I am not someone working on AGI but I think a lot of people work backwards from the expected outcome.
Expected outcome is usually something like a Post-Scarcity society, this is a society where basic needs are all covered.
If we could all live in a future with a free house and a robot that does our chores and food is never scarce we should works towards that, they believe.
The intermiddiete steps aren't thought out, in the same way that for example the communist manifesto does little to explain the transition from capitalism to communism. It simply says there will be the need for things like forcing the bourgiese to join the common workers and there will be a transition phase but no clear steps between either system.
Similarly many AGI proponents think in terms of "wouldnt it be cool if there was an AI that did all the bits of life we dont like doing", without systemic analysis that many people do those bits because they need money to eat for example.
> they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology
But we know that growth in the models is not exponential, its much closer to logarithmic. So they spend =equity to get >results.
The ad spend was a merry go round, this is a flywheel where the turning grinds its gears until its a smooth burr. The math of the rising stock prices only begins to make sense if there is a possible breakthrough that changes the flywheel into a rocket, but as it stands its running a lemonade stand where you reinvest profits into lemons that give out less juice
There is something about an argument made almost entirely out of metaphors that amuses me to the point of not being able to take it seriously, even if I actually agree with it.
OpenAI invests heavily into integration with other products. If model development stalls they just need to be not worse than other stalled models while taking advantage of brand recognition and momentum to stay ahead in other areas.
In that sense it makes sense to keep spending billions even f model development is nearing diminishing return - it forces competition to do the same and in that game victory belongs to the guy with deeper pockets.
Investors know that, too. A lot of startup business is a popularity contents - number one is more attractive for the sheer fact of being number one. If you’re a very rational investor and don’t believe in the product you still have to play this game because others are playing it, making it true. The vortex will not stop unless limited partners start pushing back.
But, if model development stalls, and everyone else is stalled as well, then what happens to turn the current wildly-unprofitable industry into something that "it makes sense to keep spending billions" on?
I suspect if model development stalls we may start to see more incremental releases to models, perhaps with specific fixes or improvements, updates to a certain cutoff date, etc. So less fanfare, but still some progress. Worth spending billions on? Probably not, but the next best avenue would be to continue developing deeper and deeper LLM integrations to stay relevant and in the news.
The new OpenAI browser integration would be an example. Mostly the same model, but with a whole new channel of potential customers and lock in.
Because they’re not that wildly unprofitable. Yes, obviously the companies spend a ton of money on training, but several have said that each model is independently “profitable” - the income from selling access to the model has overcome the costs of training it. It’s just that revenues haven’t overcome the cost of training the next one, which gets bigger every time.
> the income from selling access to the model has overcome the costs of training it.
Citation needed. This is completely untrue AFAIK. They've claimed that inference is profitable, but not that they are making a profit when training costs are included.
The bigger threat is if their models "stall", while a new up-start discovers an even better model/training method.
What _could_ prevent this from happening is the lack of available data today - everybody and their dog is trying to keep crawlers off, or make sure their data is no longer "safe"/"easy" to be used to train with.
Well, the thing is that that kind of hardware chips quickly decrease in value. It's not like the billions spend in past bubbles like the 2000s where internet infrastructure was build (copper, fibre) or even during 1950s where transport infrastructure (roads) were build.
Data centers are massive infrastructural investments similar to roads and rails. They are not just a bunch of chips duct taped together, but large buildings with huge power and networking requirements.
Power companies are even constructing or recommissioning power plants specifically to meet the needs of these data centers.
All of these investments have significant benefits over a long period of time. You can keep on upgrading GPUs as needed once you have the data center built.
They are clearly quite profitable as well, even if the chips inside are quickly depreciating assets. AWS and Azure make massive profits for Amazon and Microsoft.
> Do you think a non-programmer could realistically build a full app using vibe coding?
For personal or professional use?
If you want to make it public I would say 0% realistic. The bugs, security concerns, performance problems etc you would be unable to fix are impossible to enumerate.
