Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid — welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).
The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.
The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic.
You don’t say.
@supersquirrel@lemmy.ca I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial espionage. Although I’ll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so they’re not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.
Also hard to feel like a point for me when that atrocious Meta settlement with the attorney generals that basically locks in profits via regulatory capture just came out…
As someone from the US it feels like a nuclear missile pointed at the fediverse…
Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other people’s work as their own.
One of OpenAI’s math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?
I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public. From what I remember, the Hugging Face incident got a lot more press than any of the math results.
yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that
They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.
And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it’ll get them arXiv posts.