PA Semi was kind of an interesting acquisition. The team was definitely very skilled, but there are always gotchas. Before the acquisition happened we were on their receiving end of their dual core PPC and it was not great at all. We had a lot of issues with board bringup, power, and heat. More errata than I've ever seen. We eventually had to went with x86 for the project instead, which was more performant and certainly a lot easier overall at the time.
I had previously encountered some of that team with the SiByte MIPS in an embedded context, I know they were highly skilled, they had tons of pedigree, but PA Semi itself was a strange beast.
The one for me which was quite surprising is how recent grasses are. Grass is 110M or so year old, but grasses as we know them - the plains, covering vast spaces, etc. - the C4 grasses, are all in the 5m-15M years ago period. Imagine an earth with no sprawling grasses.
I found that surprising when I learned about it. Grass did not exist yet at the time of the dinosaurs. In good documentaries, artistic representations of dinosaurs may show them among ferns and trees, that did exist. But if I see grass I will know the team did not do a good job!
The problem is the bullshit asymmetry and engaging in good faith.
AI users aren’t investing actual work and can generate reams if bullshit that puts three burden on others to untangle. And they also aren’t engaging in good faith.
Some discussions are dialectic, where a group is cooperatively reasoning toward a shared truth. In dialectical discussions, good faith is crucial. AI can't participate in dialectical work. Most public discourse is not dialectical, it is rhetorical. The goal is to persuade the audience, not your interlocutor. You aren't "yelling into the void", you're advocating to the jury.
Rhetoric is the model used in debate. Proponents don't expect to change their Opponent's mind, and vice versa. In fact, if your opponent is obstinate (or a non-sentient text generator), it is easier to demonstrate the strength of your position to the gallery.
People reference Brandolini's "bullshit asymmetry principle" but don't differentiate between dialectical and rhetorical contexts. In a rhetorical context, the strategy is to demonstrate to the audience that your interlocutor is generating text with an indifference to truth. You can then pivot, forcing them to defend their method rather than making you debunk their claims.
If you actually have a point to make you should make it. Of course I've actually noticed the actual performance of the 'actual' AI tools we are 'actually' using.
That's not what this is about. Performance is the one thing in computing that has fairly consistently gone up over time. If something is human equivalent today, or some appreciable fraction thereof - which it isn't, not yet, anyway - then you can place a pretty safe bet that in a couple of years it will be faster than that. Model efficiency is under constant development and in a roundabout way I'm pretty happy that it is as bad as it is because I do not think that our societies are ready to absorb the next blow against the structures that we've built. But it most likely will not stay that way because there are several Manhattan level projects under way to bring this about, it is our age's atomic bomb. The only difference is that with the atomic bomb we knew that it was possible, we just didn't know how small you could make one. Unfortunately it turned out to be that yes, you can make them and nicely packaged for delivery by missile, airplane or artillery.
If AGI is a possibility then we may well find it, quite possibly not on the basis of LLMs but it's close enough that lots of people treat it as though we're already there.
Some of this has massively fallen away over the last thirty years. I spent a lot of time on Japanese linguistics, and the really formal tense usage was already falling away even in business context by the mid-1990s. I still find it fun to construct sentences that are practically gramnatical self-abasement but it's not common in actual spoken or written Japanese.
I wonder if it relates to this.
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