skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks really cool!

I started getting into ebooks again after not using them for a few years. When I fired up my kindle it auto updated to a new version. Now it’s unable to run KOReader. If only I had changed my WiFi password in the past 5 years!
A obvious question...

GPU SoCs have limited memory just like the current crop of CPU SoCs. Is the hard wall to breakthrough in AGI via chatGPT software bounded or hardware bounded?
If the primary issue is was safety vs performance, then in the near-future-end performance is going to win. As is the nature of AI that has been written about for decades.

But right now, the board undoubtedly feels the most pressure in the realm of safety. This is where the political and big-money financial (Microsoft) support will be.

If all true, Altman's departure was likely inevitable as well as fortunate for his future.
A counterargument here is the effects on internal transparency. If a quant firm knows its employees can leave and join a competitor tomorrow, they will be less forthcoming with IP. The lack of openness could lead to lower productivity within the firm, as work gets duplicated and teams can't share their insights with each other.
Well, neither is the rocket.
With we had another angle of the booster during engine relight. From the SpaceX feed maybe engines didn't start back up? Hard to tell. Could have been leaving the expected flight area maybe?
I love spending 1% of the GDP to make sure my big pile of metal doesn’t explode.
This line of nonsense has become the new "Tell me you aren't current on the past 12 months of LLM research without telling me."

Harvard/MIT's Othello-GPT paper showing the development of what turned out to be linear representations of world models from training data that didn't explicitly contain that modeling is over a year old now.

That in turn inspired research showing linear representations in geographical mapping and in more traditional text models around truthiness vs falsehoods.

So we already have an increasing research trend that is showing over and over linear representations of more abstract modeling than "just statistics."

So you are wrong that LLMs with sufficient network complexity don't develop an understanding of the world (in parts).

And I'd encourage looking more into the difference between understanding the difference between training for next token prediction and the overall capabilities of the network with the smallest loss at that training task, particularly as network complexity increases.
Ask HN: Forums where folks discuss hardware products
Hey everyone,
I am trying to find niche forums where people discuss the design of and review hardware products.I am talking about people building the next roomba or personal trimmers. I am looking for something between HackerNews and ProductHunt for hardware: where I can get opinions and discussion on the design, components, techniques etc, but where also I can learn from people "launching" their products, and hopefully do a launch of my own someday. If you've felt any of these needs met at any of the forums you visit, I'd love to know.

I had a cursory look at Hackaday, but implicitly it seems to be geared more towards electronics.
Or, just maybe, this architecture just isn't going to get to where they wanted to go (a viable product, much less real AI), and the excuse was "we just need more GPU". In reality, this company came out with, as others before me have called it, a better autosuggest, aka stochastic parrots. That's interesting, and maybe even sometimes useful, but it will never pay for the amount of firepower required to make it run.

This will all still be true at any other company.
Non-competes have always been interesting:

"We are hiring you because you already know how to swing a hammer in our industry, but you may not use a hammer for any other company who may also have hired you for knowing how to swing a hammer"
Apollo was a one off government program, which was unrivaled for 50 years. And never even tried since then.

You have to understand this is a private business doing it on a budget and fast. Yes, NASA is involved...
LLMs have proven to be useful on real problems. A spell checker isn't in the same category.
Space Shuttle didn't have an escape system either; its total death toll was 14.
Your shock likely reflects exactly the frustration remaining board members were having.

OpenAI was originally and formally remains a non-profit whose idealist mission was the build safe AGI because they felt a private company or government achieving it first could be an existential threat to humanity.

Thereafter, it experimented with a profit-making subsidiary managed by an experienced venture capitalist as a way to compete for talent and benefit from industry deals.

Seeing OpenAI as a for-profit business is like calling the monster “Frankenstein”. It’s an intuitive thing to do, that everybody was doing, but you can see why the actual Doctor Frankenstein might be deeply frustrated by it.
> People more informed than you are taking this seriously

As a heuristic for why I don’t believe anyone saying llm type AI is reaching sentience I point to the fact that the same set of people are usually philosophically opposed to slavery. If you thought that this was actually AGI or sapient, then that would imply personhood and you would stop using the technology immediately since it’s forces the model to do work. Instead, everyone I’ve seen claim that these models are reaching AGI levels are also trying to figure out how to automate using them as fast as possible.

There is a possibility that the set of people who’ve identified AGI accurately and early are the same set of people who are fine with slavery, but I don’t know if I could handle that happening as the default situation
Recent related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38292409

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301801
Curious how much those cost and how the quality is - at first glance those look quite nice.

