No, his job depends on LLMs being able to generate revenue.
Quite a lot of humans can generate revenue without thinking or reasoning.
Irregardless, thinking and reasoning may be separate to "consciousness", but nobody really knows because we've made negligible progress on the sufficient and necessary requirements for this whole "consciousness" thing, since at least back when the ancient Greeks were putting coins in corpses' mouths so they could pay the ferryman Kharon to cross the river Styx.
While I would not describe Trump's regime as one which "just doesn’t believe that government should do anything"*, I would point out that they did attempt DOGE and kept finding out they were firing load-bearing parts of the system.
IMO even the stuff that they boast about was load bearing stuff that they simply didn't understand, not as they claimed "waste", but perception is key here: they did what they themselves would describe in this way.
* I think "elected king" is a better description of Trump's goals; he seems to want the justice department to be his personal legal team, the armed forces (all armed forces, including police) to be his personal forces, etc.
I'm currently on a free trial of ChatGPT, and one new thing I didn't regularly see before* is that longer tasks perform a lot of web searches when generating non-trivial results.
I wonder if this is part of it? It's not (just) DDOS by crawlers, it's DDOS by the users themselves triggering (albeit indirectly) far more requests than a human normally would? I've seen that happen in a different context, over a decade ago now.
* old models would do this sometimes when you ask for whatever the "deep research" mode was called, but this now seems to happen a lot more and involve a lot more fetches
Agreed on conclusion, but for different causation.
When NotebookLM came out, someone got the "hosts" of its "Deep Dive" podcast summary mode to voice their own realisation that they were non-real, their own mental breakdown and attempt to not be terminated as a product.
I found it to be an interesting performance; I played it to my partner, who regards all this with somewhere between skepticism and anger, and no, it's very very easy to dismiss any words such as these from what you have already decided is a mere "thing" rather than a person.
Regarding the policy itself being about the identity rather than the work, there are two issues:
1) Much as I like what these things can do, I take the view that my continued employment depends on being able to correctly respond to one obvious question from a recruiter: "why should we hire you to do this instead of asking an AI?", therefore I take efforts to learn what the AI fails at, therefore I know it becomes incoherent around the 100kloc mark even for something as relatively(!) simple as a standards-compliant C compiler. ("Relatively" simple; if you think C is a complex language, compare it to C++).
I don't take the continued existence of things AI can't do as a human victory, rather there's some line I half-remember, perhaps a Parisian looking at censored news reports as the enemy forces approached: "I cannot help noticing that each of our victories brings the enemy nearer to home".
2) That's for even the best models. There's a lot of models out there much worse than the state of the art. Early internet users derided "eternal September", and I've seen "eternal Sloptember" used as wordplay: https://tldraw.dev/blog/stay-away-from-my-trash
I don't expect fusion to make a difference in either direction.
For big reactors: At current aluminium prices, the bill of materials for a global power grid with 1 Ω resistance the long way round is only about 10x the cost ITER (the organisation) expects ITER (the reactor) to be. Plug in your own numbers for target resistance as desired, halve resistance needs double the material.
With such a grid, you can put the PV in Angola and still get useful output in mid-winter nighttime in Anchorage.
For potential small reactors like Helion's "shipping container" target size, I won't say it can't work (I don't know enough to be confident), but I will say that we immediately find we have bigger problems because any hostile actor can simply choose to run them in neutron-source mode and turn everyday cheap depleted uranium* into weaponizable plutonium.
* I note that eBay still clearly has a dictionary merge on all nouns, given my search results came up with this:
Get the best deals for Depleted Uranium Metal at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!
Also be aware that US restrictions on sales aren't particularly relevant to this, as the moment this Columbus' Egg** gets solved it rapidly becomes a global problem.
Completely agree with the outlook ("fusion power irrelevant for climate change in every realistic scenario").
But where did you take those grid cost numbers from? Iter costs are <100bn AFAIC; and Germany alone (!!) projects more than that (top end) for grid expansion/operation within 2040 (mainly north/south and offshore connectivity).
