If you're copying from another painting, you don't paint a figure and then decide to move it a centimeter to the left. But original paintings often have such changes.
No one will ever agree on when AI systems have equivalent functionality to a human brain. But lots of jobs consist of things a computer can now do for less than 100W.
Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.
> Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.
Add to that the tier-n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.
Wikipedia quoted global primary energy production at 19.6 TW, or about 2400W/person. Which is obviously not even close to equally distributed. Per-country it gets complicated quickly, but naively taking the total from [1] brings the US to 9kW per person.
And that's ignoring sources like food from agriculture, including the food we feed our food.
To be fair, AI servers also use a lot more energy than their raw power demand if we use the same metrics. But after accounting for everything, an American and an 8xH100 server might end up in about the same ballpark
Which is not meant as an argument for replacing Americans with AI servers, but it puts AI power demand into context
The opposite. The (unsubstantiated and probably false) claim is that the Green party was helped or funded by Russian energy companies, who benefited by Germany shutting down its nuclear plants.
Checking the arithmetic in every paper published seems like an good use case for LLMs. Has someone built a better version than uploading a PDF to ChatGPT and asking it to check the arithmetic?
Modern reasoning models are actually pretty good at arithmetic and almost certainly would have caught this error if asked.
Source: we benchmark this sort of stuff at my company and for the past year or so frontier models with a modest reasoning budget typically succeed at arithmetic problems (except for multiplication/division problems with many decimal places, which this isn't).
ChatGPT 5.2 has recently been churning through unsolved Erdös problems.
I think right now one is partially validated by a pro and the other one I know of is "ai-solved" but not verified. As in: we're the ones who can't quite keep up.
You can feed it the Hodge Conjecture for all I care,
the current algorithms are a joke and without real breakthroughs your just generating left to right text with billions in hardware.
Yes, yes. We’ve all seen the same screenshots. Very funny.
Those of us who don’t base our technical understandings on memes are well aware of the tooling at the disposal of all modern reasoning models gives them the capability to do such things.
It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity. And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt. Most of the cost is drilling wells, liquifying gas, shipping it, unloading it, etc. All those other costs are much lower because the generators only run a small fraction of the time.
If you go to https://winderful.uk and set the date range to a year, you can get a sense of how many long dips there are.
> It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity.
The expected load factor for offshore wind power is around 50%. Much better than onshore wind (~35%) but still far from perfect. You can compensate some part of it by installing more power than what you need, but then you must pay for the unused capacity (£1.5B paid last year).
> And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
A day maybe, but in winter night last up to 16 hours. And wind droughts can last more than two weeks.
> But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt
But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Renewable are an important leverage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also really challenging to work with, far from the simplistic view people can have on the internet.
> But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Gas peaker plants are extremely flexible and fast to turn on and off. That's the style that will fill the gap until batteries (or whatever else) takes over the last ~10%.
It's possible to navigate without being able to measure your longitude. Like if you're looking for an island, you should first navigate to the correct latitude and then sail along that latitude until you hit the island. The route is longer, obviously. But that's what you should do if your chronometers disagree.
My conclusion is that microkernels offer some protection from random reboots, but not much against hacking
Say the USB system runs in its own isolated process. Great, but if someone pwns the USB process they can change disk contents, intercept and inject keystrokes, etc. You can usually leverage that into a whole system compromise.
Same with most subsystems: GPU, network, file system process compromises are all easily leveraged to pwn the whole system.
Given that inside information makes prediction markets more accurate, why do you believe it doesn't make stock markets more accurate?
If, say, Enron insiders could've shorted their own stock, that would have improved accuracy and thereby diverted more funding to more productive enterprises.
I guess there could be second-order effects when insiders can actually change the outcome, which is why athletes aren't allowed to bet on their own games.
> I guess there could be second-order effects when insiders can actually change the outcome
You don't need to guess. That's exactly why it's illegal: It creates bad incentives, similarly to e.g. taking out a life insurance policy on a random person you have no financial dependence on.
> Given that inside information makes prediction markets more accurate, why do you believe it doesn't make stock markets more accurate?
He didn't say that it doesn't. It obviously does make stock markets more accurate.
But it tends to drive down the total amount of money available to be invested in stocks, which is compatible with the claim that it makes the market worse at funding productive enterprises.
> But it tends to drive down the total amount of money available to be invested in stocks
That seems like a big claim. For most market participants, there's always a counterparty that's so much more sophisticated that it doesn't make a difference if they're an insider or not.
Nations have a tipping point where the violent minority can take power if there are enough of them. "Enough" might be only 10%. So a nation with 10% violent people is violent, while a nation with 9% violent people is peaceful.
It would be very hard to notice the difference between 10% and 9% by just meeting people. You'd have to meet and evaluate 1000s to measure it accurately enough. But you sure do notice the difference as a neighboring country when the tanks roll in.
So you do sometimes have to say things about nations despite it only reflecting a statistically small difference in people.
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