> The Wednesday evening statement from OpenAI was more emphatic: “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.”
> The statement added, “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”
It's great to hear that they've investigated and concluded there was zero change Tristan's prompts made it into training data for the model that solved NS.
It would have been better for them to have done this before they announced the NS solution, so that two days' worth of misinformation would not have spread wildly.
This is a tragic story. But it is also a story about the lengths that parents in China will go to improve the quality of life for their only child or to "save face" to their social circle about how their child is performing relative to others.
It's quite tragic that they felt the need to lean into this treatment and quite tragic that they were led on. Just a sad story all around.
It’s been ended officially but due to social pressures to “put all your resources into one child” as the parents were accustomed to, having just one child is still a strong cultural factor. The CCP can’t just flip a switch and suddenly the whole culture aligns with having many children.
In fact, China fertility rare went down no lower than 1.5 during the one-child policy. In 2024 however, it was 1.03 child/woman, and last year it sank to less than 1 child per woman.
But of course there are huge disparities between cities and rural areas.
Given that everything in the book is public information, it's hard to argue that any of this is strictly _illegal_, given the First Amendment. But it's definitely distasteful to write a book about a living individual without their consent (even though this does happen all the time; technically Wikipedia does this too).
Though that does raise an interesting point: what's the difference between writing a book about someone and asking ChatGPT "Tell me the biography of X"? It's the historical meaning and prestige of saying "I wrote a book", even though with Amazon, anyone can write a book and self-publish it.
> Eamon Duede, a philosopher of science at Purdue University and one of the authors of a paper called “Why Slop Matters,” said A.I. brought joy to people who wanted to create something that very few other people would find interesting — like images of their friends in historical scenes.
> “People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort,” he said. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find “a bunch of barriers removed.”
I think there needs to be a different frame with which to analyze this scenario. Yes, it's distasteful to sell a book about a living person without their consent. But who are we to deny people the enjoyment of entertaining themselves by researching, brainstorming, and publishing a document/report/book, whatever you want to call it?
I'm glad the author mentioned it in the article, but it's definitely a different world now.
> But it's definitely distasteful to write a book about a living individual without their consent (even though this does happen all the time; technically Wikipedia does this too).
I do wonder about what would happen if the LLM were to hallucinate negative facts about the person.
Like, if some asshat vibe-wrote a biography about me that claimed that I once kicked a sack full of puppies as a child, would I be able to sue the "author" for defamation? At least, would it even be worth it to pursue?
AI still images don't require a time investment from the viewer. Text and video slop is literally wasting hours of life from those who don't realize what they are consuming is devoid of redeeming value.
c'mon, you're Carlyle, a trusted institution for financial advice! How can I trust what you're saying if the AI-generated text is so blatantly obvious?
Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation? I don't know whether this was AI generated or not, but an online tool claiming it's AI generated doesn't sway my opinion much. Are there any studies showing that Pangram's tool is well calibrated for this type of article? If not, what makes you trust it?
(I'm not sure why it was marked that way, but I vouched to bring your comment back from auto-dead. I glanced at your comment history, but don't see any clear reason for this.)
I only went to Pangram because I read through the essay and could not help but notice the Claude-like sentence structure and AI-isms in it, which distracted me and completely made me distrust the thesis of the piece.
My understanding is that Pangram is the best out of all of the AI detectors and if there is a better one I'm happy to switch to it. And it's easier to point to them than to give explicit sentences and examples about why it reads so AI-generated (and since you want it, it's these sentences in particular: "The message was unambiguous: energy is finite, security is earned, and comfort has a cost.", "That template is being applied again today — and markets have accepted it.", "One country never made the West’s mistake.", etc.)
Reading through it again, there are so many emdashes. And don't get me wrong, I was a liberal user of emdashes before AI! But just like, if your job is to communicate your thoughts to a wide audience at least respect their intelligence enough and not rely on crutches just to get an article out against a deadline.
To me these look like professional writing, and I've seen worse LLM'isms. I am with some people in that I don't usually want to read pieces where GenAI was involved. But this is one of the cases where I wouldn't want the remedy to be a life of constant purity tests and suspicion. There has been enough of that in contemporary culture. I want to trust people and let them be by default. I mean, I don't want writers to specifically memorize current LLM'isms in order to avoid them: or worse, to prompt an LLM to strip them. I believe from experience than GenAI texts have secondary bad characteristics, mainly being bland in style and thought, and often going nowhere, like mandatory student papers. This should be enough to bury or criticize them on merits more often than not.
I do see myself treating slightly broken grammar, typos as a slightly positive signal in writing in the recent years. I also see that this is messed up - I'd like to respect someone in kind if they put care in writing - and easy to fake if anybody wants to, with an LLM. If you do strongly suspect GenAI writing, I mean it's fair if a sincere opinion, but I'm tired of having those as top comments with a whole response tree. Ironically contributing to that now.
