Looms are for weaving. If you try to get workers to sew with their looms it could be dangerous, maybe it rips their hands off, and then how will you get rid of the pile of detached hands? You'll have to flush them down the hand sewer. Also: Jacquard.
Elon wanted X to be a universal app like WeChat. Communication, payment, government services (and probably one-shop stop for user surveillance)... Wahey, looking forward to Grokbot telling its users "we logged in to your bank account and moved all your money to BankX, it's got the best interest rate!"
The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists.
I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.
Hard to explain the departure of Timnit Gebru if that's the case. Unless you think they actually changed corporate culture so dramatically because of that event...
Meanwhile, the AI critics got an enormous war chest thanks to Vitalic giving them all his dog coins as a joke that ended up being worth almost a billion to fight against AI.
I think Em dashes are fine in fiction where you're listening to someone's train of thought or something sudden happens, but they are really annoying in non-fiction.
I like to think that all the crazy kids running around doing stupid and disruptive things for TikTok views is an early form of AI autonomously inducing mass psychosis.
Stuart J. Russell (he of the AI textbook) claims in Human Compatible that YouTube is already an example of a runaway feedback loop between AI (YouTube's recommender "algorithm") and humanity (viewers, content producers, YouTube staff, and society at large). The AI doesn't have a body, a voice, a conscience, or a purpose yet it is busily working away to maximize engagement by changing people's minds, and in particular by bringing extremism into mainstream discourse.
(It seems to me that framing it this way does seem to absolve YouTube executives of responsibility by making the AI, not them, seem like the agent.)
I've been thinking along similar lines recently. It seems to me that the earlier form of nonhuman intelligence is a corporation (or any group which is not under one individual's control.) Each person following their own incentives can result in emergent behavior where the corporation follows its own incentives. If we can't reliably "align" corporations, and corporations create AI, will AI be aligned as well?
It's not totally disconnected, though. A corporation is constrained by what its members are willing to do. I read that the reason Gemini has fallen behind is because Googlers have been quitting over Google's DoD contract. Conversely, if engineers are willing to work hard for you, you can go far. I suspect this is behind both Anthropic's success and also Tesla/SpaceX.
That’s been a thing since before TikTok even, well before AI in any modern sense of the word, and at this point the stupidness and disruptiveness is considerably reduced from those days.
All these big tech companies are fighting over the basics eventually like power and transformers and don't like to do anything dirty that would hurt their ESG score like getting into any sort of industrial business. Thus, the default is all that stuff that heavily bottlenecks American AI gets done in China.
If you listen to Tesla's recent conference call they are going to making solar panels all the way back to making the silicon ingots and totally vertically integrate. Elon lamented on a previous call that nobody wants to get involved in these primary industries and he has to do it all himself unless he puts his whole supply chain in China. For example, Tesla recently opened a state of the art lithium refinery in Texas cause nobody outside of China does that anymore. He's opening a new fab, because everyone else is too hesitant to expand to meet the capacity he needs.
The antithesis of AI slop is when you've created a unique idea from first principles and AI keeps misunderstanding your idea and spell checking it back to something that's widely popular such that you have to write a whole extra alignment subsystem to check that it hasn't ignored half of what you've wrote in your first principles document and just thought you were talking about something distantly related in its training set.
To work on something truly original in non-fiction in the future against AI pushing everything to the mean of its training set and fighting against that when doing research, as opposed to generating a whole book of slop from familiar ideas, is going to be quite the unrecognized effort of writing those books.
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