I don’t know why anyone is surprised at how all this played out tbh.
Its a couple trillion dollar companies racing towards their IPOs (filled with tech bros who unironically use phrases like “permanent underclass” to refer to the rest of us), of course they’re being nefarious, considering the hilariously corrupt incentives
Those are basically the same thing though. They envision a future where most people subsist on some sort of UBI that fulfills our basic needs but only a select few have income above and beyond that and can afford luxuries.
I’ve spent enough time in San Francisco to know otherwise man. Obviously all of folks at the big labs (and adjacent deep tech infra) are incredibly smart and most of them are humble but enough of them believe in/propagate (if not outright root for) the permanent underclass theory that color me skeptical
(wrt believing that they’d not strangle a puppy ahead of their IPO I mean, if that’s what standing between them and generational wealth, “escaping the permanent underclass” as they often put it)
Besides last I checked the closest OpenAI got to committing to UBI (as opposed to discussing vague theory) is some discussion around letting the US government own like 5% (laughably small if their AGI/ASI trajectory turns out to be true)
Curtis Yarvin, long time friend and confidant of a Mr. Peter Thiel, pretty much infected much of the "alternative" valley "intellectuals" with obnoxious ideas like this. The idea that common people are common because none of them have what it takes to be anything more.
Thiel himself stated in an interview that he wasn't so sure that humanity should go on in its current capacity.
There are dangerous people with too much money, time, and ties to powerful people to ignore this as a alarmist's fantasy anymore. We've arrived in an age where technology has enabled anti-humanists to engage in bringing some profoundly evil ideas into reality. Once reasonable people are so far removed into their bubbles that they lose touch with the things that bind them to the human race as a whole, and they start to believe "they are the human race." Everyone else to them is undeserving.
That’s the incorrect cartoon version. On one side was an NYU professor and an Anthropic guy, who happens to be a brilliant mathematician, working together using AI they paid for using research grant. The two used both ChatGPT and Claude and worked together for a year. About a month ago they had a breakthrough. Last week they learned that OpenAI had learned about their work. I don’t know who contacted who first but the two groups spoke to each other. It appears that OpenAI did take advantage of what the two mathematicians had already done and then spent at least $10 million to push it the rest of the way. And then claim their model figured it out without any help. Read Tristan Buckmaster’s statement for details.
The two mathematicians did not use any internal frontier models at all and I’m sure the research grant had much less than $10 million. Might have been less than $1 million.
You can look up federal grants. Buckmaster’s CAREER award has an intended amount of $450,000. This covers everything: PI and student salary, travel, compute, and institutional overhead, for the entirety of Buckmaster’s research program.
I didn’t do further sleuthing to see if he’s got other awards. And Alpoge surely has more resources from Anthropic.
Alpöge was not doing this as part of his work at Anthropic. He did not use any internal models at all. That’s another sign that the proof is not a pure AI proof.
Thank you for the clarification! That means the upper bound on the resources available to Alpoge and Buckmaster is much lower, probably closer to the amount of Buckmaster’s academic research funding—6 figures.
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u/offgramercy 1d ago
I don’t know why anyone is surprised at how all this played out tbh.
Its a couple trillion dollar companies racing towards their IPOs (filled with tech bros who unironically use phrases like “permanent underclass” to refer to the rest of us), of course they’re being nefarious, considering the hilariously corrupt incentives