Anyone using DeepSeek as a service the same way proprietary LLMs like ChatGPT are used is missing the point. The game-changer isn’t that the Chinese company DeepSeek can compete with OpenAI and its ilk as an AI service provider—it’s that now any organization with a few million dollars to train and host their own model can compete with OpenAI.
I get that the data isn’t final yet, but surely they could have found a way to word that without referring to 2024 in the future tense. Like “US‘s wind and solar likely generated more power than coal in 2024”.
Hmm… Is there an underlying argument being made here that we should reject any narrative that predicates the current state of the world (e.g., widespread inequality) as an inevitable (or probable) outcome of historical processes? That would suggest that we’ve been overemphasizing causal vs stochastic elements in human cultures.
Are there any good studies looking at (say) the statistical persistence of cultural or institutional traits over time, in the absence of external factors? Or the general predictability (or lack thereof) of institutional changes over time?
Cheung explains, “Our work asks: what is the precise math problem whose solution is the scattering amplitude of strings? And is it the unique solution?”. He adds, “This work can’t verify the validity of string theory, which like all questions about nature is a question for experiment to resolve. But it can help illuminate whether the hypothesis that the world is described by vibrating strings is actually logically equivalent to a smaller, perhaps more conservative set of bottom up assumptions that define this math problem.”
OK but the only thing string theory ever had going for it is that the math is exceptionally pretty, so is this actually adding anything new?
it’s as ridiculous as Trump claiming he can declassify documents just by thinking about it
Maybe that’s the object—to put Trump and other Republicans on record as saying this is an invalid procedure.
I don’t think it’s useful for a lot of what it’s being promoted for—its pushers are exploiting the common conception of software as a process whose behavior is rigidly constrained and can be trusted to operate within those constraints.
I think it sheds new light on human brain functioning, but only reproduces a specific aspect of the brain—namely, the salience network (i.e., the part of our brain that builds a predictive model of our environment and alerts us when the unexpected happens). This can be useful for picking up on subtle correlations our conscious brains would miss—but those who think it can be incrementally enhanced into reproducing the entire brain (or even the part of the brain we would properly call consciousness) are mistaken.
Building on the above, I think generative models imitate the part of our subconscious that tries to “fill in the banks” when we see or hear something ambiguous, not the part that deliberately creates meaningful things from scratch. So I don’t think it’s a real threat to the creative professions. I think they should be prevented from creating works that would be considered infringing if they were produced by humans, but not from training on copyrighted works that a human would be permitted to see or hear.
I think the parties claiming that AI needs to be prevented from falling into “the wrong hands” are themselves the most likely parties to abuse it. I think it’s safest when it’s open, accessible, and unconcentrated.