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Drawing from reference is bog standard.

Tracing is a cardinal sin.

People lose careers over not understanding the massive difference.



Why do people still bother with meta and others?

In my community (outside USA), we use local websites and posted bills. There's no magic to it.

>Network effects

If people decide the cost/effort is too high, that will dissipate.

>"Somebody else will"

This amounts to a thought-terminating cliche at this point. You are responsible for your own choices, not what others do. It's the worst cop out, you are claiming no agency.

*royal "you" where applicable.

I find a lot of responses to these stories fiendish. It is not "privileged" to refuse a bad deal. If anything, it is "privileged" to say one has no choice.

Sorry if this comes off as rantish... I find a lot of the conversation around big conglomerates tedious and usually just laden with overtly bad-faith arguments and lazy defeatism. Conversely, love or hate Woolf, surely there is enough respect for simple arts people should find these behaviors abhorrent.


The "someone will" arguments never work for me.

I live in a community (outside USA) where it is common to advertise offline or alternative outlets.

There's no dependence "because others do". That is just defeatism. If people choose en masse to change their habits, the world has to follow suit, imho.


>If people choose en masse to change

This is nearly saying "If people stop murdering each other we won't have murder any more". Well, yea no shit, a tautology is a tautology. The question is how do you elicit social change in an environment that is actively fighting back against you doing so and has a massive amount more information than you do.

One of the key points here is you live outside the US so it's much more likely that your communities are far less digitally integrated and have a much different history of social change and dynamics. For example car culture presents an absolutely massive amount of friction to social change. It literally physically separates us at much larger distances than states that do not have car culture. There is also the fact the modern social media swept over the US first drawing in most of the population long before we recognized the dangers of it. Government agencies and businesses moved a healthy amount of their communications to things like social media platforms. The network effects are powerful.

The next thing I'd like you to do is get on social media where all these people you want to change are and tell them to get off.... oooh, your account was banned. These companies are organisms that will fight back against what your trying. You forget the tobacco companies fought in the US for 30+ years inventing entirely new methods of propaganda before we developed laws to protect the rest of us against smoke in public.

You are not talking about a choice. You are talking about a war that is actively being fought.


On the naming issue with a "UTF-8" prefix, I suggest "UTF+8" which puns earlier in the string for a double effect. Fun paper!

If it's just a general Transformation Format and Unicode will never assign those code points, it'd be just TF-8. I can think of a second way to expand that abbreviation.

Or UTF-∞

What is the consensus among experts?

That OpenAI stole the discovery from them.

That is very much not the consensus of experts.

It's kinda funny how hard the anti-ai people bias themselves and in the same sentence will say the AI people are irrational.

The point of this article we are all commenting on is that we are all irrational and we all would do well to keep that in mind and be more skeptical

The point for me is that all these people who were smirking at those of us who thought in 2023 that LLMs had the potential to do real intellectual work turned out to be completely wrong.

I’m a super skeptical guy. I was late to the ChatGPT party because it sounded silly. I didn’t even try it for a long time. As soon as I started giving it a chance, my attitudes started changing very quickly.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to understand people like the author or give them the benefit of the doubt. If I could see it as just some guy, why couldn’t they?


I agree that "don't use it for anything" might be too extreme a position to take, but I worry greatly that these proprietary opaque tools that are being provided by at best people with extreme conflicts of interest and at worst sociopaths need to be adopted with extreme care

Skepticism is a fine balance.

If you're not skeptical you invite idiocy to your bed to sleep with you.

If you're too skeptical you put yourself in a box of ignorance that puts you at a disadvantage.

Skepticism doesn't really work well without the dialectic. For dialectics to work well you need knowledge of your arguments and counter arguments.

The problem with most articles and online posts is we get "no no no" and "yes yes yes" and very few "well, maybe".


Absolutely true and the comments here are mostly in one of those two categories, sadly

They're also quite particular on keeping weights private and preventing distillation (or really, any open weight models).

Them complaining about distillation is 100% hypocritical, but also understandable; they found a goose laying golden eggs, but didn't expect it to be so easy to clone through distillation.

It's just ordinary business. You always have to get every benefit you can and deny everything you can to your competitors. The basic premise of free market economics is that when everyone does this, it will even out. OpenAI doing everything they can to stop DeepSeek, together with DeepSeek doing everything they can to stop OpenAI stopping them, is expected market behaviour. David Graeber wrote about this as his "goon" category of Bullshit Job.

This, despite the ongoing social litigation of if this is even real?

I believe AI is quite capable in the right circumstances, but I'm not convinced "this" is the watershed moment.


