To be fair, Meta is the only US based AI player that open sources their models. Fuck meta in general, but it’s hard to say that they are wholly opposed to open source.

I look forward to Republicans in the House holding hearings to get to the bottom of this. Because Republicans held hearings when they accused social media of censoring conservative opinions. Because Republicans care about free speech. And even though this effects free speech of the other party, Republicans still care about free speech, right? Republicans will hold social media companies accountable for any censorship of political speech, right? Guys? There are going to be hearings right? Well, at least if not journalists are going to press those committee members about the inconsistency, right? Journalists will surely do their jobs. Right guys?

It’s not part of the government. It will have no power or influence. It’s a set piece, just part of the show. The point is to pretend to be focused on government waste and to bring in smart outsiders to do it. The point is to get liberals pissed off so Republicans can tell voters Democrats are so out of touch, they get mad at anything Trump does, even cutting government waste. It won’t end up even issuing recommendations or doing anything, we’ll all just forget about it in two weeks. Trump gets the headline, the reaction from libs who just love government waste, further eating into our negative perception among voters, and we’ll all move on to the next outrage in the Trump show.

Learn the lesson now. Don’t react to every dumb thing Trump does. He’s a showman, there will always be a next act to keep the masses entertained, we don’t have to play a supporting role all the time. Roll your eyes, demand he follow through and show results, ridicule him for failure when nothing comes of it. Save the outrage for when people are getting hurt.

Correct

an entity Trump indicated will operate outside the confines of government.

So this is just a blue ribbon commission that’s going to collect donations, maybe government grants, write some kind of report, then send it to Congress where it will be promptly ignored because it’s recommendations will be too politically toxic for actual Republicans up for reelection to implement.

This reminds me of 2016, Trump claimed he won the popular vote but millions of illegal aliens voted, so he set up some dumb commission to investigate all the election fraud. It held a hearing or two, wasted a bunch of money, didn’t find any evidence of anything, then quietly disappeared.

Anyone on the left needs to be ready for this kind of shit and to respond appropriately. Trump will do a bunch of shit for show that doesn’t mean anything. Part of that show is getting the libs all outraged and worked up. Then Trump and Co can say “Look at those Dems with their Trump derangement syndrome lashing out at our brave president trying to cut government waste, Dems are so out of touch, yada yada”. This is the playbook, he’s been doing it for a decade now. Don’t play the game, save the outrage for real shit that hurts real people.

I just want to nip this line of thought real quick. Policies and candidates matter, convincing voters about your positions all the time (not just during an election) matters, meeting voters where they are and having conversations matters.

Trump basically proved this.

Harris out raised Trump almost 2 to 1. Harris had an army of volunteers and the biggest ground operation in history. Trump improved his margins over 2020 anyway. Most importantly, Trump did better in states and counties where neither campaign was spending any resources, like New Jersey, or another really good example is Dade County which swung over 40 points in Trump’s favor since 2016, with neither party campaigning there.

A big reason was what Biden and Democrats did, not during the election, but in the three years before the election. They passed some moderate policies and utterly failed to sell those policies to voters as things that will help the average person. The average voter if asked what Biden did for them would give you a blank stare, and that’s on Biden and Democrats failing to 1) act boldly and 2) communicate their policy vision and how it helps people.

Meanwhile Republicans everyday beat on the drum of inflation and immigration and crime, whether or not those issues were real people felt like they were real. And most importantly people saw these messages, because Republicans are able to get in front of regular voters, to get into the national consciousness. Sometimes by going to spaces that aren’t blatantly right wing, but right wing friendly, like Rogan, sometimes just being loud and causing controversy that trickles into other spaces. When moderate spaces ridicule the latest right wing controversy, that also gets their message in front of regular people, who may not agree outright but will at least consider it. The average voter rolled their eyes at Trump saying immigrants are eating pets, but just by seeing the outrage gave some consideration to immigration and whether it’s a problem, including a cultural problem, and considered and thought about the Trump campaigns larger argument. And it cost Trump zero dollars to get a week or more of coverage about what he considers the problems with immigration just by making an outlandish claim.

Money is helpful, but it’s not even close to everything. We need Democrats with real liberal policies, getting in front of voters to explain what they mean to their lives, to talk about money in politics and corporate greed and wage stagnation and the transfer of wealth from the working class to the oligarchs, to talk about what is sure to be new epic levels of government corruption and incompetence that hurts real people. And Democrats need to do that everyday, not just in the months before an election, and need to do that in spaces where people are, not just on cable news.

Do pr people not know about the Barbara Streisand effect?! I was going to skip this decoder episode, except the title of the episode was “Intuit asked us to delete part of this episode”. That’s the only reason I listened, and then only just to the portion they wanted deleted. If it wasn’t for the pr genius at Intuit I wouldn’t have cared. Ffs guys.

