I love the honesty of this opinion. No stupid sweeping statements about AI being not REALLY intelligent. Just poo.

This is false: "Everyone in IT knows that AI is just a Clever Hans pony trick". I mostly know computer scientists and senior software engineers, but I would wager not even a majority of people in IT have such a stupid opinion.

there are inexpensive insulated, lockable cat doors, in case you don't mind cutting a hole in your door.

@bob_jenkins What you've described is indeed standard, at least for proprietary models. But their advancement will be more than that. They'll have implemented a trick for improving system 2 reasoning that is more low-level and less adhoc than the techniques used to improve tool use (see section 4.3 of llama 3.1 paper). It won't be THE trick though.

There can be multiple more-than-incremental advancements (mini breakthroughs) between now and when they can "imbue actual intelligence".

@Baron_Yam If strawberry is based on Quiet-STaR (Stanford), there's a better explanation of your observations than "bullshit": the new trick for improving deliberate reasoning is still very, very expensive. In Quiet-STaR, the model learns to use a scratchpad by gradient descent (not in-context learning, not RL; it's not like "think step by step"). The (very big) downside is that for K tokens of scratchpad, it takes K times as long to generate each output token. They've probably found ways to improve on that, but I imagine it is still very expensive.

You haven't seen enough human doctor incompetence. It's a shame there hasn't been as much money put into AI doctors as there has for AI drivers. There's so much more room for improvement.

Why can't cloud computing spot instance prices absorb the excess supply? There's plenty of opportunistic compute demand, e.g. from crypto miners.

I can tell you this happens all the time. It's well known amongst third party sellers. The accuser doesn't even need to buy your product or offer a lick of proof. You lose the ability to sell a certain brand, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's the easiest and legally safest way of handling complaints, and Amazon know they can treat 3rd party sellers like shit because sellers learn that Amazon sales volume (and sometimes prices!) is so much higher than anywhere else that it's still worth it. I don't know how often this leads to account bans. But it's consistent with my model of stupid Amazon policies that they autoban sellers after N bullshit counterfeit complaints.

Whoever wrote the PR report did fine. It's quite common for computer scientists, especially theory-leaning academics, to use the word "binary" loosely to refer to any small-base discrete encoding, since the difference between using a base 2 and a base k encoding, for any fixed non-huge k, almost never has significant theoretical repercussions.

ChatGPT with gpt4 (paid) gets your question correct. Yes, -2 is one of the square roots of 4. The term "square root" often refers to the principal square root, which is always non-negative, so for 4 the principal square root is 2. But 4 does have two square roots: 2 and -2, because (-2) * (-2) equals 4, just as 2 * 2 equals 4.

You bring up a good point, but there is an equally good response: The cost of selling on Amazon is higher than on other platforms, for example Ebay. Amazon has forced free returns that are easily and often abused (and generally, more pro-buyer policies across the board), higher sales fees, ridiculously pro-accuser anti-counterfeit policies (often abused by competitors), highly inconsistent (buggy) within-Amazon pricing controls, inconsistent "gating"... I could go on and on. You wouldn't believe what a mess their third party seller system is unless you've tried it or worked for Amazon (I've done both). Usually you can get problems resolved by a phone call, or several phone calls, but often it is just too time consuming to justify. Just yesterday my partner complained that they lost her FBA inventory. There might be a way to prove it and get compensated, but it probably won't be worth the time cost. Customer service reps want to help, but I've heard they are overworked and poorly incentivized due to Amazon's naive productivity tracking of them (not verified; I didn't work in Amazon retail). Now you might be thinking, why would any third party seller put up with this? There is one answer: volume. For two reasons, you can make more sales on Amazon than any other platform: their market dominance, and FBA. None of what I've said is controversial amongst third party sellers. Despite all the frustration, most of them, including my partner, are willing to eat shit as long as the sales are good. The solution most third party sellers dream of is not regulation, but rather a competitor with a better (i.e. less buggy and frustrating) sales platform.

...has always been a better, more principled service. But they spent less on marketing, and were honest and nuanced about their claims.