MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshjob42 | 2025-04-04 05:21:08+00:00
https://ai-2027.com/research/compute-forecast

In section 4 they discuss their projections specifically for model size, the state of inference chips in 2027, etc. It's largely pretty in line with expectations in terms of the capacity, and they only project them using 10k of their latest gen wafer scale inference chips by late 2027, roughly like 1M H100 equivalents. That doesn't seem at all impossible. They also earlier on discuss expectations for growth in efficiency of chips, and for growth in spending, which is only ~10x over the next 2.5 years, not unreasonable in absolute terms at all given the many tens of billions of dollars flooding in.

So on the "can we train the AI" front, they mostly are just projecting 2.5 years of the growth in scale we've been seeing.

The reason they predict a fairly hard takeoff is they expect that distillation, some algorithmic improvements, and iterated creation of synthetic data, training, and then making more synthetic data will enable significant improvements in efficiency of the underlying models (something still largely in line with developments over the last 2 years). In particular they expect a 10T parameter model in early 2027 to be basically human equivalent, and they expect it to "think" at about the rate humans do, 10 words/second. That would require ~300 teraflops of compute per second to think at that rate, or ~0.1H100e. That means one of their inference chips could potentially run ~1000 copies (or fewer copies faster etc. etc.) and thus they have the capacity for millions of human equivalent researchers (or 100k 40x speed researchers) in early 2027.

They further expect distillation of such models etc. to squeeze the necessary size down / more expensive models overseeing much smaller but still good models squeezing the effective amount of compute necessary, down to just 2T parameters and ~60 teraflops each, or 5000 human-equivalents per inference chip, making for up to 50M human-equivalents by late 2027.

This is probably the biggest open question and the place where the most criticism seems to me to be warranted. Their hardware timelines are pretty reasonable, but one could easily expect needing 10-100x more compute or even perhaps 1000x than they describe to achieve Nobel-winner AGI or superintelligence.
by exidy | 2025-04-04 05:21:15+00:00
Apologies, I was juggling multiple sources. The Xerox VC investment into Apple is a matter of public record, the figure of $10/share is widely quoted, including in the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs[0].

Exactly how and when Xerox disposed of its shares is not public record, but it's known to be around that timeframe and certainly Xerox made a profit. The book _Dealers of Lightning_ goes into more detail about the deal if you're interested[1].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-your-computer-has-a-mous...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...
by Taniwha | 2025-04-04 05:21:21+00:00
When I was at uni in NZ (mid 70s) me and my friends wrote a compiler for 6800s (an algol subset, it fit in 2k), we wrote it with copyrights for "uSoft" (that's a greek mu), in retrospect it was an obvious name at the time.

Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of being born in the right place .....

I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for some silly amount of money
by aoanevdus | 2025-04-04 05:21:30+00:00
Don’t assume that because the article depicts this competition between the US and China, that the authors actually want China to fail. Consider the authors and the audience.

The work is written by western AI safety proponents, who often need to argue with important people who say we need to accelerate AI to “win against China” and don’t want us to be slowed down by worrying about safety.

From that perspective, there is value in exploring the scenario: ok, if we accept that we need to compete with China, what would that look like? Is accelerating always the right move? The article, by telling a narrative where slowing down to be careful with alignment helps the US win, tries to convince that crowd to care about alignment.

Perhaps, people in China can make the same case about how alignment will help China win against US.
by jim-jim-jim | 2025-04-04 05:25:29+00:00
My income is tied to the labor time I exert in creating/supporting services. I don't sit back and collect royalties on the code itself. Software is one of the first fields where the fundamental worthlessness of content revealed itself, hence FOSS.

When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have a digital copy of something, there is no labor input to its creation, so guess what the inherent value is.

Animators drew actual cels. Theater workers clocked in and screened the films. The guys at the DVD factory pressed the discs. We paid for all of this already. It's double-billing to charge for copypasting the mere likeness of something. Nobody's doing any work for that.
by wesapien | 2025-04-04 05:25:51+00:00
Read up on 1900s world history and what path dependency is. The dollar is the reserve currency because the USA won the title of world power near the end of the first of half of the 1900s. It was formalized in the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944. The US helped win the war and gained enormous trust and goodwill around the world which it has slowly been squandering since then. POTUS hit the turbo button just a few months ago.

The PRC has strict controls of their money because that is how they can became the factory of the world. They played the hand that were dealt with and battled adversity and they are reaping the rewards.

