Does it work well on Linux now? I’ve been looking for a virtual desktop alternative for a while now, but last time I checked out alvr it still seemed quite unstable.
I find this framing to be extremely far away from the reality of any sales conversations I've been a part of.
Flipping it like this is a rationalization that helps you sleep better, not some deep insight that the sales profession is great actually.
It means that OpenAIs public commitments to allocate resources for safety research do not track with what they actually do and people who were hired to work on safety (or in schulmans case choose to focus on safety) don't like it, so they leave.
Must've been a difficult decision with him being a cofounder and all, but afaik he's been the highest ranked safety minded person at openai. He says it's not because openai leadership isn't committed to safety, but I'm not sure I buy that. We've seen numerous safety people leave exactly because of that reason.
What makes this way more interesting to me though is how this announcement coincides with Brockmans sabbatical. Maybe there's nothing to it, but I find it more likely that things really aren't going well with sama.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if he actually returns next year or if this is just a soft quitting announcement.
Th reality is that every other person in tech now is hoping for Sama to fail. The world doesn't need AI to have a silicon valley face. Anthropic is doing a much, much better PR work by not having a narcissist as CEO.
I want the best model at the lowest rate (and preferably lowest energy expenditure) and with the easiest access. Anything else is just background noise.
Some people are wary of enabling ceos of disruptive technologies become the richest people in the world, take control of key internet assets and -- in random bursts of thin-skinned megalomania -- tilt the scales towards politicians or political groups who take action that negatively affect their own quality of life.
It sounds absurd, but some are watching such a procession take place live as we speak.
I hear a lot of people say good things about CoPilot too but I absolutely hate it. I have it enabled for some reason still, but it constantly suggests incorrect things. There has been a few amazing moments but man there is a lot of "bullshit" moments.
Even when we get a gen AI that exceeds all human metrics, there will 100% still be people who with a straight face will say "Meh, I tried it and found it be pretty useless for my work."
To be fair, LLMs are pretty good natural language search engines. Like when I'm looking for something in an API that does something I can describe in natural language, but not succinctly enough to show up in a web search, LLMs are extremely handy, at least when they don't just randomly hallucinate the API. On the other hand I think this is more of a condemnation of the fact that search tech has not 'really' meaningfully advanced beyond where it was 20 years ago, more than it is a praise of LLMs.
> LLMs are extremely handy, at least when they don't just randomly hallucinate
I work in tech and it’s my hobby, so that’s what a lot of my googling goes towards.
LLMs hallucinate almost every time I ask them anything too specific, which at this point in my career is all I’m really looking for.
The time it takes for me to realize an llm is wrong is usually not too bad, but it’s still time I could’ve saved by googling (or whatever trad search) for the docs or manual.
I really wish they were useful, but at least for my tasks they’re just a waste of time.
I really like them for quickly generating descriptions for my dnd settings, but even then they sound samey if I use them too much.
Obviously they’d sound samey if I made up 20 at once too, but at that point I’m not really being helped or enhanced by using an LLM, it’s just faster at writing than I am.
I don't mean this as a slight, just an observation I have seen many times - people who struggle with utility from SOTA LLM's tend to not have spent enough time with them to feel out good prompting. In the same way that there is a skill for googling information, there is a skill for teasing consistent good responses from LLM's.
Why spend my time teasing and coaxing information out of a system which absolutely does make up nonsense when I can just read the manual?
I spent 2023 developing LLM powered chatbots with people who, purportedly, were very good at prompting, but never saw any better output than what I got for the tasks I’m interested in.
I think the “you need to get good at prompting” idea is very shallow. There’s really not much to learn about prompting. It’s all hacks and anecdotes which could change drastically from model to model.
None of which, from what I’ve seen, makes up for the limitations of LLM no matter how many times I try adding “your job depends on Formatting this correctly “ or reordering my prompt so that more relevant information is later, etc
Prompt engineering has improved RAG pipelines I’ve worked on though, just not anything in the realm of comprehension or planning of any amount of real complexity.
