So what we've got is a search engine that's almost as good as Google used to be (not as good because sometimes it just hallucinates the results) while using a hell of a lot more energy than normal Google search does. Luckily, there are search engines out there that are as good as Google used to be without all the ads, and are not using so much energy to do it. So what exactly is the point of a substandard search engine that uses far too much energy?

I would place a bet that they already do.

As per the article, they are setting up a licensing system before resuming exports. I would guess that this licensing system will be intended to prevent them being sold on to the USA, with any instances of this being grounds for license revocation. I would not expect this to take very long to set up, but perhaps a slight delay is intended to focus minds and dissuade other Countries from allowing them to be sold on to the USA.

'The System' is specifically designed to ensure this. All those built-in checks and balances designed to prevent one rogue element destroying the System through Extremism work precisely by giving those two Parties the bulk of the power, and to make it a waste of a vote to vote for anyone else. That's their purpose.

Most people think of this as a good thing, and if your System is working effectively then it is. You don't want wild swings in policy every few years, because even if a rogue actor with nefarious intentions doesn't get control those swings will shake your Society apart anyway. A System without those checks and balances wouldn't survive 100 yewars, never mind the nearly 250 the USA has lasted so far.

The problem arises when the System in place is not working. Those checks and balances that have kept it together for so long work to prevent any necessary changes as well as unwanted changes. There needs to be an effective way to make the changes needed without breaking the checks and balances. Unfortunately I don't think the USA has that, and it's problems have got worse over the last 50 or so years without anyone managing to make the necessary changes. Now those problems look like they are going to break the checks and balances, and with them the 250 year old System. What will replace it is anyone's guess at this point.

In short, the voters are only doing what they are supposed to do within the System they live. The System for keeping them in line and voting for the 2-Party System includes misinformation and propaganda in it's toolkit. People en masse have inertia, especially when they news and education systems are designed to feed that inertia. It's very difficult to break out of the miindset you've been conditioned into, and there is unlkely to be enough doing so to break the System. Those few with influence who have done so are never enough against the weight of Establishment-think arrayed against them.

Much as I despise Trump, in a lot of ways he's right. The system urgently needs drastic changes if it's to survive, It was rigged from the start, and that rigging is what will destroy it. I just don't think Trump intends to replace it with anything better,rather with a aworse, even less Free system than the one Americans have been conned into calling Freedom over the last 250 years.

You and the first reply to you are conflating different things. Yes, there is a whole load of corruption going on, pretty much all of it much more corrupt than this specific example. Money paid to Tesla or Starlink, while all involving Musk, is not connected to this specific bit of corruption in any other way. So we have numerous examples of contracts being given directly to Musk Companies, often when they aren't the best for the job. Blatant and obvious corruption. Whereas here, we have NASA explicitly confirming, in writing, something that everyone knew anyway, that when Starship works NASA will pay to use it.

No money has been paid to SpaceX in this case. No money has even been promised that wouldn't have been forthcoming regardless of Musk's involvement in the Government. All that's happened is that NASA has in effect given a guarantee to any potential investors that there will be a return on that investment, provided SpaceX can deliver a working Starship. That was already a given, this just makes due diligence a little easier by explicitly guaranteeing sales when the product is ready.

So element of corruption, in that this guarantee was only given because Musk is involved in the Government and probably wouldn't be given to any other Company in the process of developing a launch vehicle. They would be expected to get it working before it's use was specifically guaranteed.

I was not directly commenting on all the other corruption Musk is a beneficiary of, although I alluded to it when I said that this is minor compared to the other, far worse, corruption occurring. I would expect techie types to understand scope a little better than you've shown here. Your 'tsunami of corruption' is outside the scope of my 'element of corruption' comment.

This is a little unfair. SpaceX is not some random person off the street, they already provide this service for NASA with different vehicles. In effect this is just stating the bleeding obvious. IF SpaceX get it to work effectively then NASA will use it for launches. It's mostly pointless to even say that, it's simply a given. I doubt anyone doubted that for a second.

However, there is an element of corruption here, albeit a very small one in the scale of all the other corruption going on. Musk has financial issues. Tesla's share price is sinking and their sales are going down. It's unlikely that this will reverse any time soon, and may even lead to bankruptcy. Musk's personal credit rating, and those of his Companies, will have taken a hit from this. People will be much less willing to either lend him money or invest in his ventures. SpaceX may not be able to fund this vehicle to a working state because of this. So he gets NASA to state explicitly what everyone already knows implicitly, that they will use this rocket when it works. This should help to improve SpaceX's credit rating at least a little.

It's not really necessary, it probably wouldn't have happened if Musk wasn't involved in the Government. It's a minor form of kickback Musk gained through backing Trump. So it is corrupt to an extent. But it's only minor corruption compared with all the rest of the corruption going on right now.

Oh, I see. You've come up with one counter example and extrapolated that for all tests everywhere. Great. It's sunny today, so I guess it must be sunny here every single day, since one example covers every possibility. And even in your one example, you have made a fundamental error. When a student takes a second, third or even five hundredth SAT they are not retaking the exact same test. They are given different questions. When these LLMs are tested they are tested on the eaxct same questions that they failed last time, and have now been specifically trained to get right. This is an entirely different thing to retaking a type of exam that you fiailed the first time. If I were given the exact same test twice I would expect to get 100% the second time.