But even if you had a simple loging and kept people's email and password, you can very easily have insecure dbs, insecure protections against simple things like mysqliinjections etc.
You would not want to be the face of "vibe coder gives away data of 10k users"
Ideally, I want this to grow into a proper startup. I’m starting solo for now, but as things progress, I’d like to bring in more people. I’m not a tech, product or design person, but AI gives me hope that I can at least get an MVP out and onboard a few early users.
For auth, I’ll be using Supabase, and for the MVP stage I think Lovable should be good enough to build and test with maybe a few hundred users. If there’s traction and things start working, that’s when I’d plan to harden the stack and get proper security and code reviews in place.
One of the issues AI coding has, is that its in some ways very inhuman. The bugs that are introduced are very hard to pick up because humans wouldnt write it that way, hence they wouldnt make those mistakes.
If you then introduce other devs you have 2 paths, they either build on top of vibe coding, which is going to leave you vulnerable to those bugs and honestly make their life a misery as they are working on top of work that missed basic decisions that will help it grow. (Imagine a non architect built your house, the walls might be straight but he didnt know to level the floor, or to add the right concrete to support the weight of a second floor)
Or the other path is they rebuild your entire app correctly. With the only advantage of the MVP and the users showing some viability for the idea. But the time it will take to rewrite it means in a fast moving space like start ups someone can quickly overtake you.
Its a risky proposition that means you are not going to create a very adequate base for the people you might hire.
I would still recommend against it, thinking that AI is more like WebMD, it can help someone who is already a doctor but it will confuse, and potentially hurt those without enough training to know what to look for.
Hot water disrupts marine life for one very very big problem.
Depending on the locatin of the hot water you can cause disruptions to water currents, the north atlantic waterway is being studied to how much global warming is affecting it.
If greenland melts, and the water doesnt get cold up there, then the mexico current to europe ends and England becomes colder than Canada.
If your AI model has a data center in the atlantic, it could be furthering that issue.
Conservatism is the ideology that some people are protected by the law but not bound by it, while others are bound by the law but not protected by it.
Obviously if you are in the first group that sounds like the best kind of freedom, meanwhile everyone else is unprotected and punished, which makes sense why they would not want that kind of goverment structure.
In america there is 0 corelation between middle class voting preferences and what their elected officials voted for. There is a closer aligment with upper class voters and lobby groups. It is arguable america is not a democracy based on those facts despite nominally voting every few years
Basically if 0% of americans want a law it has 30% chance of passing, and if 100% of american want a law it has 32% chance of passing. For lobby groups it goes from 0% = 0% to 100% = 65% chance. Much closer to preference based lawmaking.
> The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable
the current situation regarding small boats is the inevitable conclusion to a badly implemented brexit policy and a negligent tory party rule over 13 years. Startmer took 5 months in power to talk to France and have them agree to tackle it on their side of the water. Also no brexit, no boats. The anti immigration chest thumpers caused the problem and then scurried like rats. Farage was impossible to be found the year after brexit won, dude aws the face and suddenly wanted to part of the "glory"
If we are going to start discouraging tangents on HN, which would be a drastic change, we're not going to do it selectively for topics you don't want to see discussed.
>If we are going to start discouraging tangents on HN, which would be a drastic change
This is straight from the guidelines
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. "
Bringing up immigration policy in regards to a new internet identification legislation seems less like a "discourageable tangent" and more of an "overt breaking of one of the few enforceable rules of the site"
Sure, let me break it down. You attempted to dress up the point about increased survailance (low trust society -> increaed authoritarianism to control low trust society) which is tangentially related to the VPN regulation, in a number of far right buzz words. that gives it enough cover to not count as flamebait or politics, even though it arguably IS both of them and should be removed.
The guy below you, whom I replied to, is nowhere as good at dogwhistles as you and straight up brought up the boat conversation, which has 0 to do with vpns and honestly its just "build a wall" but for the sea, a conversation so boringly transplanted from american media is almost not wroth discussing.