People also continue to use them as knowledge databases, despite that not being where they shine. Give enough context into the model (descriptions, code, documentation, ideas, examples) and have a dialog, that's where these strong LLMs really shine.
I see it do a lot that's interesting but for programming stuff, I haven't found it to be particularly useful.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong?
I've been writing code for ~30 years, and I've built up patterns and snippets, etc... that are much faster for me to use than the LLMs.
A while ago, I thought I had a eureka moment with it when I had it generate some nodejs code for streaming a video file - it did all kinds of cool stuff, like implement offset headers and things I didn't know about.
I thought to myself, "self - you gotta check yourself, this thing is really useful".
But then I had to spend hours debugging & fixing the code that was broken in subtle ways. I ended up on google anyway learning all about it and rewrote everything it had generated.
For that case, while I did learn some interesting things from the code it generated, it didn't save me any time - it cost me time. I'd have learned the same things from reading an article or the docs on effective ways to stream video from the server, and I'd have written it more correctly the first go around.
So if LLMs weren't surprising to you, it would imply you expected this. If you did, how much money did you make on financial speculation? It seems like being this far ahead should have made you millions even without a lot of starting capital (look at NVDA alone)
> So if LLMs weren't surprising to you, it would imply you expected this.
I do claim that I have a tendency to be quite right about the "technological side" of such topics when I'm interested in them. On the other hand, events turn out to be different because of "psychological effects" (let me put it this way: I have a quite different "technology taste" than the market average).
In the concrete case of LLMs: the psychological effect why the market behaved so much differently is that I believed that people wouldn't fall for the marketing and hype of LLMs and would consider the excessive marketing to be simply dupery. The surprise to me was that this wasn't what happened.
Concerning NVidia: I believed that - considering the insane amount of money involved - people/companies would write new languages and compilers to run AI code on GPUs (or other ICs) of various different suppliers (in particular AMD and Intel) because it is a dangerous business practice to make yourself dependent on a single (GPU) supplier. Even serious reverse-engineering endeavours for doing this should have paid off considering the money involved. I was again wrong about this. So here the surprise was that lots of AI companies made themselves so dependent on NVidia.
Seeing lots of "unconventional" things is very helpful for doing math (often the observations that you see are the start of completely new theorems). Being good at stock trading and investing in my opinion on the other hand requires a lot of "street smartness".
Re: NVIDIA. I wholeheartedly agree. Google/TPU is an existence proof that it is entirely possible and rational to do so. My surprise was that everyone except Google missed.
I think you are in one of the extreme bubbles. The general tech industry is not subscribed to the drama and has less personal feelings on individuals they do not directly know.
Outlier success pretty much requires obsessive strategic thinking. Gates and Musk are super strategic but in a "weirdo autist" way, which doesn't have a big stigma attached to it anymore. Peter Thiel also benefits from his weirdness. Steve Jobs had supernatural charisma working in his favor. sama has the strategic instinct but not the charisma or disarming weirdness other tech founders have. Sama is not unusually Machiavellian or narcissistic, but he will get judged more harshly for it.
Yeah. It's really really hard to prevent actors from coming up with clever ways to circumvent the automatic checks. But that just means that apple needs to play the cat-and-mouse game. That's what they always say their cut is for, no?
One thing to note, is you don’t have to feel compelled to master every combat mechanic the game throws at you (which is a lot), you can just pick your favorites. A “fox with one trick vs a thousand” and all that.
I for example basically ignore the shield for the vast majority of the game, only doing some very basic usage for some bosses, but perfect counters could very well be your favorite thing.
This is super cool. It's surprising to me that it took so long for someone to try this. It seems like such an obvious idea (in hindsight). But I guess that's easy to say now that someone came up with it.
If this turns out to work well even for much larger models, then we might see loss functions that incorporate ever more specific performance metrics, conceivably even actual execution times on specific hardware.
Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.
I thought they were out of their mind paying that much money for something that I didn't think had many opportunities left to grow.