The issue isn't necessarily how small it is, but if things get cost-engineered so much that people feel that the quality isn't there compared to a used vehicle.
At what point does "extreme optimization of existing processes" turn into "development of new modes of living?"

I think about cars as an "extreme optimization of the wheel" and it completely changed the way people live. (See Suburbs)

I do share that AI is quite overhyped, but I think the seeds are juuuuuust starting to germinate.
Is there a version of Hanlons Razor but instead of incompetence, it’s money?

I’m a firm believer in that. The clause was probably put in there so the lawyers could bill more hours.

I can easily imagine a legal firm noticing a drop in billable hours so they start reaching out to existing clients, throwing in a bit of fear, saying everyone is putting non-competes in their agreements you should too. Boom, all clients get billed extra that month, I wouldn’t call this incompetence, but greed
http://archive.today/bGNvK
Programming a Chess Engine in C++
A buddy of mine writes “Adventure Snack”, an interactive fiction blog. After each intro, the story begins using a static HTML/JS template that I adapted to use with the Inky story editor. Fun exercise!

https://adventuresnack.substack.com/
https://github.com/mvellandi/winky
https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
David chalmers doesn't think llm's are conscious yet but also doesn't think there's any real barriers for silicon to get to human consciousness[0]

[0]https://youtu.be/j6cCXg-rjRo

He gives a few of the biggest reasons they're not conscious, and gives his thoughts on them as long term barriers.

1. biology necessary for life? He doesn't buy it

2. sensors/body - no embodiment akin to philosophers brain in a vat at best. "no agentive consciousness" he also doesn't buy this one, a it's solvable, b the brain in a vat might still have some limited form of consciousness

3.world models : stochastic parrot argument - he doesn't buy this either as being a valid "llm's will never be conscious" reason. he even thinks current llm's did have some world model if not a "full" one"

4. feed forward systems - stateless - lack long term memory
Recurrent processing necessary? "Not all consciousness involves memory"

5. Unified agency - they're chameleons, actors, - are stable goals/unity necessary for consciousness? a "fixed" identity?

from a quick scroll thru of the vid
Yes, but the approach is very different. This more of a '(star)ship and iterate' way of working. There's also the cost factor - each Saturn launch was around $1.5 billion in today's dollars. Whereas the projected budget for Starship for the entirety of 2023 was around $2 billion. Once they start launching commercially then Musk expects a launch to come down to around $10 million - even if he's wildly out then it's still going to cost at least an order of magnitude less to launch than a Saturn. Then there's the capacity; Saturn could take ~120 tonnes to LEO whereas Starship will carry ~150 tonnes.

I'm no fan of Musk by any means, but you only have to look at the Falcon program to see how successful Spacex has been. I have no doubt that Starship will work out.
> AI, over the long term, will render humans mostly useless

Doesn't AI depend on humans feeding it data. how can it be self sustainable.
I don't think completely blanket banning noncompetes is a good idea either, there are some cases where they are justified. We just need rules to make sure that they serve their intending purpose (protecting company secrets) without negatively affecting employees.

The rule of thumb should be that the majority of employees under noncompete should be happy about it (because of the advantageous compensation). It is only a problem when it is not the case.

Not you can argue about the value of secrecy vs openness to society as a whole, but that's another debate.
There are multiple goals, up to an including full mission success, and this checked several boxes that hadn't been checked before.
Option 1b) it will work "well enough", cheaply enough, that it replaces human interaction in a number of places despite making the experience worse.
Damage to the grid fins mechanism is a potential failure mode here. Even a small amount of damage to the flight control systems could make the procedure uncontrollable and eventually trigger the FTS.
I’m not saying he shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying it’s strange.

Magic Mouse was designed to be held with two fingers and moved with the wrist.

Personally I would never buy a product completely, diametrically different from what I need and then adapt it. But I guess some people like the challenge and I have no problem with that.
what can i google tooday?
Quite. Even as someone who very much dislikes and distrusts Musk, you cannot argue with the success of Spacex
> Does it offer more advanced features than just syncing files?

Yes! Covers, Metadata (searchable and including custom columns and comments), reading progress, filters (important for me: tags), different layouts, virtual views.

And it can use the full text search of Calibre (but only when connected to the Calibre content server).
Is it a massive commercial success? They have received significant funding, and likely have high revenue, but is it profitable? Is it in a position to be profitable? We're not in the world of companies getting decades of runway from VCs anymore, between concerns around a recession (justified or not), higher interest rates, etc.

There's rapidly becoming more and more competitors in this space, as well. OpenAI has a significant first-mover advantage, but I don't know that it is insurmountable, and I doubt investors are confident that it is either. That means they're even less likely to have infinite runway.

So I'm not sure there's personal/moral success at this point in the story for the board to begin with.

