They are trying so hard to make AI do human jobs instead of focussing on opportunities where AI is special suited. Do you really want your super intelligent token muncher to be clicking browser tabs all day?
I can't believe they are yanking tool access instead of just reducing the token quota or simply pulling Opus 4.7 access. To be fair even that would be poorly received, but at least people would have a choice of working within limits. Claude Code is their real winner, and a great ramp for newcomers coming into AI assisted development. They are playing straight into OpenAIs hands.
I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.
There's a video by Siliconversations [0] about it. Medicine is first and foremost limited by high-quality data, not intelligence. If OpenAI built a superhuman AGI tomorrow, it would not change a thing about the state of cancer treatment, at least not for a while.
Trying to design a cancer cure by setting a trillion alight on AI is like trying to achieve UBI by funneling citizen's taxes into Polymarket, so they may operate their free supermarket.
I don't think the above poster is talking about finding novel treatments, but rather that they're talking about aiding in diagnosis and navigating existing treatment options.
We always wish that our doctors would stay up to date on all of the current medical literature as they practice, and some of them do. In theory, AI systems could greatly accelerate a person's ability to retrieve and extract insights from the current body of knowledge.
Of course, that is highly fraught, but, in theory, I think I see what they're going for.
How can we be sure of that when we don't even know what improved "intelligence" might look like in this context? Especially given the increased importance of "big data" (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics etc.) to the field and the sheer amount of obscure data that's currently buried in all sorts of archival sources and might be resurfaced with some "intelligence".
What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail?
Writing prescriptions?
Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot.
Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds?
That’s decades away. And that also opens a legal can of worms. Maybe the AI lawyers can figure something out.
Yes. But unfortunately that domain suffers from ambiguity which LLMs are bad at.
Medical treatment has never been about asking questions and getting perfect answers. Excellent doctors and nurse practitioners have a great intuition for which questions to ask based on cues during patient assessment.
None of those seem like they had an capital investment equivalent to 1% of the GDP. Apparently railroad was the only technological investment that was higher than AI when measured as a percentage of the GDP.
I think all tech CEOs sleep dreaming to replace the low level employees of all the world's companies with AI. Only then this huge investment will be justified. By just suggesting a painkiller or helping with a Windows problem is not enough.
The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way.
Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.
We did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness.
I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.
It was pretty well established scientifically in 1900 that increasing atmospheric CO2 would result in increasing global temperature, but I don't think it was really in the public awareness for many decades. "Global warming" wasn't coined until the '70s.
Negative effects were immediately noticed. The change in smog was apparent. Road laws rapidly advanced. Road building standards rapidly changed. Congestion was also very much apparent, and the reason behind massive highway building effort that came some thirty years after the car's rise to popularity.
Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic? They didn't fail really, what failed was implementation not planning. Most cities you see with notorious traffic today, chances are the bottlenecks that exist were planned to be relieved by some midcentury road plan that was for whatever reason, not ever built. Comprehensive rapid transit was often also planned, several times over, but not built or at least never to the full scale of those plans. Catalytic converter was also a great success people today probably don't even think about. You can see the mountains again in California's cities thanks to the catalytic converter.
Leaded gas took longer, but I'd say the tailpipe pollution, congestion, and general capacity related issues were well understood.
They failed because traffic can’t be fixed by adding capacity. The inefficiency of cars will mean you can never build enough roads to keep ahead of consumption.
Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.
Sure traffic can be fixed by adding capacity. Demand is ultimately finite. You see this in places like the midwest where there is overcapacity on the highway system and you can go a mile a minute across the region pretty much at all hours of the day.
Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.
I don't know if Gastown will work out. But it is quite a bold take. I am interested to see how it plays out. I suspect they will eventually roll back some of the stringent "no code reading" approach in favor of observability as the community grows.
I think it behooves us to be selective right now. Frontier labs maybe great at developing models, but we shouldn't assume they know what they are doing from a product perspective. The current phase is throwing several ideas on the wall and see what sticks (see Sora). They don't know how these things will play out long term. There is no reason to believe Co-work/Routines/Skills will survive 5 years from now. So it might just be better to not invest too much in ecosystem upfront.
You may want to check out Barnum, which is a programming language/agent orchestration tool that makes it easy to build things like /loop, or Claude code routines. And you won't end up dependent on the specifics of how Claude code routines work!
I don't think the disconnect is very surprising to the "insiders".
Your Dario's and Sam's know exactly what they are doing. They know it's going to cause a lot of job displacement, even if the technology isn't perfect. They are trying to get the C-suite elite hyped up about it, and the hyperscalers are along for the ride as well. There's so much money to be made.
They could not care less about what joe schmoe on the street thinks about it.
In form it approximates a classic "park" more than the sort of national parks you and I probably think of. I like the idea of diversity in our national parks and public lands. Some could focus on history and education, others on naturalism and ecology, others could mix and match as needed. Urban national parks seem like a fine idea and a way to encourage urban populations to explore more public lands outside of their cities too, eventually. To build a nation of parks and gardens would be laudable.
IIRC the story is it basically predates when they figured out exactly what a "national park" is supposed to be as distinct from other kinds of national-whatever, and it stuck.
Similar story for the one in Arkansas I think. Both would probably have some other designation if they were created today.
[EDIT] Oh LOL I was very wrong, that was just created. What I wrote was basically true of Hot Springs, not Gateway. Yeah that's a WTF.
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