And Palantir are… Oh right yeah

I am always bewildered trying to understand how Mayer achieved any level of success. In a just world she would be stuck in a middle management role in a cubicle somewhere. She started by achieving disproportionate success at Google

The other view, more common amongst long-time Googlers, is that Mayer is a publicity-craving, lucky early Googler, whose public persona outstripped her actual authority and power at the company, where she was once a rising star—thanks to a bullying managerial style

Then she took yahoo into a nose dive (love that this link is a yahoo link)

Since then she has pissed around with a bunch of investors money on shitty startups that don’t solve any real problems and apparently now joins the rest of the Fortune 500 CEOs in catching terminal AI Psychosis.

Its absolutely insane that anyone thinks these batshit people are “genius” or gives them money.

Of course not, they’re laying off 60k people because AI can totally do their job better than they can. I mean look at the roaring success of Copilot which is a superior product that sells like hot cakes pls ignore the shady bundling shenanigans that forced it into office packages people already purchased their CEO is a visionary who definitely doesn’t have terminal AI psychosis (hopefully unnecessary /s)

AHH remember the good old days when believing LLMs were conscious got you fired instead of huge multi-billion dollar investments and cult following? Pepperidge farm remembers

Obligatory Anthropic IPO sneer subthread. They are trying to value themselves at $2Tn despite losing $80bn in the first half of the year. Anyone wanna hold my bag?

Holy hell the dumb takes get dumber.

Edit: added the sources I grumpily handwaved about earlier

So immediately after plagiarising a human mathematician’s work, OpenAi dumped 722 unverified preprints on the maths community and assumed that they would be grateful… they’re not. Just because you brute forced something in lean doesn’t mean it actually has any meaning at all. Even the one-shotted Terry Tao had some wise words on this . Many of the preprints have already been proven wrong. OpenAI just extruded a huge pile of bullshit and told people “go dig”.

So the case for ennui is this: A computer program produces plausible sounding answers to your questions so you Eliza yourself. Then, when the computer starts producing volleys of diarrhea, instead of thinking “hmm maybe I was too quick to Eliza myself like that” it’s straight to “I’m sad and depressed because this very smart computer would never produce garbage. It must simply be smarter than me”

That potato farm retirement is looking more and more tempting every day and I’ve got at least 2 decades until I’m pensionable age FML.

Absolutely. They don’t care about anyone except themselves and getting rich. Maybe some of them enter politics with honourable intentions but by the time they get into power they are corrupted to hell

On the one hand

Zomg we need to protect the kids with a new Online Safety Act

Oh the other hand

Yeah if there is a disaster you’re on your own lads. Best start stockpiling toilet rolls!

Absolutely ridiculous. There is no agreed definition for what AI means so anyone could do profiling and data mining on your data - all the stuff GDPR was supposed to protect against - and just say “well I used AI”

So now we still have the bureaucracy and overhead of GDPR and the hostile front ends that ask you in terse language if you are happy for your data to be processed for legitimate interests with none of the actual benefits

FML

“Look the thing is, I am still planning to walk away from Omelas but it turns out they believe DRM is ethically and morally wrong here - I need to spend some time here to focus on my next book ‘Making Children Miserable Might Be Ok in some Circumstances’”

Why the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like “99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios” that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook’s users using muse for example.

Disney character ai experience coming to a theme park near you. Wait in line with 1000 other lonely men and husbands abandoned by their families who went to see space mountain. Admits one at a time - the “ride” lasts 30 seconds but in between each run there’s a 15 minute cleanup time.

Coming soon the Lonnie Boo experience - completely fictional AI character. Any likeness to real people is a coincidence.

Super weird that Dan Luu still hasn’t apologised to Ed yet.

Can we just revoke these peoples’ internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with “Bob, 57, drinks his own piss daily” as a peer.

Nah I think it was earlier than that… Markov chain models!

In fact you could probably do better by building script that pseudo-randomly picks words from categories containing “intelligent sounding” words and “lewd” words and “edgelord” words

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they’re probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.

Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅

For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.

MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin

Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn

Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.

1. 9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.

2. Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.

3. Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.

4. Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.

5. Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.

6. Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.

7. Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.

8. I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.

This is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. “If you really believe, you’ll drink the koolaid”

It’s just such a clichéd remark from AI bros now that I cringe whenever I hear it along with “sure the current model can’t do X but the next one will be able to bro… Just one more model bro”

Saw a matte green Tesla with a late 2024 registration plate and a bumper sticker saying “I bought this before we knew Elon was nuts”

My man, in 2024 musk had already destroyed twitter, was already promoting the far right AfD party in germany, Tommy Robinson in the uk, bribing voters for Trump in swing states, talking about what DOGE would do when Trump won the election… Like why bother with the pretense?

TBF I was visiting the south coast of the UK a few miles away from the recent Balaklava protests over migrants in dinghies so perhaps none of the above qualify as “nuts” from this particular genius’ perspective.

What a tool.