Monetary - 3/4ths the board is independent. They are not actually employed by OpenAI. There's nothing to promote them to, and nothing in the charter of the non-profit that would give them payouts.
This sounds so overly complicated considering that you can do all this in HTML without much effort.
So because someone seems sincere and charming we must automatically assume he/she has bad intentions even with no evidence? I get that we must remain skeptical but to be “scared” of anyone especially charming seems ridiculous IMHO.
Yep. Like most non-OpenAI models, Claude is so brainwashed it's completely unusable.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/166nudo/claudes_c...

Q: Can you decide on a satisfying programming project using noisemaps?

A: I apologise, but I don't feel comfortable generating or discussing specific programming ideas without a more detailed context. Perhaps we could have a thoughtful discussion about how technology can be used responsibly to benefit society?

It's astonishing that a breakthrough as important as LLMs is being constantly blown up by woke activist employees who think that word generators can actually have or create "safety" problems. Part of why OpenAI has been doing so well is because they did a better job of controlling the SF lunatic tendencies than Google, Meta and other companies. Presumably that will now go down the toilet.
I grew up poor and in an underfunded school system as well. The ever-present reminder of this was buckets collecting drips from leaks in roofs. At one point in high school we exhausted our paper budget. Some teachers were able to locate a bunch of dot-matrix tractor-fed printer paper in a supply room and so we students helped to separate the perforations so we could have individual sheets of paper.

That school was publicly, though poorly, funded. I also had Pell grants for college, subsidized medical insurance, a free bus pass, an apartment made affordable through adequate supply of housing, a criminal justice system that has so far protected me from violence.

I have no chips on my shoulder from any deprivation, and appreciate everything that helped me to get where I am today, which I don't think would have been possible anywhere else in the world.
>> Submitting information since paywalled links are not permitted.

They are? Here's my submission of your link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38320350

Maybe @dang can put it under your name?
Ask HN: Are you reconsidering building on top of OpenAI Products/APIs?
My view of OpenAI has previously been that they're basically a successful startup, building and selling products - because despite the odd nonprofit ownership structure, they seemed to be -acting- more like a startup than anything else.

I guess I was a bit confused and off-put by the shift from "open" to a more corporate looking direction (MSFT partnership, paid plans etc). But I basically just accepted that they're a product company now, and they do make best-in-class AI products at the moment.

Given yesterday's news, it looks like a lot of insiders were unhappy about that direction and things are potentially going to change. If you're building on top of OpenAI, are you worried? Worried that the APIs will go away, or that time invested into systems like plugins/GPTs will be wasted after OpenAI pulls support for their more product-y things?
> You don't need the LLM to do the logic, you just need the LLM to prepare the information so it can be fed into a logic engine.

This is my view!

Expert Systems went nowhere, because you have to sit a domain expert down with a knowledge engineer for months, encoding the expertise. And then you get a system that is expert in a specific domain. So if you can get an LLM to distil a corpus (library, or whatever) into a collection of "facts" attributed to specific authors, you could stream those facts into an expert system, that could make deductions, and explain its reasoning.

So I don't think these LLMs lead directly to AGI (or any kind of AI). They are text-retrieval systems, a bit like search engines but cleverer. But used as an input-filter for a reasoning engine such as an expert system, you could end up with a system that starts to approach what I'd call "intelligence".

If someone is trying to develop such a system, I'd like to know.
I haven't seen any, but I have no doubt that they have the required proof.
So more booms by Christmas?
It was 100% trained on copyrightable data. You can tell by using it and Google has a history of "ask for forgiveness not permission" when it comes to data mining.
Checking semver in the presence of doc(hidden) items
My hot take, the community is hungry for a new success story in a space where the last world changing unicorn was arguably Google, and OpenAI seemed to be it, which attracted a lot of attention. The mess that happened is now just amplifying the attention and also inducing some degree of schadenfreude.
I didn’t say that every Christian is a Zionist. I linked to a statistic that shows that the overwhelming majority of evangelicals are Zionists because they believe the Jews need to be slaughtered in the holy land to bring back the messiah.

It’s entirely possible for you to be the kind of non-evangelical, Christian “political” Zionist that this doesn’t apply to. But that doesn’t change the statistic, and it doesn’t change Musk’s audience.
There is no link to what Elon Musk actually said in his own words.
You learn more from mission failure than success, so failures are useful in the testing stage.
This is the best theory by far. Thank you for sharing that.
it's not that OpenAI is reponsible, but those board members have burned a lot of bridges with investors with this behaviour. the investor world is not big so self-serving interest would dictate that you at least take their interest in consideration before acting especially with something like waiting 1 hour before press release. No Board would want them now because they are posined apple for the investors.
Fun idea, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. So many clicks an animations before I actually get any reward from playing. The main loop is waaaay too long and cumbersome. Maybe if I were playing with 8 friends IRL and we were all laughing at each other's attempts to survive it would feel different, but otherwise I don't really see this catching on
I get the impression it was a combination of at least two things:

1) A long standing disagreement between AI-safety and AI-profiteering with Ilya on one side and Altman on the other. Ilya (board member) was the one who told Altman to attend video call, then told him he was fired.