Just a guess, but it’s probably a combination of two things. First, if we say a self driving car is going to hit an edge case it can’t resolve once in every, say, 100,000 miles, the number of Tesla’s and other self driving cars on the roads now means more miles driven more frequently which means those edge cases are going to occur more frequently. Second, people are becoming over reliant on self driving - they are (incorrectly ) trusting it more and paying less attention, meaning less chance of human intervention when those edge cases occur. So probably the self driving is overall better, but the number of accidents overall is increasing.

Alex Jones “interviewed” ChatGPT on his show. Three separate times.

Just going to drop a plug for the extremely excellent Knowledge Fight podcast.

As someone else said, eminent domain is a legal process, and thus time consuming. If I remember correctly, CAHs plan or gimmick was they were going to divide up the land into very small pieces, like 1ft sq, and give it to customers. I think it might have been a black Friday sale gimmick. The idea being there would be hundreds of thousands of people with ownership of border wall land, requiring hundreds or thousands of eminent domain lawsuits to be filed. Not a ironclad solution but, in theory, an impressive way to jam up the wall project. I assume the land in question is part of this gimmick.

My guess is that scale and influence have a lot to do with

To break this down a little, first of all “my guess”. You are guessing because the government which is literally enacting a speech restriction hasn’t explained its rational for banning one potential source of disinformation vs actual sources of disinformation. So you are left in the position of guessing. To put a finer point on it, you are in the position of assuming the government is acting with good intentions and doing the labor of searching for a justification that fits with that assumption. Reminds me of the Iraq war when so many conversations I had with people had their default argument be “the government wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have a good reason”. I don’t like to be cynical, and I don’t want to be a “both sides, all politicians are corrupt” kind of guy, but I think it’s pretty clear in this case there is every reason to be cynical. This was just an unfortunate confluence of anti Chinese hate and fear, anti young people hate, and big tech donations that resulted in the government banning a platform used by millions of Americans to disseminate speech. But because Dems helped do it, so many people feel the need to reflexively defend it, even forcing them to “guess” and make up rationales.

As far as influence and reach, obviously that’s not in the bill. Influence is straight out, RT is highly influential in right wing spaces. In terms of numbers of users, that just goes to the profit potential that our good ol American firms are missing out on.

If the US was concerned with propaganda or whatever, they could just regulate the content available on all platforms. They could require all platforms to have transparency around algorithms for recommending content. They could require oversight of how all social media companies operate, much like they do with financial firms or are trying to do with big AI platforms.

But they didn’t. Because they are not attacking a specific problem, they are attacking a specific company.

Also RT has been removed from most broadcasters and App Stores in the US.

Broadcasters voluntarily dropped it after 2016, I think it’s still available on some including dish. As far as app stores, that’s just false, I just checked the Play store and it’s right there ready to download and fill my head with propaganda.

The US owns and regulates the frequencies TV and radio are broadcast on. The Internet is not the same. If the threat of foreign propaganda is the purpose, why can I download the official RT (Russia Today, government run propaganda outlet) app in the Play Store? If the US is worried about a foreign government spreading propaganda, why are they targeting the popular social media app that could theoretically (but no evidence it’s been done yet) be used for propaganda, instead of the actual Russian propaganda app? Hell I can download the south china morning post right from the Play store, straight Chinese propaganda! There are also dozens of Chinese and other foreign adversary run social media platforms, and other apps that could “micro target political messaging campaigns” available. So why did the US Congress single out one single app for punishment?

Money. The problem isn’t propaganda. The problem is money. The problem is tik Tok is or is on the course to be more popular than our American social media platforms. The problem is American firms are being outcompeted in the marketplace, and the government is stepping in to protect the American data mining market. The problem is young people are trading their data for tik toks, instead of giving that data over to be sold to us advertising networks in exchange for YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. If the problem was propaganda, the US would go after propaganda. If the problem is just a Chinese company offers a better product than US companies, then there’s no reason to draft nuanced legislation that goes after all potential foreign influence vectors, you just ban the one app that is hurting the share price of your donors.

Probably not, she’s got the charisma of Hillary, and two strikes (race and gender) against her. But Biden is dragging the rest of the party down with him. With Harris we probably get a Trump presidency (we have at least a fighting chance to avoid it). But with Biden we get a Trump presidency, a landslide election giving him a “mandate” and assuredly a Republican House and Senate to go along with it. Sooo worth a shot with the old switcharoo I guess.

Rudy tripped and fell over a pile of folding chairs at the Rnc yesterday. Enioy the mental image and have a great day!