But now I think it was the perfect time for Persson and his team to give it to someone with the resources and the reach to make those opportunities. Yes, Microsoft changed some things about Minecraft the game, but overall they didn't touch the core gameplay loop. Instead they focused on expanding the minecraft universe with genre crossing spinoff games and cooperations that the old Mojang could've never done. And kids loved most of it. Stuff like Minecraft: Story Mode added a richness to the franchise that you could completely ignore if you wanted to, or dive into if it appealed to you.
Microsoft grew Minecraft because it still had a lot of growth in it. It might clash with your nostalgia, but it evolved such that it still broadly appealed to its growing core audience. And that is and always has been children. And children still love Minecraft.
Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.
I am still peeved that my lifetime license "mysteriously" broke during Microsoft's account transitions. Trillion dollar company lacks the manpower and technical capability to handle it? Or someone cannot be arsed to maintain "freeloader" customers.
Same here. Had one of the first few thousand accounts. Since Microsoft took over:
- it got hacked. Got it back but name was changed, history not perfect anymore
- much later somehow lost my account due to me trying to keep my old account I guess. Whatever I wasnt noticed that my account is going to die. It just did. Microsoft support also never answered to my request getting it back
Microsoft’s bean counters immediately set about milking as much profit from Minecraft as they can right after the purchase, be through Minecoin, premium skins, or by collecting PII via requiring phone numbers from everyone for “SMS verification” due to “security alert” blackmail (total joke—the attacker could just as well provide their own phone number and lock me out—except, of course, there is no actual suspicious activity: my account was never hacked, and I was not playing for years).
It was the first game I bought in my life, and 30 EUR was quite a chunk of change. Since the acquisition, it stopped being a game I have; it is now a game that Microsoft may or may not let me play. As a result, I don’t bother.
They did provide several notices regarding that years in advance to shutting down the old auth servers and also had a long migration period during which you could log in with both accounts (assuming you have migrated the old account to Xbox/Microsoft).
The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.
Their notices required you to re-verify your original email address, which so far has never been required. So lots of people (myself included) had their passwords and could play fine, never mind the 10-year-old @aol.com account tied to it, and could do nothing but watch that deadline approach before being locked out.
Oh man, I guess I was so angry about that at some point I blocked it out. My dumb ass actually bought a 2nd account because I couldn't convince my friends to play with me until it was free. After MSFT purchased Minecraft I could never recover either of those accounts!
Yeah, that's fair. That was just a shitty thing to do.
I was more focusing on the creative development that Minecraft saw under Microsoft.
Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.
This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.
But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.
They just added the autocrafter and trial chambers, enhancements for redstoners, adventures, and builders
They need to get a handle on inventory management, probably the most complained about thing. 100s of new blocks but inventory is still largely the same
Minecraft STILL doesn't have a lot of stuff Notch was planning on adding. Instead of becoming an actual living breathing world you want to explore more they focus on premium skins and an occasional update with mostly bewildering content. Usually big projects like movies and games have a director(s) with a grand vision. Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money. Microsoft's only vision for Minecraft has ever been sponsorship deals and merch. Honestly, I feel more betrayed by Notch than by Microsoft.
> Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money.
That's certainly one way to see it, but I don't think Notch was ever really in a position to turn some of his more grand ideas for the game into a reality. Not because he couldn't afford it, but because he didn't have the skill (or interest) in leading a Studio that's much bigger than ~20 people. From everything I've read about him it seems like he never liked any of the additional responsibilities that came with Minecrafts growing success and there are some accounts from some early members of the team that seem to corroborate this.
So I really don't think he sold out. I think he realized that he couldn't be the person to manage Minecrafts generational success and that he'd rather have 2 billion dollars in exchange for giving another company a shot at that, versus not having that money and then seeing himself fail to bring his ideas to fruition.
In the end that's of course just speculation. It could just as well be that he never had any of those thoughts and just fucked off, laughing all the way to the bank and then to the biggest hollywood mansion that money can buy.
In that case I'm still glad that he got the bag from Microsoft, because I can imagine much worse ways that this could've gone.
