Would be neat if AGI could become our rulers/caretakers and govern/adjudicate in a sustainable, egalitarian fashion, since we've proven time and time again that humanity is too selfish for long term planning.

There are plenty of problems that have technical solutions, or might have technical solutions. Diseases of all sorts, disabilities, pollution, climate change, incidentally complicated bureaucracy. Although you can gesture that these have a social component, even for that, the social component becomes much easier to address if the cost of addressing it goes down.

To say nothing of how ubiquitous manufacturing automation would make material goods accessible to a much broader range of people (though, you could argue that material goods are today effectively universally accessible, and I wouldn't disagree).

For some reason, it seems like the vast majority of people pontificating about AGI scenarios seem to have trouble contemplating the idea that humans might not remain in charge.

But these guys don't care about your social and political problems. All they care about is winning the technology race with China and making ungodly amounts of money in the process.

If current technologies can't solve the problem for political/societal reasons? We need better technologies.

Improving technology is easy. "Just fix everything that's wrong with the society and the problem will go away" isn't.

It's way, way easier to improve solar panel and battery storage tech until fossil fuels are completely uneconomical than to get the entire world to abandon fossil fuels while fossil fuels are the most economical source of energy by far.

I don't think we are anywhere close to AGI. That being said, advances in these tools could help untangle the blocks to using existing tools. These are language models, after all.

What’s the biggest problem we’ve solved in the last 30 years through addressing our social and political deficiencies?

People need to consider the source. Not sure how that basic advice ever got short-circuited where AI is concerned. Owners and marketers of AI systems have every incentive to exaggerate their capabilities, even to the extent of disingenuously/performatively being "afraid" of "what's coming."

I just remembered the rich guys behind all this used to love watching Entourage back in the day. And like didn't hide it, were so unashamed they even brought the show up in conversation. We're so f'd.

> “AGI” will do nothing to address our social and political deficiencies.

I'm not an AI zealot at all but I don't see why AGI wouldn't be able to address thos e deficiencies.

it’s a religion

The key insight is that these models are becoming obsolete so fast that it doesn't make sense to not publish them. If others use your tech and stack and build on top or refine your ideas then you benefit greatly.

Nobody is releasing their training scripts. Unfortunately.

This is a replay from having cryptography algorithms on the 1990's classified as military weapons went down, other international algorithms were eventually created.

The authors have some concrete policies they want to see adopted:

> launch a large-scale AI literacy initiative across the government

> invest billions of dollars in procurement over the next few years

> expand support for the National AI Research Resource

The article exists to convince someone with the power to direct those billions of dollars to direct them this way. Claiming that the US is falling behind is a popular trick to make that happen.

Presumably the holders of purse strings know that policy papers must not be taken at face value, but if they're unaware that the robots in Chinese factories are far from the AI-driven humanoids of popular imagination, or that the AI Plus Initiative is full of lofty goals with nothing concrete on how to achieve them, they might be fooled nonetheless.

The intention of the Sullivan Doctrine was to keep Chinese players 1-2 generations behind in AI/ML applications, as this would give breathing room for the US, because AI/ML is essentially an HPC problem that can be solved by throwing a ton of capital and compute.

The issue is, a large subset of American "AI" startups are founded by people who are ideologically driven by an almost religious fervor around unlocking AGI and superintelligence.

On the other hand, most Chinese startups in the space are highly application driven and practical in nature - they aren't chasing "AGI" or "Superintelligence" but building a monetizable product and outcompeting American players. (P.S. Immigrant founded startups in the US approach the problem in the same manner)

I've said this a ton of times on here, but most American MLEs are basically SKLearn wrapper monkeys with a penchant for bad philosophy. It's hard to find MLEs at scale in the US who understand both how to derive a Restricted Boltzmann Machine as well as tune and optimize the Linux Kernel to optimize Infiniband interconnects in a GPU cluster.

Most CS and CE majors in the US who graduated in the past 7-10 years think less like engineers (let's build shit that works, and then build it at scale) and more like liberal arts majors but wanted to learn enough coding to pass leetcode medium and get a job - I've had new grad SWEs who are alumni of MIT caliber schools ask me about how to become a VC or PM and how I did the SWE-PM-VC transition because "they don't want to code". I was gobsmacked.

The same mindset occurs abroad as well in China, India, Eastern Europe, Israel, etc but at least they force students to actually learn foundations.

And if you look at most of the teams who lead or develop either GPU architecture, high performance networking, RL research, Ensemble learning research, etc - most did their undergrad abroad in China, India, or the CEE but their PhD in the US. The pipeline and skill at the junior level in the US is almost nonexistent outside a handful of good programs that are oversubscribed.

When (picking a random T10 CS program) Cal and UIUC CS tenure track professors are starting to take up faculty positions in China and India's equivalent of those CS departments, that means you have a problem.

CS is a god damn engineering disciple. Engineering is predicated on bridging the gap between theoretical research and practical applications, but I do not see any backing for this kind of mindset in most American programs.

And yes, the work ethic in the US leaves much to be desired. If Polish, Czech, and Israeli engineers will be fine working 50-60 hour weeks during crunch time, asking you to work earlier hours in order to accommodate your private commitments after 3PM is not some form of egregious abuse.

The American tech industry has become lazy, the same way the American automotive industry became lazy in the 90s and 2000s. The lack of vision and the pettiness amongst management and the lack of motivation amongst ICs who are amongst the highest paid in the world is not conducive if we want to retain a domestic tech industry.

And unlike the automotive industry of ye olde days, the tech industry being a services industry can and has begun moving P/L and product roadmap responsibilities along with the execs who own said responsibilities abroad. If the HQ is in the US, but all the decisions are made abroad, are you really an American company?

Not at all. A big thrust of the article is about falling behind in AI adoption. See the first 3 paragraphs below the heading "Innovation and Adoption." Specifically:

>"Although the United States and China are very different and the latter’s approach has its limits, China is moving faster at scaling robots in society, and its AI Plus Initiative emphasizes achieving widespread industry-specific adoption by 2027. The government wants AI to essentially become a part of the country’s infrastructure by 2030. China is also investing in AGI, but Beijing’s emphasis is clearly on quickly scaling, integrating, and applying current and near-term AI capabilities."

The archive.is links work but whenever I visit archive.ph I see a welcome to nginx page. Anyone know why?

You might as well imagine that in the US it’s going to be forbidden to develop the AI that’s not holding fascist views. See Grok’s owner struggles with it. So American firms might not reap this advantage.

This article doesn’t really explain it, but Eric Schmidt in this article explains what the concern is.

I’m not sure about the legitimacy of these claims but trying to clarify what some people are concerned about with the US’s vs China’s approach

https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/25/09/47859358/us-coul...

maybe a perspective from outside of the echo chamber is useful

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When I develop a feature with ChatGPT it requires about 10 rounds because of the syntax errors. And often the syntax errors aren't fixed in the next round.

Now this happens with a pretty complex game I'm working on but it really shows the limits. It can't handle large amounts of indentation. It completely breaks.

1. Ime, Power generation isn't a major blocker and my peers in the DC space are seeing a decreasing interest in funding new capex expansion because there is a bit of a worry of a Telco Bubble 2.0 arising.

2. Robotics should not be bundled with LLMs, but it is absolutely an AI/ML subfield - and in fact, the kind of subfield that is the best example of AI/ML having tangible real world impact. Autonomous UAS was a sci-fi concept 20 years ago, but is an engineering problem that has become a reality today.