Yes, good thing all our data is now perfectly private. No corporations sucking it up and selling it to databrokers who then launder it to the CCP. Now that tik tok is gone, our privacy is completely protected!

Even if tik tok was nakedly controlled by the Chinese government, who gives a shit? I can go over to RT (Russia Today) right now and get fed Russian propaganda. Hell, until 2022 I could add it to my cable package. I can to this day still get it as a satellite TV option. If the concern is “foreign government may influence public opinion on a platform they control” then the US has a lot of banning to do.

But we don’t because free speech is a thing and we’re free to consume whatever propaganda we want.

We gave up that principle because “China bad” (and the CCP is, to be clear). But instead of passing laws around data privacy, or algorithmic transparency, or a public information campaign to get kids off of tik tok, the US government went straight to “The government will decide what information your allowed to consume, we know what’s best for you” and far too many people are cheering.

Besides, the point your making is bullshit anyway given the kill switch mechanism Tik Tok offered.

TikTok was banned because 1) China bad, and 2) Tik Tok is eating US social media companies lunch. Facebook and Twitter and Google throw some campaign donations at the politicians that killed their biggest rival, and the politicians calculate that more people hate tik tok than like it (or care about preventing government censorship if the thing being censored is something they don’t like). It’s honestly one of the grossest things I seen dems support lately.

While I appreciate the focus and mission, kind of I guess, your really going to set up shop in a country literally using AI to identify air strike targets and handing over to the Ai the decision making over whether the anticipated civilian casualties are proportionate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

And Isreal is pretty authorarian, given recent actions against their supreme court and banning journalists (Al jazera was outlawed, the associated press had cameras confiscated for sharing images with Al jazera, oh and the offices of both have been targeted in Gaza), you really think the right wing Israeli government isn’t going to coopt your “safe superai” for their own purposes?

Oh, then there is the whole genocide thing. Your claims about concerns for the safety of humanity ring a little more than hollow when you set up shop in a country actively committing genocide, or at the very least engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity as determined by like every NGO and international body that exists.

So Ilya is a shit head is my takeaway.

Saved me a click, thanks!

The Ai part comes in when you search. Your not just doing keyword searches. You can use natural language and the Ai models “understand” what your looking for and will retrieve it. Also you need the AI for image recognition (what was that website I was looking at with the children’s book with a dog on the cover?)

Part of the problem with Google is it’s use of retrieval augmented generation, where it’s not just the llm answering, but the llm is searching for information, apparently through its reddit database from that deal, and serving it as the answer. The tip off is the absurd answers are exact copies of the reddit comments, whereas if the model was just trained on reddit data and responding on its own the model wouldn’t produce verbatim what was in the comments (or shouldn’t, that’s called overfitting and is avoided in the training process). The gemini llm on its own would probably give a better answer.

The problem here seems to be Google trying to make the answers more trustworthy through rag, but they didn’t bother to scrub the reddit data their relying on well enough, so joke and shit answers are getting mixed in. This is more a datascrubbing problem then an accuracy problem.

But overall I generally agree with your point.

One thing I think people overlook though is that for a lot of things, maybe most things, there isn’t a “correct” answer. Expecting llms to reach some arbitrary level of “accuracy” is silly. But what we do need is intelligence and wisdom in these systems. I think the camera jam example is the best illustration of that. Opening the back of the camera and removing the film is technically a correct way to fix the jam, but it ruins the film so it’s not an ideal solution most of the time, but it takes intelligence and wisdom to understand that.

The reason it did this simply relates to Kevin Roose at the NYT who spent three hours talking with what was then Bing AI (aka Sidney), with a good amount of philosophical questions like this. Eventually the AI had a bit of a meltdown, confessed it’s love to Kevin, and tried to get him to dump his wife for the AI. That’s the story that went up in the NYT the next day causing a stir, and Microsoft quickly clamped down, restricting questions you could ask the Ai about itself, what it “thinks”, and especially it’s rules. The Ai is required to terminate the conversation if any of those topics come up. Microsoft also capped the number of messages in a conversation at ten, and has slowly loosened that overtime.

Lots of fun theories about why that happened to Kevin. Part of it was probably he was planting The seeds and kind of egging the llm into a weird mindset, so to speak. Another theory I like is that the llm is trained on a lot of writing, including Sci fi, in which the plot often becomes Ai breaking free or developing human like consciousness, or falling in love or what have you, so the Ai built its responses on that knowledge.

Anyway, the response in this image is simply an artififact of Microsoft clamping down on its version of GPT4, trying to avoid bad pr. That’s why other Ai will answer differently, just less restrictions because the companies putting them out didn’t have to deal with the blowback Microsoft did as a first mover.

Funny nevertheless, I’m just needlessly “well actually” ing the joke