The president said today that the US trade partners and allies/friends have been taking advantage. You can easily verify if that is true or false. US capitalists moved production overseas to make more money at the expense of the local workers. That's the scam.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-04 05:26:29+00:00
That's false. Everything comes down to good leadership. Monarchies with good leadership very well might have incredibly effective anti-corruption techniques and competency. China is managing a billion people and their infrastructure and tech is incredible.

The problems are two fold. The first is vetoing of bad ideas. No leader is right 100% of the time, and when they are wrong, someone must have the power to veto. There must be some way for reason to triumph over power, and a leader who chooses to be responsible is capable of deferring to expertise.

The second is succession. A good leader today may be succeeded by rotten leader tomorrow, but both have the same legitimacy, because the legitimacy comes from power alone and not reason.

> effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.

These things are a result of culture, not a result of the government itself. The government influences culture, but they are first and foremost functions of culture, specifically a culture of tolerating speaking truth to power, dissent, critical thinking, tolerance, and solidarity.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-04 05:27:01+00:00
The world will slowly, slowly converge on this but not before many years of hyping and preaching about how this shit is the best thing since sliced bread and shoving it into our faces all day long, but in the meantime I suggest we be mindful of our AI usage and keep our minds sharp. We might be the only ones left after a decade or two of this.
by LightHugger | 2025-04-04 05:27:32+00:00
Meritocratic hiring of the best candidates is equality of opportunity, not equity/equality of outcome. Equity requires discrimination and dehumanization of individual people to achieve because racial distributions vary at an earlier stage than the hiring process. I agree that a responsible company tries to remove bias and doesn't discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics, however...

It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.

If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.

It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.

You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
by sillywalk | 2025-04-04 05:29:13+00:00
Does MCP or OS 2200 have any well known users, or was there a niche that they fill(ed)?

Also, I noted in those two roadmaps that they offered continuity - Clear Path Forward -> "Don't worry about migrating or refactoring your apps", but also stated that "none of these new features are guaranteed to show up, and if that damages your company financially, it's not our fault".

I don't know if this is just a standard legal cop-out
by digestm | 2025-04-04 05:30:25+00:00
Don't expect much. Modi's overnight demonetization of Rs. 1,000 bills back in 2016, caused a lot of inconvenience to almost all the Indians for 3/4 months at-least. Demonetization and flawed implementation of GST caused many small scale companies to shut doors.

With media in their pockets they can get away with anything.
by petesergeant | 2025-04-04 05:30:33+00:00
> Some companies try replacing call centres with AI, but it doesn't really work and everyone hates it.

I think this is much closer than you think, because there's a good percentage of call centers that are basically just humans with no power cosplaying as people who can help.

My fiber connection went to shit recently. I messaged the company, and got a human who told me they were going to reset the connection from their side, if I rebooted my router. 30m later with no progress, I got a human who told me that they'd reset my ports, which I was skeptical about, but put down to a language issue, and again reset my router. 30m later, the human gave me an even more outlandish technical explanation of what they'd do, at which point I stumbled across the magical term "complaint" ... an engineer phoned me 15m later, said there was something genuinely wrong with the physical connection, and they had a human show up a few hours later and fix it.

No part of the first-layer support experience there would have been degraded if replaced by AI, but the company would have saved some cash.
by yokaze | 2025-04-04 05:31:20+00:00
It is being done in countries like Switzerland and Norway. Not exactly poor countries.

As I understand, in both cases, the tax resident has to declare their global (netto) wealth and have to pay a small percentage (close or less than 1%) of that wealth.

Don't you ever had tax obligations due to shares? Sell-to-cover is one solution. But I suspect at that scale you get enough dividends from these companies to cover.
by treetalker | 2025-04-04 05:32:38+00:00
Loomered!

> In a statement, [Senator Mark Warren of Virginia] praised General Haugh’s leadership and said his removal would not make the country safer, jabbing at the White House for sharing sensitive material on a commercial messaging application and ousting members of the National Security Council staff at the urging of Ms. Loomer.

> Amid such actions, Mr. Warner said, the firing of a “nonpartisan, experienced leader” like General Haugh is “astonishing.”
by energy123 | 2025-04-04 05:33:19+00:00
It's giving too much. The US should not manufacture games, whether by subsidy or tariff. Full autarky is bad policy for the US.

