Is the single one in a million dimensional one-hot vector special? Why?
If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random. Just the other random values don't get to ask the question...
> If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random
"It was random" in my opinion explains little. If it was sentient, maybe the dice would say "why did I land showing my '6' face? Why me?" and the answer would be many other dice landed showing their '6' faces. Random, but given enough dice rolling you'll get another '6'.
The universe is finite but it's mind-boggingly large. I think Earth is special because a- I was born there, enough said, and b- it has just the right conditions and luck for life to exist. But I don't think it's so special that it's the only planet in the whole mind-boggingly large universe to be this way. There must be other planets/dice rolling out there.
Until we find another such planet we cannot know for certain, but in my opinion it seems unlikely that these conditions don't exist anywhere else but on Earth. Why? Well, because the universe is so large -- the dice pool is very, very large.
Interesting - as I'm in the middle of one of the red blobs on the map and just used my phone with google maps to drive around. It worked fine. All the local services that rely on positioning via phones seemed to work fine as well.
I wonder how the jamming works - is it just for higher altitudes or maybe it only affects GPS and my phone also uses GLONASS or something?
On your phone the GPS is just one input to determine its position. It's most likely also triangulating cell phone towers. Get an app that only shows GPS data and check if you see coordinates jumping around.
Google maps (and your phone's location services) seldom rely only on GPS.
For one, accelerometer-based location has become pretty good. You can usually get by for a few kilometers on the average road.
For two, Google maps is aware that you are driving, and this it sticks to roads, especially ones that are on your itinerary, because of your GPS registers as the middle of a field, it's more likely that you're experiencing GPS issues rather than you driving at 130km/h in a potato field.
Finally, location services are amplified by nearby wifi signals, mapped by google with street view. Your phone can say "here is the Mac address of every wifi network I can see and a rough estimate of my position" and Google's services can very accurately triangulate where you are.
Does accelerometer-based location algorithm integrate the acceleration readings to get the phone displacement? Is it a part of the phone operating systems ?
It tries. Accelerometer-based positioning is best used with camera displacement, which isn't used in Google maps driving mode (though there was? Is? An experimental on-foot mode that showed directions in AR).
the accel-based positioning I'm pretty sure is implemented app-side, not os-side, but I could be mistaken.
Aircraft fly higher, which means they pick up ground radio signals from much further away - both good (ATC communication, ground-based navigation beacons) and bad (intentional jamming).
On the ground, the radio horizon is about 20-40 miles. In the air, the radio horizon is about 200-400 miles.
But that depends on context. If I would ask "please make picture of Nigerian nurse" then the probability should be overwhelmingly black. If I ask for "picture of Finnish nurse" then it should be almost always a white person.
That probably can be done and may work well already, not sure.
But the harder problem is that since I'm from a country where at least 99% of nurses are white people, then for me it's really natural to expect a picture of a nurse to be a white person by default.
But for a person that's from China, a picture of a nurse is probably expected to be of a chinese person!
But if course the model has no idea who I am.
So, yeah, this seems like a pretty intractable problem to just DWIM. Then again, the whole AI thingie was an intractable problem three years ago, so...
I guess if Google provided the model with the same information if uses to target ads then this would be pretty much achievable.
However, I am not sure I'd like such personalised model. We have enough bubbles already and they don't do much good. From this perspective LLMs are refreshing by treating everyone the same as of now.
> There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in seeing a hugely fat person and trying to imagine that their nervous system is for some reason acting like they are starving. It's a lot easier to imagine that they just don't have the willpower to resist that extra snack, which is a situation a lot more familiar to most of us. But it seems likely that the further is more correct.
yes, 100% this. Your analogy with scratching the itch is spot on. And you know that the itch that you can't scratch will continue forever until the end of your life. How depressing is that? It's not like running a marathon - with a marathon, it's long and hard, but there is a finish and you can rest after that. With being hungry all the time, there is never a finish. You just gotta keep on running. And running's kinda hard - and if you stop resisting and eat a few big meals, you offset weeks of weight-loss. Losing 100 calories a day for 20 days is hard, but gaining 2000 calories a day is real damn easy, and also feels great!
