Distilling isn't necessarily easy, there is a huge cottage industry of services middle-manning ChatGPT and Claude to collect huge amounts of data. It is still vastly cheaper than training yourself, but it is certainly not easy or feasible for most organizations. And I'm sure a flock of lawyers would show up if someone in America was found doing it.

That particular quote did stand out to me. I think the counter claim is that if everyone uses software everywhere for everything, there is a very real societal cost for damaged data and if it's hard to detect then there is no way to prevent or measure harm. I think the "invisible hand" free market is showing some serious strain in modern times. People stopped using leaded-gas because it was causing measurable decreases in IQ for generations. I don't care how much you want to save a few dollars if it harms a lot of people and is difficult to measure. Everything else seems like a race to the bottom price so pushing the market in this manner doesn't bother me in the least. If you are running a server with others' data at stake, it seems like an obvious benefit for society on the whole to address the problem rather than serve some cheap datacenter operators.

I didn't know the imperial system was named "standard". Funny, cause its everything but standard both internationally and its definitions (which are not standard as based on SI)

Claiming something isn't standard because it isn't based on SI is entirely circular in the case of weights and measures.

That said I wish the US would bite the bullet and make the switch. Mandating dual labeling on everything would be a great start. Then in 20 years we could narrow it back down to one.

You just need to start teaching kids the metric system. Then when they'll grow up the switch will almost magically happen by itself.

All of my science classes in the rural US from middle school onward were taught entirely in metric, and it had been that way for decades prior. Obviously I'm an adult now, and metric still isn't universal.

The cost is too high. You can't have mph and kmh signs on the same road. So you gotta switch all the signs at once. Mile markers, exit numbers (are miles), distance to signs, all have to change.

I did the math on a comment elsewhere. Just google how many miles of interstate there are, and quadruple it, thats not even approaching how many signs you'd need for just the interstate. Signs run $25-ish, plus installation, which can cost >$1000. At the very least the km markers will need to be installed.

I know you’re being snarky, but the US system is not “imperial” anyway. It’s properly “US Customary” but is often called “US Standard.”

Wasn't it (also?) the Ariane V flight in 1996? Oh, NVM, that was an overflow error.

If someone quits their job, do all their opinions suddenly become suspect? You're kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't. Either you work for the company and you are biased one way, or you quit and now your bias is now suddenly the other way. I've joined and quit many jobs and my opinion may or may not have changed due to my change in status but it is clearly and ad hominem attack.

Not the OP, but:

The point was not that their opinion is suspect, the point was that they are former because people who care about the customer get fired and/or that everyone who cared is former, so nobody who is left cares.

Listening and responding are likely pretty different mental activities

I think the fundamental problem is that training current SOTA AI models is very expensive. If a simple "classical" model can detect them, presumably at much lower algorithmic cost, then why wouldn't the model trainers use these same tools to feed back into their models to improve them at low cost to make them better? It's an arms race. Any cheap pattern can and presumably will be used to retrain if it becomes and effective way to catch AI.

It’s simply not a priority. The labs can do many things. Making text non-LLM is not really that useful. Analogous to Facebook not picking up the obvious $20 bill in front of them. It’s because they’ve got $100 bills at their feet they’re picking up.

Not a priority currently. Selling services to spammers... I mean marketers is still big money and eventually someone will pick it up. If training costs ever drop, then it's one of the first things that will happen.

Because model providers are not optimizing for being indistinguishable from human text, and in fact, there is more value/demand in modeling a different distribution (ie an “agent” capable of producing vast amounts of concrete procedural/planning text interspersed) than there is in modeling the way humans write (ie GPT3).

Also you have to keep in mind that most AI companies are in fact trying to create and offer legitimate products and services to customers doing actually-useful work. They’re not trying to help fly by night hustlers scam people out of crypto or run spam campaigns, and in fact often voluntarily watermark to prevent misuse of their products.

You could argue that’s “just to avoid bad PR” and maybe you’re right, but that’s just another way of saying that it’s more profitable to prioritize other use cases than the deepfake/spam market. Spammers and fraudsters are shitty customers and a major brand risk.

Could also be a problem of the form of P=NP. Validating might be very easy, but writing might be hard. Like the traveling salesman problem. It’s very easy to tell whether a specific path takes N units of time, but it’s hard to figure out if there’s any path, among all possible paths, that takes N units of time.

In part because model vendors specifically prefer when people think that lots of content is produced by their model. The more Claude-like writing appears on the internet, the more signal there is to investors that people are using Claude for a greater number tasks.

It’s an arms race where the AI companies are at an extreme disadvantage due to relative training costs.

I think one thing to point out is "everyone" in this context is probably the broader market, but the stock holdings aren't distributed uniformly. A few large investors could actually be sophisticated and unload a fortune and the rest of the shareholders could still largely still ignore fundamentals and suffer large losses. The broad market can be ignorant and the stock can (and is) be down, both things can be true.

Extra props for tilting thw windmill that is tech behemoths funneling data to government agencies without oversight. Aiming at Amazon is certainly something not to be taken lightly.

Your "tilting at the windmill" phrasing is interesting. I don't get the sense from your tone otherwise that you disapprove of it or think it's pointless.

"Tilting the windmill" is from Don Qixote who famously fights a windmill (which is a bit absurd) so he is courageous but also a bit foolish.

I took it as doing what too many people feels like tilting the windmill. As a society (and frankly in myself on too many issues) I notice way to much "well what can we do" defeatist attitude.

Isn't the phrase "tilting at windmills?"

It comes from Don Quixote, as I recall, and suggests a fruitless effort. A waste of time.

Yeah, def is tiling at windmills, but my point is the same, I took it as them saying the public has taken a defeatist attitude and views it as tilting at windmills but here's a case where it wasn't fruitless effort and we need to view it as inspiration.

Correct, AI will not replathe 3 high-paying watch maker jobs that exist. You are the best kind of correct, technically. But you are distracting from the fact that most people aren't doing anything even remotely physical related in the space that some people posit will be decimated by AI: white-collar jobs where you are a keyboard jockey all day.

If you are using a mechanical watch to keep time (accurately for long) you are doing it wrong