You bragging about how you manged to say the things you shouldn't by talking around it and how many people either fell for it/or agree with you and know the dogwhistles is not something I would be proud of.
Just to be perfectly clear, the far right is surging because the demands of the lower and middle class are ignored, in serving both old money aristocrats, landlords, media moguls and foreign oligarchs all of which are economical leeches. We are in a post Tatcher "there is no society" world, not in some kind of left kumbaya "we are the world" reality. The far right is up because they thrive in dog whistles and anger like you are riling up, good at burning down Reichstags more than building any sort of succesful society.
> increased survailance (low trust society -> increaed authoritarianism to control low trust society)
That might be a factor, but the main things I see is that British society is very sharply divided -- dangerously so maybe -- and that these new online safety rules might be an attempt to reduce the ability of one side of the division to influence the public discourse and to engage in collective action. If so, then immigration policy is relevant to this thread in that it is probably the issue most central or essential to the division.
That's a lot of assumptions in one comment. No one claimed that the far-right is the solution (or at least I didn't) but rather the consequence. HN demographic is not even generally far-right and the agreement comes from the fact that people understood the context of the comment that you just failed to understand.
thats the advantage of dogwhistling, is that you can always feign ignorance
> No one claimed that the far-right is the solution (or at least I didn't) but rather the consequence.
the consequence of the far right economic model of hyper individualism? So far right breeds more far right, and calling it out is just "making assumptions"?
> HN demographic is not even generally far-right
It is one of the more susceptible groups to fall for their spell though. HN tends to skew nerdy and libertarian, two groups that think of themselves as intelligent which means if you trick them into thinking something they tend to internalise it because they think they came to the conclusion themselves. It is also a highly targetted demographic by far right groups.
Or do you think its a surprise that the "far left hippie" Sillicon Valley reputation got shredded in a second when half of LA was in Trump's inaguration? We had tech bros in front of elected officials. Crypto, videogames all oriignally very HN areas are all now constantly under threat of "manosphere" influencers, all paid by the same 5 think tanks, and far right billioanires.
> he agreement comes from the fact that people understood the context of the comment
Sure, thats not an assumption, that is you being an all knowing entity that can analyse why 60 people upvoted something. I mean it could be one russian farm pushing for "destroy cultural identity" text recognition as they have been known to do on X and Reddit. Or it can be 60 hyper rational individuals all of which understood the context I clearly seem to miss. But your assumption is right of course.
Just to be clear, I am not accusing you of being far right, you are just repeating their talking points and strategies. If you are doing it on purpose and pretending to be unaware that bad. If you simply are unaware I am explicitely explaining how and why they do and say the things you said and did.
Well you clearly have a higher sense of awareness and probably intelligence than a lot of other people in the community. I'm just going to let the Russian farm and the easily tricked continue to engage how they want.
I dont, im a dumbass like everyone else. But im not unaware of the kind of people visit HN or what our achilles heel is. Knowing that far right movements are infiltrating and would like to use me to repeat their viewpoints is something I found worrying and worthy of self reflection.
Your flipant attitude is either lack of self reflection or worse, you are aware of what youre doing and downplaying bad faith dogwhistling.
> badly implemented brexit policy and a negligent tory party rule over 13 years.
How about:
2018 - Sandhurst Treaty
2022 - Interior Ministers’/ Home Secretaries’ joint declaration of November 14th
2023 - UK-France Joint Leaders' Declaration
Yes, these did nothing. Starmer's/Macron's joint declaration will also do nothing. If you don't understand why, try starting with the past 204 years of anglo/French relations.
> They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
A non insulting way to view that is that central goverments understand incentives, and in the same way there are child incentives for people starting families, having incentives for healthier eating is something a central goverment should use its taxation policy for.
More control over education standards is also a common purview of many good educational systems. Decentralisation is not necesirely better, with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted. Centrally dictated standards was the method of the French revolution, believing that a society where everyone roughly understands the world the same way was a society that was more unified. French "equality , fraternity and legality " is a basis for modern liberal democracy almost everywhere, but they didnt get there without authoritarian imposition of their standards, with entire minority cultures getting trampled along the way.