And yes, computers are very good at doing calculations. It doesn't require an LLM for this, we've had pocket calculators since 1972. An LLM has access to the calculator function on the computer, and yet they still sometimes get the calculations wrong. And getting the calculations right has many times been reported by these companies as passing a Math Olympiad, when the difficult bit was done in the prompt designing by a human. This is exactly what they have done.

That's complete nonsense. The mistake you've made is that you have assumed that people get to retake tests over and over again until they get it right. In most cases they don't, they get one or at most two resits. And even then the fact that they required a resit is recorded. They don't get to keep trying until they pass no matter how many attempts that takes.

>p> 'AI' however does, at least in the internal Company tests. This is why the results published by these Companies is vastly different to the results published by external benchmarkers, who don't give the 'AI' multiple tries. And not only do these Companies give them multiple tries, they often even deliberatedly cheat. For example, the 'Math Olympiad' tests are first transposed form the natural language they were written in to symbolic language easier for the 'AI' to understand, which is actually the hardest part of the question. Then the 'AI' simply does the calculations, which we all know that computers are very good at. This is then reported as the 'AI' being able to win a Math Olympiad.

Tthere is nothing in it to breach. It's simply a declaration of intent, not a set of constraints. By refusing to sign it The USA and UK have given the impression that they don't care about it. And public criticism will occur anyway if any Company behaves unethically, Chinese Companies included. If regulatory agencies choose not to hold Companies to a set of rules public complaint is mostly irrelevant. Is Trump's Government likely to care any more than China's about that? It's the optics of this that look bad. It's choosing to make your Country look bad on the World stage for no actual gain, and signalling that you don't care about the common good. It's foolish. It's exactly what I would expect of Trump, but the UK joining in disappoints me while not surprising me.

I don't understand. If China sign it but aren't constrained by it, why would the USA be constrained by it if they signed it? It's a non-binding commitment in the first place. All it does is put out a message of intent, a bit of mood music stating the intended direction of travel. It doesn't actually commit anyone to anything. As such, what exactly is the problem with signing it?

Messaging is important even if it's just an empty gesture. It may (or may not) make any AI Companies think twice before acting unethically, but it doesn't set any regulations to stop them doing so. But even the possibility of them thinking twice is better than nothing, and nothing is being committed to, so again what exactly is the problem with signing?

Refusing to sign givers the opposite message, that you don't care at all if Companies act unethically. That too sends out a message, and not a good one.

I wouldn't be surprised if Altman is saying this in order to pave the way for that. Far more money has already been invested in this than will ever be recovered While there are uses for these models, and value will be gained from them in the future, the bulk of the money invested so far will need to be written off first. There is a big crash coming. These Companies are heading for a serious devaluation in the near to medium future. Probably the near future, as the big players in it seem to be selling off their stocks. I wonder why that is? The share prices will shrink to probably 1/4 or 1/3rd at most of the current value, writing off a large part of the money invested. Then it should settle down, the hype will die down and the technology will be used for the uses it's capable of, which is about 10% of what they are currently claiming it's capable of. The likes of Altman need an excuse for why this haircut happens that isn't them lying to investors.

Or Musk, in an attempt to get everyone to use Star Link instead. 'Use our satellites, nobody can cut your cables then'.

He didn't throw it away as such. He put it in a black bin bag and left it in his hall. His girlfriend took it to the dump thinking it was trash. Still pretty stupid of him though.

This raises another point about Bitcoin though which I haven't ever seen discussed. If these coins are now irretrievable, what exactly happens to them? As far as I'm aware they just stay on the blockchain, assigned to a wallet that can never be opened. As Bitcoins are a finite resource, surely the value of these should be taken off the total value of Bitcoin? They are in effect worthless. It's as if you've invested in gold then dropped it into a volcano. How much of the total amount of Bitcoin are in this state, where they can never be redeemed? This isn't the first such case I've heard of. And if this keeps happening, sooner or later all Bitcoin will be in this state.

To properly simulate something it requires an equal or greater amount of resources used by the thing you are simulating. Anything less requires leaving out some factors. If you want to perfectly simulate the Universe you need as much energy as the Universe contains in the first place. If you want to simulate our environment on Earth you need as much or more energy as the Earth uses up. More because there will be wastage in your simulation.

So any simulation run in this way can only be massively imperfect. If they want it to be perfect then they will need to run it in space and use a huge amount of energy, more than is currently available to the whole Human Race. Using 'AI' doesn't change any of this. There was a BBC Sci-Fi series about this a few years ago. This is as doomed to failure as the attempt in that series was.

They're just following America's lead. Facebook, YouTube, et al were there first. The Chinese are just proving better at it. Furthermore, it's not even the Chinese producing the content. It's Westerners, mostly Americans, doing it to themselves and each other. China just provides the means. Remember, guns and Social Media don't kill you, people kill you.