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Submission + - Leak-Proof AI Benchmark Posts Biggest Gain in 20 Years, on One CPU Core (spasim.org)

Baldrson writes: The Hutter Prize for lossless compression of human knowledge has paid out nearly €50,000: its largest advance in 20 years: three entries together cut the record for compressing a 1GB Wikipedia snapshot by nearly 10%: a compression ratio of more than a factor of 10. Every entry ran on a single CPU core, in about 50 hours and under 10GB of RAM, so the gain came from algorithms.

Unlike most AI benchmarks, the prize requires no validation data, so a leak can't inflate a score. The full file is public, and the size of the decompressor counts against the entry, so anything memorized is paid for in bits. Vladimir Ivanov's fx2-cmix-T now holds the record, after earlier 2026 gains by Ibrahim Marcouch and Kaido Orav (cmix-lex) and David Freelan (cmix-obias). Sponsor Marcus Hutter, who advised DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg's 2008 thesis "Machine Super Intelligence," calls it "the largest progress in its 20-year history." With trillions riding on claims of AI progress and data-center power demand, is a leak-proof, energy-limited benchmark the yardstick the industry should be watching?

(Disclosure: the submitter is on the Hutter Prize committee.)

Comment Holy shit, have some self awareness (Score 2) 124

My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.

This doesn't pass the 'would you say the same thing if it wasn't your baby' test.

Comment Re: Which is it? (Score 1) 128

I just wanted to let you know that you have successfully driven me off of /., after some 25 years.

Not just you, obviously, the site has been in steep decline for a long time, but you were such a huge asshole that you managed to be the last straw. So, congrats for that. I won't be back.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment Re:Don't hate the player, hate the game (Score 1) 75

You're right, they could have made that choice. However, they would have priced themselves out of the market, as while they would have gained a small uptick in 'I want a cool Linux computer' sales, they would have faced a massive loss in 'I want a game console' and 'I want a Blu-Ray player' sales, which were the two primary drivers of PS3 sales.

Console price is king. There's a reason Sony's entire console launch presentation for the original PlayStation at E3 in 1995 was, and I quote, '$299.'

You can find it on YouTube, if you're interested.

Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 0) 128

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us?

Not "at the same time". You're conflating what AI can do now with what it will likely be able to do in a year or five, or 20.

Amodei and others are worried about what AI that doesn't yet exist may do, not about what current-generation AI can do. AI is getting better, very quickly, and unless there's some blocking obstacle that no one has been able to identify will at some point become far, far smarter than humans, individually or collectively. So before that happens, we need to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI wants to help us, and wants to do it in the right way.

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