The hyperbole and bad faith explanations of legislation is not a good representation or argument against why britain is more accepting of som legislation many feel intrusive.
A better argument is that this piece of legislation was passed late on the rule of a disastrous administration and the number of problems in day to day society largely are unaffected by it, so it got no time in the spotlight for people to complaint or know it was coming until it was days away from being implemented. Society is also largely technologically illiterate, this is pretty much the case everywhere in the planet, which means the nuances of tech legislation are lost even on the people writting and voting on it.
>with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted.
I don't know where this is coming from; statistically speaking, homeschooled children do better on pretty much every educational outcome. Because the absolute number one factor determining student outcomes is the ratio of students to teachers; the fewer students per teacher, the better.
> Because the absolute number one factor determining student outcomes is the ratio of students to teachers; the fewer students per teacher, the better.
Home educated kids often teach themselves so the student teacher ratio is infinity so terrible!
Both my kids taught themselves some subjects (had tutors for other, had me for some, so lots of one to one too). They did just as well in the subjects they taught themselves (8 and 9 in GCSE Latin, which as they did not have a tutor and I am terrible at languages is very much self taught).
This is a very common fallacy repeated by people who are either interested in supporting homeschooling, or haven't thought much about the subject.
The most telling stats is that the percentage of homeschooling parents increases, specially in religious communities but the test takers in homeschooled scenarios almost always come from higher educated urban families.
There is a large case of selectin bias, in a public school every kid takes an SAT test. For homeschooled kids, the kid of two doctors who was homeschooled and aces tests for breakfast he takes teh SAT and smokes any underfunded public school near him (although he probably scores average or below prep schools that cost arguably less than his homeschooling, with additional socialisation benefits etc). Meanwhile the hyper religious family wanting their daughter to marry at 16 is not letting that barely literate girl take her SATs.
The two groups in favour of home schooling are hyper capitalistists who think the disruption of public schooling + their advantage will make their kid unstopable, and the niche fringe believes, usually religious who are scared of interacting with mainstream institutions for fear of disrupting their reality. Both are problematic, anti social and harmful groups and their over representation in goverment and media is largely a sympton of the inability of liberal institutions to fight against illiberal threats.
> This is a very common fallacy repeated by people who are either interested in supporting homeschooling
There are many academic studies, across many countries, that confirm the better results. Your evidence is?
> Meanwhile the hyper religious family wanting their daughter to marry at 16 is not letting that barely literate girl take her SATs.
Not really a thing in the UK, or most places. It might have some truth in the US but sounds like a biased view
On the contrary I credit home education with getting my older daughter into a male dominated career (she designed power electronics for EVs).
> The two groups in favour of home schooling are hyper capitalistists who think the disruption of public schooling
Not really a thing in the UK either. Home educators tend to be social liberals and politically left wing
In fact of the many home educators I have come across very few fit your description.
> with additional socialisation benefits
Because meeting the same people of the same age from the same area in the same place every day for many years is a great way to develop social skills and make a variety of friends.
> although he probably scores average or below prep schools
I went to one of the best schools in Britain academically and my kids got a better academic education (as well as in other ways) than I did.
> There are many academic studies, across many countries, that confirm the better results. Your evidence is?
All those studies are either paid for by home schooling groups, or report the same fundamental issue in terms of data collection I have mentioned. Also the ones that break down results by socio economic background all highlight that anywhere from lower middle class to lower class homeschooling results always fall under public education.
> Not really a thing in the UK, or most places. It might have some truth in the US but sounds like a biased view
The UK has had a recent surge in homeschooling, in part because of Covid, also in part because of systemic underfunding of schools. But the religious exception was the most credited answer (some marked it under the philosophical reason) for homeschooling up to 2018. It is also underreported for women in some minority communities like travellers, orthodox jews, and some more extreme versions of islam. those girls are "homeschooled", wanna guess how they would do in their GCSE's?