False premise. Fasting isn't forever, its for a set period of time. Running and fasting are very similar. When running you often feel the urge to stop and give up. You build up the strength over time to say no to that voice. Fasting is a method of short-term saying no to urges. As you learn to say no to that urge, you become better at saying no to that urge. A single prolonged fast can redefine ones relationship with eating. There are lots of reasons to eat, not all of them are the need for nutrition. There are lots of reasons to grab a phone, not all of them are necessary to function/social/work, yet many people feel the urge to pick up there phone 50+ times a day.
Well, thank you for telling me that I have understood my life all wrong.
About 10 years ago I weighed 113kg. I decided to really tackle it hard and not give up. Threw out all the sugar at home and went on a weightwatchers diet.
Over a period of 1.5 years I got my weight down to 97kg. It was very hard. It was a constant battle with hunger and feeling like crap. But I made it! I reached my goal and it was awesome!
So I crossed the finish line, right? No more hunger?
Guess again. I was back to 110kg a few years later. Still hungry.
So yes, please do tell me about how the urges will go away.
No, they do not.
It's a chemical reaction somewhere that in my body is happening with different amounts of components than some other people's body's. It's not a thing that I can wish really hard to change.
For the first 43 years of my life I was kind of always overweight. Not always obese but there were periods. I've also always known that it would be healthier to have less fat, so it was always a thing on my mind.
But, I was also always hungry. Mostly not starving, but just hungry. I could eat a big meal, that made my stomach feel physically full, even painfully so and still have the feeling of hunger.
Of course, I also understood that on pure physics terms it really is calories out vs calories in that makes the difference. So I did try to eat less.
Also, you read and see people eating a salad and at the end saying, "oh, I feel so full". I always tyhought they were lying, because that never happened to me, so I kind of dismissed it as bragging or something.
Now, could I eat less food? Yes, of course, but it's always a struggle. Every day, all day. And if you fail once, that's that week's gains gone. Imagine there's a fly that's buzzing around your face 24/7 and you can't swat it away, you just have to live with it and if you have a bad day and swat it away for just a bit, you get fat.
Some time ago I took ozempic for the first time and that's when I realized that yes, in fact, it is possible to eat a salad and feel satisified and full after that. Even after more than a year on semaglutide I'm still amazed at how little food I actually need. It kind of feels like I should have died by now due to lack of input calories. But I'm feeling great and almost to normal weight now!
For me the change of how I felt was really something I could not even have imagined before, that you could actually not think about food all the time and kindof ignore it and not really get hungry. And eat just a little and feel full. Amazing. But two years ago I could not have imagined that this is possible, as it had never been before.
This of course led to the realization that the opposite is true for some people, who have better regulation of whatever chemical makes you hungry. Apparently there are lots of people for whom feeling hungry after eating a large meal seems impossible. And since this is something they have never experienced, it's not really reasonable to expect them to understand or be able to imagine it. I wasn't able to imagine the reverse!
So yes, it is possible for everyone to lose weight just by commiting. But it is much harder to commit in a specific area for some people than others. Commiting to a lifetime of always being hungry is very very hard over the long term.
>the opposite is true for some people, who have better regulation of whatever chemical makes you hungry. Apparently there are lots of people for whom feeling hungry after eating a large meal seems impossible. And since this is something they have never experienced, it's not really reasonable to expect them to understand or be able to imagine it.
I don't know, I found the idea of "what if I was hungry, but too much instead of too little" pretty easy to wrap my head around I think. I also wouldn't call feeling full necessarily as being the same thing as being well regulated, anorexics can feel full but they're hardly well regulated.
I once knew this fairly average weight bodybuilder that hated fat people with a passion and practiced a strict diet. During one of his many anti fat people rants, he started ranting about how fat people have no discipline, I sort of snapped back at him and pointed out my many struggles with eating and asked him "why it is that you complain that fat people are undisciplined but don't criticise me in the same way when you know I don't have a good diet and struggle to put on weight?" He didn't have a response to that and the conversation awkwardly ended.
For me, it was pretty easy to come to essentially the same conclusion you did from the opposite starting point. That it's possible for everybody to change their weight by committing, but for some people like this bodybuilder they're going to be able to maintain a healthy weight without struggling, and for others it's going to be a slog.
