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Couple of anecdotes from the last week.

Yesterday the Gmail virus scanner stopped working. For a while I couldn't download my attachments. A few minutes later it said the virus scanner was offline and download at your own risk.

Meet audio seems to be having a particularly bad week. It just doesn't work with headphones. Their testing tool indicated everything was fine. It's worked after I logged off and on. Audio quality issues are getting more common as well.


I do wish they had left a window open for criteria to whitelist developers who can create PRs. By closing off their developer circle, they are losing the best parts of open-source - new software developers eager to solve large problems with novel approaches.

Its in a weird space right now.

These models are actually extremely good but they are far from an intelligence unto themselves. Truth is if someone told you they could build these things 5 years ago, you d write them a check for a trillion dollars. Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that. Its like a mecha suit in a universe, where mecha suits are abundant and cheap. Someone has to climb into them everyday and put in the work for it to be effective.

So now the skeptics are saying this technology is overrated. And the optimists are accusing the skeptics of moving goal posts.


I think we are learning in real-time what intelligence re. humans is as we go along.

Humans only what they know, until they acquire more information about what's possible.

The goal post narrative is stupid to begin with.


Humans have goal seeking behavior. LLMs don’t. You could maybe call the combination of LLMs and the RL-based harnesses somewhat “intelligent” in aggregate, but the problem is that it’s not “general” intelligence like these labs want to argue, since it’s by definition only good for the set of problems the RL part has been trained to solve, which is a subset of programming problems.

> Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that.

Isn't this just the hype cycle? [1]

Fake edit: I know its not a perfect model.

1: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...


The problem is what they can do is rapidly expanding. Software development is becoming increasingly hands off.

If they get to the point where they're smart enough to make tasteful code decisions based on stakeholder input... we're cooked as a profession.


Most of the skeptics exist because of the grandiose claims made by the AI companies saying pure hype marketing bs. If this was just a tool, discussed at the scope of what the tools can actually produce and do, there would be sensible discourse about it.

Outside of coding what other tools expend that kind of tokens? People are not creating that many slide decks or videos are they?

I really doubt that 400M number. They try to get me to login to Threads see comments on Instagram posts. Technically I am monthly "active" user, but not really.

I see more Bluesky links in the wild than Threads and they claim only 27M users.


Threads is taking off in regions likely irrelevant to your interests (India, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, etc). The content on Threads covers national politics and local social issues, which would typically not be shared on a tech forum like this one.

Tech news is still dominated by X and bluesky, so naturally those content sources appear more here.


The only thing scary is that federal government interns have discovered how to one-shot shitty web apps.

I guess that first piece was important to me. I actually assumed, based on statements Musk has made in the past, that they are purely working off cameras and AI. Isn't that his whole pitch as to why Tesla FSD will scale out faster than waymo?

I believe there is some level of deception there that needs to be stated.


I agree. With Altman at least it seems he is making the pivot because he thinks its better messaging. Amodei is just re-framing what he actually sees as the endgame here. He says 10x productivity, he means 10x less jobs.

I would hope that if Sam was making a deliberate pivot here he might use a slightly bigger platform to do so than a conversation with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference.

I love Sonnet 4.6 so much.

You'll love Deepseek V4 Pro w/ High thinking.

If it spends 2x tokens to achieve the same result, that's effective 2x cost in a manner of speaking

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