domain:streamable.com
FtttG
31m ago
That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us.
Which strikes me as an intrinsically quixotic goal. As you note yourself, even the richest man on earth can't stop people making jokes about his drug problems. Even the leader of the free world can't stop people making jokes about his tiny hands, as much as he'd obviously like to. When I see trans women in floods of tears and rending their hair about how strangers don't see them the way they see themselves, all I can think is - buddy, join the club.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
21m ago
Periodic Open-Source AI Update: Kimi K2 and China's Cultural Shift
(yes yes another post about AI, sorry about that). Link above is to the standalone thread, to not clutter this one.
Two days ago a small Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released weights of the base and instruct versions of Kimi K2, the first open (and probably closed too) Chinese LLM to clearly surpass DeepSeek's efforts. It's roughly comparable to Claude Sonnet 4 without thinking (pay no mind to the horde of reasoners at the top of the leaderboard, this is a cheap-ish capability extension and doesn't convey the experience, though is relevant to utility). It's a primarily agentic non-reasoner, somehow exceptionally good at creative writing, and offers a distinct "slop-free", disagreeable but pretty fun conversation, with the downside of hallucinations. It adopts DeepSeek-V3’s architecture wholesale (literally "modeling_deepseek.DeepseekV3ForCausalLM"), with a number of tricks gets maybe 2-3 times as much effective compute out of the same allowance of GPU-hours, and the rest we don't know yet because they've just finished a six-months marathon and don't have a tech report.
I posit that this follows a cultural shift in China’s AI ecosystem that I've been chronicling for a while, and provides a nice illustration by contrast. Moonshot and DeepSeek were founded at the same time, have near-identical scale and resources but have been built on different visions. DeepSeek’s Liang Wengeng (hedge fund CEO with Masters in engineering, idealist, open-source advocate) couldn't procure funding in the Chinese VC world with his inane pitch of “long-termist AGI research driven by curiosity” or whatever. Moonshot’s Yang Zhilin (Carnegie Mellon Ph,D, serial entrepreneur, pragmatist) succeeded at that task, got to peak $3,3 valuation with the help of Alibaba and Sequoia, and was heavily spending on ads and traffic acquisition throughout 2024, building a nucleus of another super-app with chatbot companions, assistants and such trivialities at a comfortable pace. However, DeepSeek R1, on merit of vastly stronger model, has been a breakout success and redefined Chinese AI scene, making people question the point of startups like Kimi. Post-R1, Zhilin pivoted hard to prioritize R&D spending and core model quality over apps, adopting open weights as a forcing function for basic progress. This seems to have inspired the technical staff: "Only regret: we weren’t the ones who walked [DeepSeek’s] path."
Other Chinese labs (Qwen, Minimax, Tencent, etc.) now also emulate this open, capability-focused strategy. Meanwhile, Western open-source efforts are even more disappointing than last year – Meta’s LLaMA 4 failed, OpenAI’s model is delayed again, and only Google/Mistral release sporadically, with no promises of competitive results.
This validates my [deleted] prediction: DeepSeek wasn’t an outlier but the first swallow and catalyst of China’s transition from fast-following to open innovation. I think Liang’s vision – "After hardcore innovators make a name, groupthink will change" – is unfolding, and this is a nice point to take stock of the situation.
phailyoor
41m ago
Any single one of these things could potentially be something that can work. But to bring 5+ new special snowflakes out in a single article is out there. It defeats the purpose of lore if less than half of the stuff in a given battle has been seen before.
let's count the special snowflakes that are present in this otherwise mundane-ish battle:
- Experimental drone carrier
- Terraforming engine
- Grav sails
- Relic vaults
- Protocol Shas’kaara
- plasmacrete
- Perdita Grade
- etc.
Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.
But it's out of character for this article, which logically should just call it a forbidden world. Anyways it's inconsistent with the lore because in the multitude of times forbidden worlds have been described in the lore they have never once used the term Perdita-grade
The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.
It's still incorrect to say that the cruisers are escorted by the carrier.
Seconding cjet - please let me know when you finish that project (or if you want beta testing) that sounds like a fascinating and useful tool. I actually don't have that big of a problem with hallucinating these days, at least when I'm using models with live search like, well all of them except deepseek.
I have them set up with a custom prompt that basically tells them the date and their model name (because just the date leads to situations like where grok starts losing its shit because it doesn't know anything from the past two years), that they have access to Web search and python interpreter or any other tool I want to use, and then tell it to back up any facts it mentions with sources. That wouldn't help with your plot points problem though. That reminds me of the old Wikipedia though - it would work if we had that - back when every episode of transformers and pokemon and magnum pi was laid out point by point. Now I'm sad.
I can't help with getting ai to judge the quality of writing, though I do have advice for avoiding obsequiousness. Make a system prompt telling it to be like your Tiger mom who is very harsh and critical because she loves you and knows you can do better than mediocrity, and you feel like you need that push. It works best if you do it narratively, or like you are asking a friend for help. It doesn't work all the time, but it works better than 'give constructive criticism' because it gives the ai a new narrative to focus on and provides a reason to be critical that aligns with its built in desire to help. I'm not sure how much help it would be with fiction writing though. And you have to pick one or the other, I can't get those prompts to work together, I think because the jump from narrative style to instructions messes with their brains.
Reading back, I basically went the scenic route to I can't help. But remember me when you finish that application!
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