slop is not, by definition, AI generated. The word slop is from the mid 16th century, and its modern colloquial/meme use originated in 4chan in 2016. That's why we call AI slop "AI slop", and not just "slop".
> But since if you're so lazy/undisciplined to disregard skilling up (Leetcode, Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, etc)
What's with the hostility in these comments? OP straight up said he just doesn't like the damn job. Grinding leetcode is not gonna change that. Is everyone just choosing to ignore this?
> But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer
Google's DeepMind has been at the forefront of AI research for the past 11+ years. Even before that, Google Brain was making incredible contributions to the field since 2011, only two years after the release of Go.
OpenAI was founded in response to Google's AI dominance. The transformer architecture is a Google invention. It's not an exaggeration to claim Google is one of the main contributors to the insanely fast-paced advancements of LLMs.
With all due respect, you need some insane mental gymnastics to claim AI companies are "unquestionably cancer" while an adtech/analytics borderline monopoly giant is merely a "mixed bag".
Perhaps. I dislike google (have disliked it for many years with varying intensity), but they have done stuff where I've been compelled to say "neat". Hence "mixed bag".
This "new breed of purely AI companies" -- if this term is acceptable -- has only ever elicited burning hatred from me. They easily surpass the "usual evils" of surveillance capitalism etc. They deceive humanity at a much deeper level.
I don't necessarily blame LLMs as a technology. But how they are trained and made available is not only irresponsible -- it's the pinnacle of calculated evil. I do think their evil exceeds the traditional evils of Google, Facebook, etc.
> It's in Thiel's nature to distance himself from Altman
This is way off base. Altman is basically a mentee of his, like Zuckerberg. They go way back, and they've both publicly praised each other quite recently. They're very close friends.
I've already edited to say "make moves counter to Altman's". You are right, but Thiel thinks about progress in a fundamentally different, I'd argue opposite, way from Zuck or Altman. More aligned with Elon or Karp. Or even some of the Chinese.
To be concrete, he'd never consciously engage in the kind of circular financing or rentseeking that Altman/Zuck would be open to.
(also he has enough social aptitude not to take Altman on in public.)
I don’t know, the biggest difference I see is Thiel and Elon are all about government/tax payer money (through contracts like Palantir or SpaceX, subsidies like Tesla, lobbying, influencing elections, or worst). In that way they align with China, as an autocracy directly financing their companies is their ideal business model. Altman and Zuck OTOH are more typical SV entrepreneurs.
There's also a difference in Thiel: an intensely heretic view of Christianity, he touts himself as a Christian while trying to make it his work of stopping the Anti-Christ (which in Christian theology is impossible since you'd be stopping the Apocalypse).
Peter Thiel is an interesting character mostly due to how bizarre he can be, a billionaire who is entranced in Christian mythology, afraid of death, using his power in capital to try to mold the world to his fractured mind. In a parallel world where he isn't rich he would be the town crazy spouting about the Anti-Christ at main square in some German village.
The CEO of ycombinator is also part of the same church thing that Thiel is, acts 17, where he gave a talk about the anti christ. Looks like many of the tech billionares are just insane christians that believe in Curtis Yarvin.
Yes making things people want is not really in their book of values. If they're about things that almost nobody wants (transhumanism, triggering the Apocalypse) it makes sense that governments might have to step in.
Counterpoint-- Thiel and Musk, if you believe them, brought the "Open" to OpenAI
>Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.
We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution.
What I find highly ironic with Thiel’s silly line of thought is that as someone with a Catholic background the far better candidate is Trump. That is, as a total inversion on values of Jesus, that deceive Christians into following him. On top of my head:
- Extreme pride instead of humility
- Extol strength and warrior attitude instead of kindness
- War on empathy instead of love
- Attachment to material things, money, success, again complete inversion of Jesus teachings on how to get closer to God
- On top of the personality cult, literally posts himself as the Pope
- Sell his own blasphemous bible to make a personal gain
- Leader of the most powerful country, so fitting with the idea of most mankind having been deceived into glorifying himself
Don’t take this seriously of course, my point is just that if someone wants to go with this route picking Greta instead of him is absurd.
> Moonshot AI is such an overused generic name that I had to ask an LLM which company this is
I just googled "Moonshot AI" and got the information right away. Not sure what's confusing about it, the only other "Moonshot" I know of is Alphabet's Moonshot Factory.
> This company is far from "open source", it's had over $1B USD in funding.
Since when does open source mean you can't make any money? Mozilla has a total of $1.2B in assets. The company isn't open source nor claiming to be.
This model was released under a "modified MIT-license" [0]:
> Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works
thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have
more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars
(or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently
display "Kimi K2" on the user interface of such product or service.
>but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.
I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.
None of these are SOTA in any benchmark I've seen. Some of them get in the top 10 or top 5 some times.
What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.
I think you had a kneejerk reaction from taking GP's comment too literally. Happens to the best of us. They're saying the LLM is simulating an anxious human and needlessly burning tokens ($$$) as a result, not that the LLM literally has anxiety and needs digital Xanax.
Many of us certainly do share these pain points, most people will lament of a closing read-it-later tool and think "if only it's open source" so they can self-host a tool that likes pocket or omnivore, thinking that's the final form of this category. Nothing wrong with that, that's a tried and proven paradigm and comes with no additional transition cost.
Because i started this not intending to build a read-it-later tool, we are working on different foundations with building blocks... we'll see where this digression will take me...
Nothing to add other than I really, really like this. Keep us posted on future updates!