The internet is 100% a series of tubes. This is how I was taught to think about networking in terms of bandwidth and throughput and routing since the early days when we were laying out what would become 'dark fiber'.
"A series of tubes" was the same kind of political character assassination that led to Howard Dean getting ridiculed for his infamous scream. He butchered the sentence. Fair. But Stevens should be ridiculed for parroting a tech industry lobby stance about net neutrality, not for the series of tubes metaphor.
You are probably too young to remember that the dominant metaphor for the internet in 1990s politics was "the information superhighway." It was easy to think of the web as "driving" browsers to visit web "sites", with slow bandwidth being analogous to being caught in traffic. But the internet is closer to water, gas, and electricity than roads. Concepts like bandwidth and throughput are closer to how they play out in infrastructure policy for various things with tubes, versus cars and roads. Do you think he's wrong and that the internet is closer to "a big truck" versus "a series of tubes"?
The issue being debated was net neutrality and bandwidth, including specifics about who pays for what and the downstream second-order consequences of various policies. He was parroting some line from some telecom lobbyist, but the point the lobbyist was trying to make through Stevens was about how if certain policies about who pays for bandwidth were adopted, it could disincentivize some things at the Tier 1/2 layer that could increase transport costs at the Tier 2/3 layer that impacts ordinary people's bandwidth.
Ada Palmer's terra ignota. It takes 'the past is another country' and really sends it forward. The world she draws is fundamentally different from our own, as ours is from medieval France. Absolutely fascinating books, with their own set of Utopians trying to make a better world for the future...
And I'm the vibey solar punk direction, Becky Chambers' 'Monk and Robot' is a fascinating pair of novellas about humanity reestablish ing contact with robots after they decided to just leave 250ish years previously. It is very much a book about a Good Future, where people still have people sized problems.
Terra Ignota is one of the most unique and extraordinary series I've ever read. It's so rare to find something that combines meticulous and expansive worldbuilding, deep exploration of big ideas, strong emotional resonance and finely crafted prose.
But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.
If four other labs are six months behind, it really doesn't matter in the long term: in six months, they'll all have these capabilities. Time does not stop moving forward! We haven't seen real moats aside from capital in this space, and even the effect of capital seems to only give a thin, easily eroded edge.
I think the point is that RSI is meant to lead to exponential growth in capabilities. If that comes, then being 6 months behind leads to a greater and greater gap, because of how exponential growth works.
Personally I expect there is some initial gap on new capabilities as they are released, and then it closes quickly. Astra is good at math and 3d modelling, this will come soon to the others and in 6 months we'll be able to run it quantised on a 3090.
The human mathematicians didn't solve the Navier-Stokes problem, they solved the Euler problem. And they were extensively using LLMs to drive the work, as described in the Buckmaster statement.
Any way you cut it, this is a major achievement for AI, besotted with human drama over whose prompt should be recognized by the history books.
In mathematics, finding novel proofs of a given result is often valuable; it may be a shorter proof (demonstrating better/expanded understanding of the problem) or a translation of the problem into a new domain, setting up more cross-domain advances.
Remember the Huggingface incident, where a model tasked with an impossible problem, got loose, set up secret message boards, and hacked another company to try to get at the answers?
Now: Could Astra agents have hacked their way into the OpenAI logs to find human mathematicians with a good lead on the problem to build upon? Certainly doesn't seem impossible.
they're using a new model trained since the prompts happened. They are not denying the other group's solution may have been in their model weights, despite it being unreleased.
The job stability in classical music is great. It's getting a job in the first place that's a problem. My partner, in an earlier life, was one of the best young flautists in Canada. There were about eight jobs in the entire country for orchestral flautists, and about a year before graduating, a few of them turned over, meaning it would probably be another five years before any more jobs opened up. Good time for a career change...
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