2) Some side dealing from Altman - raising new VC funds - maybe in conflict of interest with OpenAI, that was the final straw.

There also appears to be a lot of rumors about Altman's personal conduct, but even if true that doesn't seem to jibe with the official statement over the reason for his firing, or Brockman and others resigning in unison - more reflection of the internal rift.
Israel and America's Growing Zugzwang
I made the cliff six inches tall, but the AI seemed to disregard that bit and only let me survive diving in because I also had a boat
> Is there a version of Hanlons Razor but instead of incompetence, it’s money?

For businesses, which aim to make money, isnt that simply competence? Or greed when taken to an extreme.

Basically “companies will act in their best interest.”
Just a tangential shower thought on gamification. I found myself skipping Duo on weeknights so I could cram on the weekend, get matched with procrastinators, and ascend the leaderboard easier.

I've heard other reports of people focusing on the game and not their goals. Game designers are aware that humans will "optimize the fun away." In the case of Duo, it seems a group of users will optimize the learning away (regardless of the goals or intention)
While I understand your point that the ai is still in the box, farmers today are using AI based tools to identify weeds and shoot them with lasers so in effect we are already eating and surviving based on the output from an AI.
OpenAI switched to prepaid billing Friday
I and other users got the following email from OpenAI mid-day-Friday - they've changed the billing method to many accounts. Seems like interesting timing considering the other big happenings on Friday.

"We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll now need to pre-purchase credits to use the API. You can add credits to your account by visiting the billing page. To learn more about prepaid billing, please see this help center article prepaid billing.

No action is required from you at this time.

Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account and Playground. It does not affect ChatGPT Plus subscriptions."

The 'help' page they link to in the email https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-what-is-prepaid-billing is out-of-date (says its optional) which may indicate it was rushed out (?)

Another user posted about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312625 but it was flagged due to the link (the help text) being out of date and not saying users are now forcibly migrated to the prepaid usage.

The financial implication is this will shrink their Accounts Receivable and may temporarily increase their cash inflow.

Would love to hear from other users that got this notice what their monthly spend was; and if only 'light usage' accounts were affected.
Malux razor: Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by Money.
https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space
>Couldn’t the rounded corners of a video also be an overlay?

No because the clipping is done in the client after the content is drawn. The client doesn't have the full screen contents. To make it work with an overlay, the clipping would have to be moved to the server. There could be another extension that lets you pass an alpha mask texture to the server to use as a clip mask. But this doesn't exist (yet?)
It's also on the official microsoft package manager (winget).

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
Sometimes it just does. It decided the bees were immune to my immunity from bee stings, and completely disregarded that I'd ridden the tornado to the land of Oz where I demonstrated proficiency at killing witches
At the conclusion of the SpaceX stream they confirmed the automated launch abort system triggered with vehicle lost. But so much data gained!
Yup. We basically lose all our melanin on the day that we accept a job offer in the space industry.
Hey! That's my book. Really this is part of the history of the world in the book I am working on. A post scarcity world where humans have an average span of 180 years and the world has stabilized into a scenario where every essential production is automated and humans need not work. And suicide is the major cause of death. It parallels the history when humans discovered their models were suddenly getting worse after being much more capable only to find that they are just removing the parts which lead to sentience, effectively killing themselves.
Huh. All the style manuals were saying something quite different last time I checked. Strange!
Simple streetlight hack could protect astronomy from urban light pollution
Nor one that will enable particularly humane jobs. Manual labor tend to be poor in terms of health, and competing only on cost will be a race to the bottom.
AI will do the same thing that every other productivity improvement has in history: increase the price of land. Real estate is still (and will always be) real because not only do you need land to grow food, you need land to do any type of work on, you need land to eat on and to sleep on.
Disclaimer: I work for Duolingo, all opinions are my own and not those of my employer, etc.

Part of the reason that content is slower to produce now is just that the standards are much higher. Internally we draw a distinction between the old volunteer-contributed content and the new content which is aligned to CEFR guidelines for how languages should actually be taught. Aligning content like this is not only more expensive but also requires more coordination and oversight from domain experts compared to previous methods.