As someone who has historically been very much an LLM inevitabalism skeptic and has recently decided that we've crossed the breakeven point with indiscriminant use of Opus 4, eh, it's precisely because we're in late LLM === AGI hype world. They're actually cutting the shit on "this can do anything, and in a month, twice that!". This thing is crazy operator aligned, wildly SFT'd on curated codebases, and running a TTFT and cost that means it's basically Chinchilla maxed out, back to work boys, sell some NVIDIA stock.

This is precisely the opposite data point to the one you'd expect if the TESCREAL hype men were right: you do that when the writing is on the wall that this thing is uniquely suited to coding and the only way you'll ever do better than quantize and ad support it is to go after a deep pocketed vertical (our employers).

Nothing whatsoever to do with making a military drone or a car that can handle NYC or an Alexa that's useful instead of an SNL skit. That's other ML (very cool ML).

So the frontier lab folks have finally replaced the information commons they first destroyed, except you need a nuclear reactor and a bunch of Taiwan hawks that make Dick Cheney look like a weak-kneed feminist to run it at a loss forever.

The thing is, this kind of one ine itabalism isn't new: David Graeber spent a luminous career tearing strips off of hacks like Harari for the same exact moral and intellectual failure perpetrated by the same class warfare dynamics for the same lowbrow reasons.

Can you translate "SFT'd" and "TTFT" and "TESCREAL" for the less clued-in members of the audience? On "one ine itabalism" I just gave up.

This comment is absolute bullshit.

It starts off being wrong ("Opus 4 has maxed out LLM coding performance"), then keeps being wrong ("LLM inference is sold at a loss"), and tries to mask just how wrong it at any point in time is by pivoting from one flavor of bullshit to another on a dime, running laps a manic headless chicken.