.
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