It’s either heavily AI written or the authors style has been heavily influenced by LLM writing. That said, using LLMs when writing does not mean the article is not informative, thought provoking, or relevant. An idea fleshed out in prose by an AI is not the same as AI generated content. But it is lazy writing.
How do we create an environment that incentivizes human writers to focus on their craft instead of “productivity”?
Thats maybe one of the more pressing issues of our time.
Personally, at first I thought these sorts of tools were dumb and wouldn't really work, but I think it works because it just isn't designed to be "adversarial". If you want your AI to trick Pangram, you can make an AI to trick Pangram. It just catches people who are cutting and pasting from the AIs without putting any more effort into hiding it.
While I am quite skeptical of the claims linked above, that link does indeed cover the FNR at the FPR of 0.005, and finds it broadly to be on the same order of magnitude, i.e. also below 0.005.
If the FPR is very low, the FNR rate doesn't really matter if you get a positive result (unless the pre-test probability is very low, which is not the case here)
This has the same energy as people who don't care if controversial images in social media are AI generated, as long as they're engaging.
It makes a huge difference if the writing was manual or automated. LLMs generate verbose, generic writing, and ideas that could be concisely expressed in a sentence inflate to entire paragraphs. It's disrespectful to readers when the author saves a couple of hours by wasting thousands of their readers.
I wasted some time trying to get a sense of the content, to "judge it on its merit". It is a total slop. And if i knew beforehand that it is AI, i'd have spent much less time as the first short look would have confirmed that it is slop.
Article from a trusted organization is supposed to be grounded in real-life events and filtered through their specific area of expertise. They bet their reputation on it, at least in theory. Current agents have none of that, and you can't trust their output to the same extent in practice. Too much recognizable slop in the article suggests high degree of autonomy of the agent that has been used, and raises doubts about trusting the entire article. It might be the valid opinion of the author rephrased by the model, but you can't tell as it obscures actual intent and the amount of real life data.
You can absolutely level this claim against Tesla too. When deliveries dropped a year ago, the stock price didn't go down. Tesla's stock is disconnected from the fundamentals and every stock investor today knows this.
Why would SpaceX be any different? If anything it would be even more disconnected from the fundamentals than Tesla is, given how much more control it gives Elon.
SpaceX stock is a bet on Elon, full stop. It has nothing to do with space, data centers, AI, or whatever technology they're currently working on; it's a bet that Elon will figure something out.
(and if you need any example of this, just look at Twitter--he engineered an exit for his X shareholders at a higher valuation [at the expense of SpaceX, but a positive exit nonetheless])
Yeah you can’t go into this with any expectations or later complaints. Everyone knows at this point that he’s going to do whatever the fuck he wants. If you give him money, that’s what it’s for.
I say this entirely neutrally. Some people want to invest in that—and he’s made a boatload of money for those who have thus far!—while others find it insane.
If you have ETFs or index tracking funds in your 401k you're going to buy it. In fact, you'll buy more of it than is going on sale. Since they only need to issue 5% of the stock for it to show up as a 20% market cap in the QQQ index and tracking funds own over 20% of the market, they pretty much have to buy all the shares. Welcome to market manipulation 101.
I 100% agree SpaceX (and Tesla) is a bet on Elon, completely divorced from the fundamentals. But I don't think people realize just how risky this is.
Tesla is only one administration change away from going bankrupt. Ask yourself what would happen to Tesla if BYD could freely import cars.
This might not even take an administration change. Elon very famously had a public falling out with Donald Trump, going so far as to call the sitting president of the United States a pedophile, basically [1]. Now, as a Tesla investor, what to make of this? Elon is technically risking the entire company on a childish outburst.
SpaceX at least has some competitive advantages. Falcon 9 as a launch system is unmatched. Nobody can currently compete with the track record and cost per launch (factoring in booster reuse). That may change but the next company has to compete with the Falcon 9 and develop a proven track record. Also, SpaceX is American so it has guaranteed business from the US government for national security reasons.
But, space operations are a rounding error in the valuation model for SpaceX. All of the AI stuff is bullshit, basically, particularly space-based data centers. STarlink is interesting but is dependent on Starship and will have to compete with 5G operators.
I really don't see how you can be sure of that. Who would want to live in a steel cave for their entire life? Anything we need from Mars could be extracted with automated machinery.
He is not popular. I am sort of reminded of folks from hollywood or tech who collide with politics... and not everybody becomes ronald reagan.
Also, someone doesn't get to be the richest man without controversy.
But controversial or not, I think he has been a net positive.
Would we so profoundly have electric cars if tesla hadn't shaken the status quo? Sure, now ford has cancelled the lightning, but they now have people who know about EV technology deep within their stodgy ICE stronghold.