It's those who seemed to control their weight at will I couldn't empathise with, fat people were relatively relatable.
Usually in debates around weight, people focus on the message of counting calories and metabolism, but the psychological aspects are not usually discussed and based on how I felt and what you said, it is a super imprtant important aspect of the puzzle. After all, the feeling of hunger only exists in your head, not in the cells of your stomach.
> Some time ago I took ozempic for the first time and that's when I realized that yes, in fact, it is possible to eat a salad and feel satisified and full after that.
I am currently taking semaglutide, and it's exactly the same.
Previously I suffered a lot with little effect. And everyone was giving me advice how I simply need to stop being lazy. Now I am losing almost 1 kg a week with zero suffering. The difference is not that I suddenly have more willpower; the difference is that I no longer have to spend all of it on fighting my hunger.
(By the way, it is also possible to have an opposite problem. I know a guy who is thin and wants to gain a little more weight, but he can't, because after he eats a little he feels so full that he is unable to eat more.)
If a model generates video in the woods but there is no-one that can see it, does it really generate video?
Seriously, I'm sure it's awesome creating all the papers but the real test is making it possible for people to use the things. Google seems to be massively failing at that.
Is it possible that google will build the next great AI? Of course.
But right now they really really seem to be failing at it. Maybe the core tech in gemini is great. But it's nowhere.
Just as an anecdote, I tried to actually pay google for an AI product they claimed to have launched - the image generation, Imagen 2. And apparently, I can't. Even after tens of e-mails and a call with an account manager, the response is "uh, follow us on twitter and explain why you are good at building AI tools".
Jeez, buying a service is not supposed to be like a job interview. It's supposed to be like buying the same service from OpenAI - enter credit card details and go.
So, the issue with google is that they took the wrong approach - build it in-house at a big company. What a big company has, are lawyers. Very good ones. The job of lawyers is to avoid risk. And they are great at it. However, building these sort of cutting edge services requires taking risk. And you can't really do that at a large company.
This is why Microsoft is winning - they realized that investing into a startup that has no lawyers and is willing to take risk is the right path to quickly getting to the result. This is also why dalle3 and chatgpt4 are available for everyone today. And Geimini ultra isn't.
Does anyone remember Google Video? It was a horrible experience. The upload process was a pain, and I think some approval was needed at some point, or you had to be sponsored by someone already on the service.
Then Google bought Youtube.
In the AI space it's unclear what/who they could buy -- OpenAI being obviously out of reach -- but it's possible they could find a good match.
everyone in this thread agrees google problem is all management and product and that buying a company is just a palliative way of acquihiring a still ungoogled management team. which don't last long, obviously.
you're all just telling each other exactly this in hundreds of different ways.
Anthropic feels very much like google though. It took me 6 months to get access, once I finally did it was only a testing type account that then requires me to talk to sales before they take my credit card.
On the other hand OpenAI has been quick to take money. Mistral too, got an account immediately and able to add billing details and they don’t even have a usage page so I have no idea how much I have burned through.
I just tried their API mistral-medium model for some coding prompts that failed miserably on anything other than gpt-4 and it handled them well. Just anecdotal, didn't so any proper benchmarking.
IIUC their open Mixtral 8x7 maps to the mistral-small model (which while impressive is still behind gpt-4).
I guess they want to keep their best model behind the API for now.
Anyway, I second that Mistral does stand a good chance to compete with openai
Microsoft isn't any better. Competition in this space is dead. Who ever is capable of posing a threat to both these obese rentier parasites will be targeted and obliterated given the cash mountain ranges at their disposal. Quality is not possible when competition is an illusion.
The only way competition in this space can be described as "dead" with all the free-license models bouncing about is that there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for.
That would be the one that MS invested in.
Well, for now at least. At some point one of those free models will best it.
> there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for.
Yes. Perhaps. That said "the model currently worth paying for" isn't the only possible business model or approach to "winning AI." It was a pretty incidental business model that unexpectedly got big.
I'm not convinced this is the final state.
AI models need users. There's having the most users. But, there's also having the right users. This isn't a linear race. Image generation. Language generation. Those work now. They'll get better... but it's still not clear what better enables. Best way to find out is by finding out what current models enable.
