@ianbremmer tells Trump, a guy for whom any US trade deficit is like theft. 🤔
when you are pandering to people they can see you are pandering to them. who you are, what you stand for, will not seem powerful, valuable, aspirational, “real” to them. because it is not to you.
live and profess your values like they matter to you and they might start to matter to someone else.
declare the (always right-wing) “vibe shift” and think about how we are going to accommodate ourselves to it might not, in fact, be the best way to do politics.
re #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-vibes-they-are-a-shiftin
“we’re replacing your oncologist with someone fully aligned with the Trump movement.”
Do not open this thread in public.
i’m not flipping you off. it’s an etruscan salute.
we need strong leadership to keep us safe. https://flipboard.com/@cbsnews/politics-fcotvfd4z/-/a-W0vhZh1YRXKsXueEwzYhjg%3Aa%3A2476075171-%2F0
we are going to have to do better than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
@ouguoc always a pleasure to natter!
@ouguoc ( Matt’s someone I know and trust, a one-person think tank and AI powered web entrepreneur with nlrbresearch.com https://x.com/mattbruenig/status/1882223297150259590 )
@ouguoc ( and now this. too new to get much sense how much the thing lives up to the press release though https://www.aibase.com/news/14931 )
@eARCwelder what's bad for (our) billionaire's net worth is bad for America!
@ouguoc the qualitative evaluations i’ve read have been positive as well (except the one testing a Tiananmen Square prompt).
skepticism is always a good starting posture! i haven’t played with it, and would not in any case be competent to evaluate it.
but i guess i’d perhaps conspiratorially suggest the US incumbents really do not want AI to be “light”, that for example Sam Altman’s ambitions depend on it being capital intensive and difficult to contest. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/113873326922290767
the world’s status hierarchy is built on top of stock/token prices.
both AI and crypto present opportunities for fast run-ups of market capitalization for those with ambition or grievance to contest the higher echelons.
@ouguoc https://www.deepseek.com/
i don’t think that’s a fair characterization. they seem to have achieved close-to-frontier performance much more cheaply both to train and operate, and perhaps without access to the most advanced GPUs.
obviously they build on the largely American foundational research. but OpenAI wants 500B (fucking absurd) to build out off of that.
AI:
Great US champions do it with great fanfare, exorbitant finance, yielding either vapor or some bloated, uncompetitive thing.
China: Some firm you’ve never heard of, one of probably a zillion such firms, does it on a shoestring, it works well, costs a fraction of what anyone thought possible.
@taral exactly.
“if Trump wants your opinion, he’ll tell you what he wants it to be.” @pkrugman https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/voodoo-trade-policy-comes-to-america
Suppose Elon Musk’s, um, hand gestures, his support of AfD, and promotion of replacement theory have persuaded you he has some interest or fascination with the historical Nazi movement. 1/
Musk has been fascinated by the number 420, which (4/20) is Hitler’s birthday but also a marijuana signifier, for many years. https://observer.com/2024/04/elon-musk-number-420-tesla-twitter/ 2/
Is your inference he recently became Nazi-curious, and previously had fetishized 420 solely over marijuana, or that he had some interest in Nazism for a long time and enjoyed the ambiguity and plausible deniability that 420’s marijuana associations afforded? 3/
If the latter, is it plausible that the wealthiest and most influential figure in “tech” would have remained supportive of the Democratic Party and its racially, culturally, and sexually progressive values if only partisans had been less mean to tech? 4/
Or is it more plausible that any apparent progressivism was always feigned and as Musk’s wealth and power grew he would become emboldened to openly advocate for his views? 5/
We can’t know! In some counterfactual universe where the racially, socially, and culturally progressive party was also the low taxes on rich people and deferential to monopoly party, maybe Musk’s material interests would have overwhelmed his, um, “playful” fascinations. 6/
But in anything like the actual universe, I think the evidence suggests there was little hope the party both more economically and culturally progressive could have retained this person’s support if a more materially friendly, more racially “realist” party could champion his interests. /fin
@_dm it was unprofitable capex, but not wasted, it was ultimately used.
i’m not sure the same will be true of whatever too much money thrown at less efficient AI. they actually laid fiber. sometimes cash travels fruitlessly from one pocket to the next.
@_dm just when a chinese firm trained a model that performs near the current frontier, that was trained and runs much more cheaply. i’m sure this will be money well spent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek
if you were to observe the world through infrared goggles, would it be visibly more hazy now than 40 years ago?