Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid ā welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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 peopleās work as their own.
One of OpenAIās 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 OpenAIās 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.
They want to sell the claim that theyāve āachieved AGIā. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of āthe computer talks back to youā, 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 itāll get them arXiv posts.
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