IMO, there's a lot more room here for bravery and creativity than beating OpenAI at whatever the race appear to be at this particular moment. The budget necessary to build applications is nothing compared to the scale of strategic investment being made.
Make the LLM chat/email client. Make the LLM project management software. CRM. tech support. All the cheap, obvious stuff.
Once upon a time, Google had a let 1000 flowers bloom approach. They did succeed in launching lots of pretty good products. They did not succeed in turning that tactical success into a strategic business success. That said, the tactic worked.
Why take the risk/effort/etc of winning the race to cloud services? Google have already lost one cloud race to google and amazon. Just build the apps yourselves. Find a framework. Do it. Don't want to run them forever? Then sell them off. Shut them down and leave the space open for startups.
Not when AI agents start doing their own thing, synthesizing their own data to go beyond what humans have conversed. The main thing keeping this from happening is data corruption. I don't know how that will be solved.
The only real competition seems to be Meta, which is another behemoth.
I agree, there are some minions whose valuations have skyrocketed because they happen to also try and compete in this very bubble-y market, but other than that I haven't heard any "those guys' LLM product is great!" comments related to anything other than whatever OpenAI or Meta have made public.
>right now they really really seem to be failing at it. Maybe the core tech in gemini is great. But it's nowhere
I think it's still an open field. Ability to make AIs into products and businesses... that's a lot of the game.
I agree about housing it all inside Google. Not necessarily because lawyers, or even because risk. There are advantages to both in house and outhouse approaches but... Google just isn't that good an in-house.
We do not know, at this point, what are the big businesses opportunities presented by recent AI advances. There's a lot of focus on near-future breakthroughs. IMO, many of the breakthrough products may already be possible to build now.
There's also an innovator's dilemma with the Google search mothership. One obvious area for LLM's is search replacement. "How does adwords benefit?" is not necessarily a question you want to have to answer, if your goal is search-replacement.
Everyone is in AI now and we are just finishing 2023. The next innovation(s) (dilemma(s)) could happen everywhere. Rephrasing Andreessen's quote: "AI is eating the world". This does not mean that we are close (or not) to AGI, it means that capital is flowing towards AI and AI has REAL applications. Just see what happened in Web3 with not so real applications (but uses). In the cybersecurity space I now see cybersecurity + AI, in the Web3 space I now see AI + Web3. It perfectly could be that Google is the next Altavista for AI.
Web3 saw an incredible gold rush in multiple cycles and gigant amounts of money flew to the sector. The Web3 also experienced a gold rush because many incumbents went "magically" rich.
They're behind in selling for now but ahead in research - who is to say that selling access to your AI is really where value and growth will be in the future?
MS is winning clearly, if the Azure $1bn revenue beat is mainly from AI/Copilot they are on track to recoup their OpenAI investment in 10 quarters, likely less.
Google has the ability to build something better than OpenAI but that's not even a certainty
Huh, not sure. I've found Bing chat to be actually useful compared to Google search. For some recent projects, Bing introduced me to a few very useful packages that I wouldn't have known even existed, if I had stuck to Google search. I've only seen Bing fail for my use cases when I drafted queries that I wanted it to fail: for example, asking some esoteric question on how to beat the Burmese 1st mission of Age of Empires in under 10 minutes. In most cases, Bing is actually a good enough replacement for a market research bullshitter, for cases where I'm looking for non-exact data.
Can confirm what the other poster said - it only affects the desire for food and food-related items.
It is absolutely amazing. Before I was basically always hungry, even right after a big meal that left the stomach physically full, the thought of "eh, maybe more food?" was in the back of my mind. Now it's not there and even a small portion makes me feel full.
If anything, the weight loss has made me feel so much better that I have more energy to work on other goals, it definitely hasn't stopped desire for sex or money or success.
The store owner wants to do something nice for people and in your world the best way to handle that is making them jump through months of bureaucracy and probably paying a lot of money to their insurance and for permits and shit?
Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
Right, if that is really true as a blanket statement, then it's an idiotic and short sighted law.
I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye.
According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury?
Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
Is the single one in a million dimensional one-hot vector special? Why?
If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random. Just the other random values don't get to ask the question...