What it does get right though is policy certainty is important. Tariffs won't bring back much manufacturing if capital thinks that they're going to be revoked, either by congress/courts or by the next administration.
by carpo | 2025-04-04 05:35:15+00:00
That's awesome! That's a lot of data and a great speed increase. I think that as long as you test and don't just accept exactly what it outputs without a little thought, it can be really useful.

I take it as an opportunity to learn too. I'm working on a video library app that runs locally and wanted to extract images when the scene changed enough. I had no idea how to do this, and previously would have searched StackOverflow to find a way and then struggled for hours or days to implement it. This time I just asked Aider right in the IDE terminal what options I had, and it came back with 7 different methods. I researched those a little and then asked it to implement 3 of them. It created an interface, 3 implementations and a factory to easily get the different analyzers. I could then play around with each one and see what worked the best. It took like an hour. I wrote a test script to loop over multiple videos and run each analyzer on them. I then visually checked the results to see which worked the best. I ended up jumping into the code it had written to understand what was going on, and after a few tweaks the results are pretty good. This was all done in one afternoon - and a good chunk of that time was just me comparing images visually to see what worked best and tweaking thresholds and re-running to get it just right.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-04 05:35:25+00:00
> tests of loyalty

A quick side-observation: The real purpose of forced loyalty oaths are not to create trust, but to destroy it.

The fascist saying "pledge loyalty or be fired/jailed" knows that an affirmative response doesn't mean anything, but that's not a primary goal.

Instead, they're forcing the remaining people to scar their own reputations in a way that makes it harder for them to self-organize. It seeds a doubt: "Even if this guy didn't really mean it, it still means they were willing to lie when their job/freedom was threatened. They say they're on my side, but... have they threatened again, and are they lying to me now?"
by terramars | 2025-04-04 05:36:24+00:00
"We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games."

This seems like a prima facie bad conclusion to their hockey study, considering that the Panthers won the cup while being effectively tied for the lead in penalty minutes, with #3 not being particularly close. Yes there's a weak correlation between penalties and losing, but considering that the absolute best teams usually have a high rat index, there's a big lost opportunity to go into the rat factor in hockey and how it translates to the corporate world!
by xracy | 2025-04-04 05:36:25+00:00
I feel like the people who say things like "communists were treated like some sort of conservatives because of identity politics" are telling on themselves.

If you look at the people on the actual political left in the US (Bernie, AOC, etc) are they talking about identity politics? Last time I checked they were talking about the problems that impact non-billionaire Americans: Healthcare, Social Security, Raising Minimum Wage, and other efforts to improve quality of life for Americans.

The only times I ever hear about identity politics is when I listen to conservatives describe what people on the left are talking about.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-04 05:38:12+00:00
These is a timer to substantively act and it's soon coming up.

Right now the government is avoiding truly unpopular unjustifiable policy while it is purging the old government and placing loyalists into positions of power, something anyone would recognize as a coup if it happened in a foreign country.

The administration is mildly bound by law so long as they don't do anything to provoke into action those who took an oath to protect this country from enemies foreign and domestic and to act in service to the constitution... but once people in positions of enforcement are replaced by loyalists, the constitution truly becomes just a piece of paper. Laws and ideals are just words on paper. It is the enforcement mechanisms which turn those ideas represented on paper into something that interacts and molds physical reality.
by 9rx | 2025-04-04 05:38:31+00:00
HP sold what they called a "personal computer" in the 1960s, well before Apple and Microsoft came around. It wasn't exactly what we consider to be a personal computer nowadays, but MySpace wasn't exactly what we consider social media to be today either. I'm not sure these things happen in discrete steps like you seem to imply. There is a clear continuum. I think it is quite fair to say, for example, that Meta help define its industry like Microsoft and Apple helped define theirs.

There will never be exact replicas of Apple and Microsoft again, but there undoubtedly will be many companies in the future that we will eventually look back upon in the same way.
by MatekCopatek | 2025-04-04 05:39:47+00:00
Great examples!

Polluting vs. not polluting sounds super straightforward, but then you look outside and we often pollute rivers, so it's clearly not that simple.

Personally, I'm fully with you on not polluting. But that immediately puts us in an ideological position - we value preserving the environment and staying healthy.

A neo-liberal might come along and say we're wasting economic potential. Keeping the river clean means not building a factory near it. If the products from that factory and the jobs it provides offset the negative effects, they'll argue we _should_ pollute the river.