I think the watershed moment was when it was proven that it can solve highschoolers maths olympiad problems at competitive level. These problems require complexity of thinking that is beyond what most humans have to deal with in their entire lifetime. When AI took that in stride it was obvious that sky is the limit and entirety of current human achivement is a milestone but in a sense of the one that the car passes while doing 60.


>entirety of current human achivement..

The right way to look at it is that LLMs help us to maximize the utility of the entirety of current human achievement/knowledge by discovering obscure connections in it.


So pretty much the same thing that humans do. New things come out of those connections.


Yea, it is a better search tool than humans, as computers always were....


The qualitative difference is that it searches semantically across unstructured data and is able to cleverly combine related searches into an answer.

Imagine SQL but the queries mostly write themselves and database is just entirety of human knowledge with no formalization. If you were to create such thing 7 years ago you'd say somebody expects a miracle out of you. I don't get why so many people have trouble recognizing it now as such.


Yes, it is a very efficient search tool for existing data..


Comming back to SQL analogy... When you make a view over existing data tables that calculates something novel did you extend the amount of existing data?

Because AIs are sort of like that. Creating views of existing data no human has ever came up with. Views that might unlock new even more surprising and useful views. They are sort of materialized views because we are writing down what LLMs came up with. So they are new data tables. Derived, true. But possibly novel and unlocking something else.


Sorry. I don't agree that it "create" views autonomously. A human has to create a view in a database.

In the case of LLM, a human has to create a "prompt" that the LLM just continue, based on the patterns humans has created in the past.


Yeah, I see you are set in your ways. Maybe in a year of two of experiening frontier AIs firsthand you'll come around.


Where exactly do I need "coming around" based on what I said here?

I see a lot of Self-driving cars hitting people vs. reckless drivers hitting people.

What I want is simple: accountability. If a human hits a human, we throw the book at them in the case of a modality of negligence. If a robot screws up, how do we remedy and discourage?


It should be 100% liability on the self-driving car. Only by doing that will there be enough incentive for the manufacturers to drive the accident rate down to zero (or in practice a low enough number that the cost to manufacturer of the remaining accidents is negligible). Less than 100% liability provides wiggle room, which car manufacturers will exploit to maximise profits over lives. With 100% liability manufacturers can still make a pile of money, but only if they have a low accident rate.


A roundabout way would be to impound the car itself as punishment to the manufacturer and charge a very high fee to their insurance to get it out.


Point of fact: we do not treat vehicular homicide seriously in the American legal system.


Hold the manufacturer equally liable. Easy.


The shenanigans AI companies have been up to recently (including boasting about criminal behaviour hacking other companies) without repercussions is pretty good proof that it isn't "easy".


Why? It is easy.

Anthropic has paid out an awful lot of money settling piracy suits.

An example where no one attemped to hold anyone liable isn't a counterexample to what happens when we do.


I think you’re deliberately being obtuse.

The rights holders that got a settlement out of Anthropic spent two years and probably a fortune fighting in court. If that’s “easy”, then sure, this is a solved problem and there’s no point discussing it.

> An example where no one attemped to hold anyone liable isn't a counterexample to what happens when we do.

Yes it is (specifically, a counter example to it being easy, not that it’s possible). The whole world saw HuggingFaces get hacked and the collective legal response was crickets. The same world that’s had its legal system throw the DMCA and unauthorised access to computers legal book at researchers, games preservationists and random people trying to access media that they can’t licence in their region.


"here at waymo we hire a list of fall guys who will go to jail if one of our cars hits someone. its a great job, just like being oncall"


Sure, and in China some companies do exactly that.

I can't find evidence of it working in the US. Gets hard to pay fall guys when all company assets have been seized in court judgements.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the popular use of the phrase relating to people who exhibited actual psychosis-like symptoms where the AI fed into a lowlevel but undeveloped delusion? Later people would appear to be experiencing a full blown episode which was fed and maintained by their interaction with AI?


Yes. This typically manifested as either:

- religious or mystical experiences, often paired with the belief that the AI model is a manifestation of a divine being and/or has become sentient

- belief that the person has made a great scientific breakthrough using AI, typically in someone with no real knowledge of the field (which was usually theoretical physics)

- paranoid fantasies, e.g. belief that one is being followed or surveilled, that one's computers or other electronic devices have been compromised, etc.

(Ars Technica reports on a particularly horrifying instance of the first type at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/man-told-chatgpt....)


I always love the “paranoid fantasy” one because all electrics are spy devices and they are spying on you


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