Right now there are 14,000+ satellites in earth orbit, 11,000+ are from the US, and 10,000+ of them are from spacex.
By any objective measure, he has figured stuff out. And he has shaken things up.
Lots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!
I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works, sticks, and starts to grow.
In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk about the things they launch that successfully grow!
OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it was.
All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses innovation by making future launches less likely.
People are much more willing to give the benefit of the doubt on things like that when the flagbearers of your industry aren't running around sucking all of the oxygen out of the system and telling people things are "solved": that your product will obsolete them in the next 6-12 months.
We get it. They say that stuff to raise money, make sales and keep the party going. But don't expect too much sympathy when the strategy falters a bit.
Sora was losing 15M a day and it was running at least 3 months, so that's a total 1.3 Billion. That's a pretty expensive experiment. It sounds like a company with lots of VC to burn and no discipline. Even Jensen Huang accused them of lack of discipline in business approach.
Yeah. $1.3B isn't scrappy startup pivots, it's the sort of money Google/Meta/Microsoft/Yahoo/Salesforce burn on strategic acquisitions. And those entities absolutely get and deserve the sneers when they "sunset" the product 6-18 months later having concluded that it wasn't even showing enough signs of being a market they should bother with keeping the lights on.
At least Sora was novel and technically impressive, I guess.
Ah, but when you're little, if each misstep annoys a few early users who hit a dead-end with your project, the longer-term reputational damage is trivial. You've still got 99.999% of the TAM (total addressable market) that is ready to be charmed by something new, with no negative vibes in their mind.
As you get bigger, serious numbers of people get annoyed at dealing with a company that keeps inviting us into the Roach Motel of doomed products and features. Big case in point was Google's spree, a few years back, in terms of launching big new services/features that soon afterward got shut down. Great training ground for ambitious PMs; miserable user experience.
Somewhere between the death of Google+ and the demise of Google Hangouts, even folks like me began thinking: Why should I engage with new Google stuff if it's likely to be blown up in a few years, leaving me with buried IP from whatever I tried to do?
> When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work!
When you announce a post money valuation of $852 billion, you should probably be a bit better at figuring out what works, though. You're not a scrappy startup any more, even if you like cosplaying as one.
I'm not sure your criticism is quite fair. I think everyone here is willing to cut more slack to the underdog. But when your company represents an outsized chunk of the digital economy and employs 10k+ people, and only then says "sooo, let's try to build some sort of a profitable product here", I can see why people are rolling their eyes.
OpenAI also burned a lot of goodwill by pretending to be a nonprofit foundation focused on the betterment of mankind and then executing one of the most spectacular rugpulls in modern history. So yeah, people will be giving them a hard time even if it turns out that the valuation is justified.
Companies with non-stupid people can still do stupid things.
I think the issue with the experimentation is that they still don't have an obvious golden goose yet. Google has been able to fuck around with experiments because search/ads are always still there to carry the team and provide an infinite money spigot, even if the experiments mostly fail. But OpenAI doesn't really have an equivalent for that.
Or perhaps they lucked into chatGPT and the true prowess of the product function is being laid bare. They've had many failed projects now: that shopping stuff, a web browser, Sora.. the success they are having from Codex wasn't an original idea but a classic-case of copying. Have they run out of steam?
Very much possible. What has come out of Meta organically besides Facebook? Its valuation comes predominantly from the assets they acquired + investments yet to be made that build on the acquired assets.
Google is similarly iffy with product development. OAI is better still, marginally, in terms of delivering a more polished experience.
Also I do regard them stupid, simply because they are not following wisdom that was shared decades ago by someone with an incredible batting average when it comes to innovation: start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.
Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!
They have infinite amounts of investor money to burn and no obvious way forward. TFA's line about "spaghetti at the wall" pretty much summed up what happens in that situation.
And in terms of "the people who work there aren't stupid", you can have technically talented people who are very good at their specific thing and hopeless at anything else, a friend of mine once summed it up as "the dumbest smart people I ever met". This is why you need skilled management to let them do their thing but also steer them in the right direction as they're doing it. From the descriptions of OpenAI it's kinda rudderless apart from the one-man hype machine at the top.
They very nearly gave Elon Musk a controlling interest in the company. Their justification for not doing so was entirely vibes based. "Stupid" is a broad categorization, someone can be smart in some areas and do dumb things. You shouldn't let your personal appraisal for someones talent color the actual results they produce.
Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago.
Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!
I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.
So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
Interesting, because I’d choose not to fly with an entire carrier because they have chosen to implement Starlink and support a Nazi pedophile, but horses for courses.
> The statement added, “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”
It's great to hear that they've investigated and concluded there was zero change Tristan's prompts made it into training data for the model that solved NS.
It would have been better for them to have done this before they announced the NS solution, so that two days' worth of misinformation would not have spread wildly.
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