Same with taxing sugary drinks - uncertain results aren't the issue. The issue is we have different opinions on how much a government should be able to regulate certain aspects of life in the pursuit of improving public health.

Even if you have reliable statistical data from countries that implemented such a policy, some people will argue their freedom to drink whatever they want is what's important here and your bean-counting of medical expenses is completely missing the point.
by dovin | 2025-04-04 05:40:43+00:00
Dogs offer humans no economic value, but we haven't genocided them. There are a lot of ways that we could offer value that's not necessarily just in the form of watts and minerals. I'm not so sure that our future superintelligent summoned demons will be motivated purely by increasing their own power, resources, and leverage. Then again, maybe they will. Thus far, AI systems that we have created seem surprisingly goal-less. I'm more worried about how humans are going to use them than some sort of breakaway event but yeah, don't love that it's a real possible future.
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-04 05:42:00+00:00
I suspect that if the order goes as you suggest (Greenland, Panama, Canada), there won't be much of a US military left after the first war (the one against nearly all of Europe). Not because we'll have lost, but because the majority will have quit.

The US military relies heavily on contractors and civil service for logistics these days, it is basically non-functional without them. Unlike members of the military proper, civil service and contractors can walk away with very little trouble (other than finding employment, of course). Members of the military will risk court martial and other disciplinary actions if they refuse and may have their resignations refused.

Who maintains our weapon systems? Civilians. Who maintains the communication networks? Mostly civilians. Who builds our aircraft and munitions? Civilians. Who maintains our ships? Civilians. Who builds our ships? Civilians, but they're not very good at it anymore. Who maintains our nukes? Civilians, but they keep getting fired and rehired.
by jll29 | 2025-04-04 05:43:01+00:00
There are reasons for Americans to be concerned; more importantly, they should protest and now hide.

Rhetorical question: Who would you rather be loyal to, (a) a man who grabs women, pays prostitutes to silence them, and has been convicted of multiple crimes or (b) all the people of Canada?

If the citizens of the USNA are smart, they will choose the latter. (Loyalty should be to a country, not to a leader - the latter concept applies only in dictatorships.)

Oh, and the Panama Canal will continue to be labelled "Panama Canal" on all my maps as long as I live, and there is nothing any president can do about that.
by jabl | 2025-04-04 05:43:51+00:00
> In 2014, a shop called VMS Software Inc (VSI) strikes some kind of deal with HP where they get to develop and support new versions of VMS while older versions continue to belong to HP. As part of this, they finally announce an x86-64 port. This port first sees the light of day in 2020.

And interesting factoid about the x86-64 port is that they've switched to LLVM-based compilers rather than making x86-64 backends for their legacy compilers.
by namibj | 2025-04-04 05:43:58+00:00
Makes me wonder if the generic servos of the described kind are really close enough to the performance a cheap-class servo can have, or if modern advances in monolithic power stage ICs could allow a servo free of sliding movement (no brushes, no wiper potentiometer (maybe a capacitively coupled differential sensing of angle, or the tricks of the cheap digital calipers with their iirc nonius-like scale read through several parallel tracks of non-touching capacitive electrodes?), instead just a clever chip digitally controlling a brushless electric machine using the feedback sensing available to it).

Being able to run an even just very simple digital controller allows things like severely dropping negative feedback gain at a resonance frequency of the larger system. And so much more.
by goatlover | 2025-04-04 05:44:02+00:00
I wonder if California were to pass Calexit in response to this administration's ongoing actions, what happens to the military bases and personnel in the state? Last year's Civil War movie by Alex Garland showed California and Texas with their own military fighting the US government. I took it to mean the military units in those states seceded with the state, instead of remaining part of the US Armed Forces.
by hitekker | 2025-04-04 05:45:06+00:00
The accusation is harsh, but I think Zig's BDFL had a point. V-lang seems to have been poorly led for many years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27441848

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39503446

Many links paint a picture of constant false advertising, even deception.
by tqi | 2025-04-04 05:45:08+00:00
Give me a break, I read the article, I'm not convinced does anything to further his specific claims about the community. Frankly the whole thing is just a rant about how things were better back when.

"But the tradecraft is slipping. Analysts are skipping the hard parts. They’re trusting GenAI to do the heavy cognitive lifting, and it’s changing how we operate at a foundational level."

Next we're going to be hearing about how participation trophies and DEI are also contributing to this imagined "problem."