I don't think it's valid to draw broad conclusions from the funding of a new company vs. an industry leader. If AMI builds something that looks impressive considering the funding they got, then they'll get plenty more in the next round.
AI is hands down the most researched topic in CS departments. Of the 10 largest companies (by market cap), only 3 aren't balls-deep in AI R&D. The fastest growing (private or public) companies by revenue are also almost all companies focused primarily on AI (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Scale AI, Nvidia).
And the money isn't even the most important part. It's all about mindshare and collective research time. The architectural concepts can be researched and developed on top of open models, so even individual relatively poor researchers unaffiliated to anything can make breakthroughs.
Even the computing required for the legendary "Attention is all you need" paper could probably be recreated on con-/prosumer hardware in a month's time.
Sure. Still from what he said, your company wants every communication from you stored somewhere, ready for analysis. I don't think an unfiltered data acquisition is good, my interpretation and decision making is also part of my work. Also meetings may share some personal details that I would never tell on the record.
Full transparency has a cost, and we cannot afford it.
Since well before LLMs, people have been talking about "philosophical zombies," hypothetical objects that could emulate human behavior perfectly but had no inner experience.
Some philosophers (one modern example being Kastrup) point out that the only thing we really know is our own conscious experience. We don't go full-on solipsist because other people appear to be built the same way as ourselves, so it's a small jump to think they're conscious as well. Over the past few decades scientists have found that other animals' brains are quite similar to our own in important ways, mammals especially, and are more willing to credit them with consciousness.
But AIs run on completely different hardware with different algorithms. It's entirely possible that they're philosophical zombies. It's a bigger leap to say they're conscious like us, because they're more different from us.
That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.
The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.
People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.
The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
> France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
As always this is a political problem, not a technical or economic one.
The Hollande government put a law on the books that made it illegal to increase nuclear generating capacity beyond the then-installed 63.2 GW
The only way they were even allowed to build/operate the single EPR in Flamanville was to shut down two old reactors in Fessenheim. Even that was questionable, but shutting down more perfectly fine reactors would be economically suicidal.
That law was only rescinded in 2023 (by 2/3 majority), and so after that they began plans for the 14 EPR2s, six now, eight later.
Now that that is in place (and France currently has more electricity than they need), the newest energy strategy calls for massive reductions in solar and wind build outs.
Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there.
Which directly contributes to your later point:
> We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi
I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive!
These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
Military small reactor designs use fuel enriched to levels higher than what we want to be standard in civillian reactors. Second, military nuclear reactors are expensive as hell, and we wouldn't want to power our society with them.
We build nuclear submarines because operationally they are unsurpassed, there's no alternative, and the operational benefits are worth sky-high costs. When it comes to the grid, we have cheaper, more flexible, and faster to deploy options.
> Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China
That's quite a comparison given China's governance and environmental record. China will take your land, poison you, imprison you if you protest and suppress any mention of it on social media or in the press. Of course a business can get a lot done in that environment, is that really something to aspire to?
Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.
china is a single party state. they can order whatever plants they want and they'll get built - regardless of how much they cost, regardless of if the power is economically competitive, with no need for insurance (the state will clean anything up if it comes to that), and with no need to factor in disposal or decommissioning costs. They can do all this and need not worry if the math pencils out long term, or if the bet was wrong vs renewables. They cant get voted out. Yes their buildout is impressive, but its just not a comparable situation in any way to the mostly free market driven west.
Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.
not single party, but the nukes are all majority owned by the state. Which tends to obscure real costs, as there are no insurance, cleanup, and capex loan interest costs. All covered by the state. Which are some of the biggest costs that make private nukes untenable in the west.
State owned NPPs could work like this elsewhere, i just dont see it happening politically. Outside of maybe france or some other euro countries that still believe in state owned industries. The rest of the west is too deep in the "free market and private industry will solve everything" rabbithole.
>That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s.
I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s.
>But this time it's different!
Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
> I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s
What you haven't heard every decade since the 90s is that storage, solar, and wind are cheaper than nuclear. Technology has changed. We're no longer running 486dx or pentiums, we have something better.
>> But this time it's different!
I didn't say that, and I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you think energy technology is not going through a massive disruption, completely different than the 1990s, or 2000s?
> Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
This is very cryptic. Climate change doesn't threaten the industrial supply chains for nuclear, it does threaten the standard cooling sources though, such as rivers and other aquatic ecosystems. "If we don't do it" not sure what the "it" is bet no path leads to cannibalism.
They're not saying today's AI has that kind of power, and they're not saying future superintelligent AI will give you that power. They're saying it will take all power from you, and possibly end you.
If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. Oil companies don't brag about climate change. Tobacco companies don't talk about giving people cancer. If AI companies wanted to talk about how powerful their AI will be, they could easily brag about ending cancer, curing aging, or solving climate change. They're doing a bit of that, but also warning it might get out of control and kill us all. They're getting legislators riled up about things like limiting data centers.
People saying this aren't just company CEOs. It's researchers who've been studying AI alignment for decades, writing peer reviewed papers and doing experiments. It's people like Geoffrey Hinton, who basically invented deep learning and quit his high-paying job at Google so he could talk freely about how dangerous this is.
This idea that it's a marketing stunt is a giant pile of cope, because people don't want to believe that humanity could possibly be this stupid.
Exxon has never bragged to investors that they'd burn so much oil, civilization would collapse from climate change. They've always talked about how great fossil fuels are for the economy and our living standards. It makes no sense to sell apocalypse to investors either.
There are all sorts of things you could do that might make an AI like you, and none of them have more justification than any other. This is not an argument AI firms are making.
I agree that short-term greed is driving investment, but it would drive just as much investment if AI companies were not warning of apocalypse. Probably it would drive even more, because there'd be less risk of regulatory interference, and more future profit to discount into the present.
So why are they making those warnings? It doesn't benefit them. The simplest explanation is that this stuff actually is dangerous, and people who know that are worried.
> So why are they making those warnings? It doesn't benefit them.
Because "we built a chatbot that can generate technical debt" is not a good proposition for investors. "Invest into our AI before it takes over the world and fires all knowledge workers" is.
> The simplest explanation is that this stuff actually is dangerous, and people who know that are worried.
The system also wasn't designed for presidential immunity. Combining that with unlimited federal pardons, we're the wild west permanently, or at least until that decision is overturned.
I suspect cynically that as soon as someone not a republican takes power the presidential immunity will magically evaporate in a burst of bad faith jurisprudence.
Serious question: What exactly do they love America for? I just don’t get it. Seems like in every way that matters to the common people, the US is at best mediocre.
Could it be that they secretly subscribe to a different version of the same mythical exceptionalism as the president they despise?
People love their home sports teams, even when they're losing. They love their kids, even when they're getting mediocre grades in school. It's like that.
You're thinking of nationalism, which is when people think their country is the best one. Real patriotism is loving your country just because it's yours.
I just read Steve Yegge's book Vibe Coding, and he says learning to use AI effectively is a skill of its own, and takes about a year of solid work to get good at it. It will sometimes do a good job and other times make a mess, and he has a lot of tips on how to get good results, but also says a lot of it is just experience and getting a good feel for when it's about to go haywire.
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