Al P Phillips @AlPPhillips

California set aside $24 billion for homelessness. California then announced that the entire $24 billion DISAPPEARED. Finally, it was tracked down. It turns out that the funds were turned over to an NGO. Instead of helping the homeless, the funds were used for a mansion in LA, a home in Greece, and a $125,000 vehicle. All under the watchful eye of Gavin Newsom. The dude belongs in prison.

Vice President JD Vance on H1-B visas: "If you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who is an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius. That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people... my view is the H1-B program is completely broken."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on AI model distillation: “That’s called competition. You’re allowed to test somebody else’s products all you want.”

Peter Thiel just said America’s deficit era is ending. His argument: once interest rates stopped being zero, the West’s model of big welfare states, already-high taxes, and large deficits stopped being sustainable. There are only three choices left. 1. Massively cut spending 3. Massively hike taxes 3. Keep kicking the can down the road For close to 20 years, the answer has been #3. Ever since the 2008 crisis, we’ve just been borrowing more and more money. The result is a fiscal trap that arithmetic, not ideology, is now closing. Think exploding interest costs crowding out everything else. Trust funds running down. No slack left for the next shock. A country that used cheap money to delay every hard choice. The numbers already show the can is getting heavier: > FY2026 deficit already $1.4 trillion through 9 months and on track for $2T or more > Total federal debt around $40T, roughly 123% of GDP > Annual interest now over $1T Then he added the part people usually skip: “My intuition is we’re close to the point where that ends, and then you’re going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution of either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures.” Zero rates made centrism look possible. Higher rates make it look like delay. It seems America’s real fiscal problem may not be starting the spending. It’s refusing to admit the cheap-money version of kicking the can has an expiration date.

Thiel on Trump: “There are a lot of things I got wrong... was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought.” “You wish they’d appointed more competent people.” “administration is… staffed by not very smart but very loyal people”

Peter Thiel on camera: “If you’re evil, you’re at least competent. You’re not bad. You’re actually kind of good.” This is how these people talk when they stop pretending.

AI is powerful enough to kill a billion people if it falls into the wrong hands, Bill Gates has warned, as the Microsoft co-founder urged tougher government regulation of the technology. ft.trib.al/apO3uEU

If you believe that the incidents of the past month warrant urgent AI regulation, please watch this first. This is the most prescient, concise argument for why we must be careful of excessive AI regulation. It comes from a Feb. 2024 (2.5 years ago!) congressional testimony from @glukianoff, a free speech advocate and the author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Here's what he said: "But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge. A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas and even questions are permitted in the name of 'safety' or 'alignment.' I have dedicated my life to defending freedom of speech because it's an essential human right. ... It's not just about the proverbial 'marketplace of ideas,' it's about allowing information, independent of idea or argument, to flow freely so that we can hope to know the world as it really is. This means seeing value in expression even when it appears to be wrongheaded or even useless. This process has been aided by new technologies that have made communication easier, from the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, to phones and the internet: each one has accelerated the development of new knowledge by making it easier to share information. But AI offers even greater liberating potential, empowered by First Amendment principles including freedom to code, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry. We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge. AI's potential is humbling, indeed, even frightening. But as the history of the printing press shows, attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will fail. Despite the profound disruption the printing press caused in Europe in the short-term, the long-term contribution to art, science, and again, knowledge, was without equal. Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI, or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players. The end result of pushing too hard on AI regulation will be the concentration of AI influence in an even smaller number of hands. Far from reining in government misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor, but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself."

Mark Warner @MarkWarner

2 weeks ago

Later today, I’m headed to the floor to try and force a vote to get urgent protections done around AI. We cannot wait any longer. We must take action to put some guardrails on this tech before something catastrophic happens.

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Remember October 2022 when you doused Galactica with vitriol? Galactica was a 120b-parameter LLM-based system from Meta-FAIR designed to help scientist write papers. It was open sourced (link below). A mob of haters, including Michael, claimed it was dangerous and toxic and was going to destroy Science. The small team at FAIR couldn't sleep at night and took down the demo website (they kept the GitHub and paper up). Then, only 3 weeks later, ChatGPT was released and was welcomed as the second coming of the Messiah🤔 The vitriol dousers were silent. technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/106… github.com/paperswithcode…

Nope. It's still true. Where is your domestic robot? Where is your Level-5 self-driving car? Where is your robot car that can learn to drive in a few hours of practice like any 17 year old? Where is your AI system that can understand the real world and quickly learn new skills like a house cat? There is no question that AI will eventually become as intelligent as humans in all domains. *** BUT *** 1. We're still far from that, even if AI and computer technology surpasses humans in an ever-increasing number of tasks. 2. It won't be based on LLMs, although LLMs will have a role to play (e.g. as a text interface).

Seems like this has already been falsified

Veee @vikktorrrre

2 weeks ago

Yann LeCun: we are not going to get human-level intelligence or AGI by just scaling LLMs. “There’s absolutely no way in hell.” “The idea that we’re gonna have a country of geniuses in a data center, that’s complete BS.” “It may feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you.”

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