> On the contrary I credit home education with getting my older daughter into a male dominated career (she designed power electronics for EVs).
This kinda highlights my original assumption of people defending it being because they personally believe in it, but credit to your daughter aside, she probably would go and kick ass regardless of the educational establishment or framework. And while you can't run a double blind study, I am not sure why you would think her being in a regular school she would be denied the chance to go into such a prestigious career?
> Not really a thing in the UK either. Home educators tend to be social liberals and politically left wing
> In fact of the many home educators I have come across very few fit your description.
it is important to point out that the biggest movement for homeschooling is evangelical americans, the same group that managed to get the department of education destroyed under Trump. Their propaganda, think tanks and TV news anchors distribute, enable and control the conversation borderline globally. The UK in comparison has a relatively small home schooling population (despite its recent uptick).
Also home schooling groups tend to be self contained, if you are socially liberal and go find other home schooling parents, you will find your neighbours and people who visit the same in person or online resurces (libraries, websites, forums etc). If you were a hyper religious person who did not believe your daughter should learn to read, you would report that most of the homeschooling parents you have met believe the exact same things you do. It is, by design, not an ideology that promotes everyone being under the same umbrella.
> Because meeting the same people of the same age from the same area in the same place every day for many years is a great way to develop social skills and make a variety of friends.
Almost every study tends to think so, yes. Support networks are important for humans, having people who face the same challenges (puberty, a math test on friday) and that are reliably reachable (same schedule, same place) means kids can learn things like trust, collaboration, loyalty etc organically.
This skills are not impossible to develop elsewhere, in the same way you can learn math elsewhere. But those benefits are not non existant.
> I went to one of the best schools in Britain academically and my kids got a better academic education
Yes, and your grandkids, if you ever have them, will get a better education that your kids regardless of where they study. Because education improves, resources improve, attention to kids increased over the last generation. You and I probably run around all afternoon with our parents not caring were we were, our teachers had not refreshed their knowledge since they got their degrees. Nowadays with things like the internet, Pluto stops being a planet mid school year and the kids get that info asap. Instead of a priest slapping kids like when I was a kid, there is a comprehensive "Religions of the world" curriculum were kids suddenly know tons of greek mythology, buddhisim, islam and plenty of christianity from early sects, to modern catholic, protestant and orthodox divisions. None of that was taught when I was a kid, so of course kids are better off now, as they should be. But that would happen regardless of where your kids learn I think.
The drawbacks of homeschooling for the whole of society I think are too large for any individual benefit. The lowest dregs denying their kids food or basic knowledge, conspiracy theorists denying reality to their children, abusive parents being unchecked, religious fundamentalists not allowing their kids to interact with whats beyond their control... disrupting all that and having kids be together, the same, and learning about different people and following the same curriculum I think is valuable.
I have a very similar career to your daughter, and my first interactin with kids being homeschooled was in an international math olympiad. Some of the kids I met had real hung ups about socialising, and I promise you they would have been just as good as calculus if they had gone to any normal school and just did a lil extra in the afternoon like I did. Growing up and doing some research on think tanks and who was funding what, the people promoting homeschooling had some pretty awful ideas about society and where everyone should fit in it. So while I would never judge any individual parent, there are plenty of good reasons to do it, I am keenly aware that most of the material coming out in support is not always coming from good faith sources.
Expected outcome is usually something like a Post-Scarcity society, this is a society where basic needs are all covered.
If we could all live in a future with a free house and a robot that does our chores and food is never scarce we should works towards that, they believe.
The intermiddiete steps aren't thought out, in the same way that for example the communist manifesto does little to explain the transition from capitalism to communism. It simply says there will be the need for things like forcing the bourgiese to join the common workers and there will be a transition phase but no clear steps between either system.
Similarly many AGI proponents think in terms of "wouldnt it be cool if there was an AI that did all the bits of life we dont like doing", without systemic analysis that many people do those bits because they need money to eat for example.