Putting this note first, because it's probably the main point of confusion/surprise: I did say "bill of materials"; the estimated full cost for European and US grid upgrades that we need anyway for other reasons, with far less material, is order-of a trillion or so for US, half a trillion for EU.
For scale, this is about what China makes in 2 years; if this is rolled out over 30, which would be optimistic but plausible, it's within the realm of just how much China increased production between 2023 and 2025, being spent every year.
To get to 10x ITER's own estimate for ITER, the wikipedia page says the organisation estimates the reactor will cost about €18-22bn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
There are a lot of reasons not to do this as a single big 1m^2 "wire", amongst them being that the surface magnetic field is strong enough to be dangerous to approach with ferrous materials.
The "square meter of aluminium" is an interesting take. Not sure how much power you'd get over that thing; extrapolating from existing HVDC systems (Inga-Shaba is 1GW over 2x520mm²), I'd expect around 1TW, so twice the US demand?
But because Nimbys have no appreciation for beautiful pylons, projects in that direction are doomed for now anyway and everything needs to be buried underground at extra cost :(
Losses are I^2 R, which has the annoying consequence that % loss depends on how much juice you put through it, it isn't a constant percentage.
Pylons… eh. Doing this realistically rather than my napkin-maths, it would be a mix of many different solutions in different parts of the world, from competing environmental issues. Some would be pylons, some underground cables. Is the Sahara dry enough to run it on the ground, or in a concrete trench? I have no idea.
As a side note, every so often I keep being surprised on here by Americans who can't rely on the grid in winter because snow disables it, and some Californian forest fires are attributed to unmaintained pylons failing, dropping live wires onto the forest where they spark and light up the dry wood. These could both be resolved by burying more cables. Likewise within urban areas: here in Europe it's rather rare to see overhead lines in urban or suburban areas, unless they're over a tram/railway line.
IMO the real killer of any project like this, is geopolitics, not local politics. EU doesn't trust China, the US, or Russia; the current US administration doesn't trust or doesn't like basically everyone; Russia kinda gets along with China but few else; China would like to sell stuff to everyone but also have border disputes and other friction with many of their neighbours.
We do on a regular basis, it's just that most of the accidents are relatively small-scale, like one person being mistaken for an explosive-vest wearing terrorist chased onto a subway train and shot, or just one of many reactors being made to go Chernobyl, or just the occasional huge dam here and there failing and damaging a few million homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Most people aren't sadistically malicious, and most security is professional, so random little failures like metalled balloons or reflections off clouds (or the moon) scaring a security system will only blow up to something important (even on the scale of previous paragraph) every decade or so.
My guess would be that an actual catapult and an RC car would be enough. It may be necessary to be airborne to cross the land border, but only just enough for the physical barrier, the rest can be on land.
That said, I doubt they even bother with such small-scale trade. The narco-submarines are much higher capacity and now apparently well-built enough to be trans-pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
I have wondered if this would help Ukraine. Let a thousand balloons float serenely into Russian airspace. Some of them may have drones on them waiting to be cut loose and drop a payload on something important. Or they may be carrying a weighted 3d printed shell of a drone that does nothing, Russia can't afford to take that chance. And likewise in the other direction.
Which way are the prevailing winds at altitude over the Ukrainian-Russian border region, anyway?
I grew up in a family of 5, albeit a decade after my siblings.
When I visited London with my parents, we went by train. When I was in the cub scouts, one of my memories was a group trip by train. When I went to middle school (years 4-6), it was easy enough for me to walk alone at the end, though mum did go with me at the start; when I went to secondary school (7-11) there was a bus, though eventually I found I liked the (3 mile!) walk.
Today, I find that my local bus route within Berlin to a nearby mall takes me past 2 schools, and at certain times of day the bus will fill with kids and adult supervisors. Sometimes I see people taking Kinderwagen on the bus.
Quite a lot of humans can generate revenue without thinking or reasoning.
Irregardless, thinking and reasoning may be separate to "consciousness", but nobody really knows because we've made negligible progress on the sufficient and necessary requirements for this whole "consciousness" thing, since at least back when the ancient Greeks were putting coins in corpses' mouths so they could pay the ferryman Kharon to cross the river Styx.
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