Imagine, a corporation finding their own voice, as a proper signal of their awareness of their customers. Nope, gotta sell your soul to tech stocks.

He's so close to being depressed enough to maybe ask a vital and important question about meaning and his own relationships with technology. But probably he'll just buy more AI.

I feel this shouldn't at all be surprising, and continues to point to Diverse Intelligence as more fundamental than any sort General Intelligence conceptually. There's a huge difference between what something is in theory or in principal capable of, and the economics story of what that thing attends to naturally as per its energy story.

Broadly, even simple things are powerful precisely because of what they don't bother trying to do until perturbed.

Ultimately, I hypothesize the reason why VCs like the idea of LLMs doing simple things far more expensively than otherwise is already possible, is because, They literally can't imagine what else to spend their money on. They are vacuous consumers by design.

The issue isn't even that AI is doing grading, really. There are worlds where using technology to assist in grading isn't a loss for a student.

The issue is that all of this is as an excuse not to invest in students at all and the turn here is purely a symptom of that. Because in a world where we invest in technology to assist in education, the first thing that happens is we recognize the completely unsexy and obvious things that also need to happen, like funding for maintenance of school buildings, basic supplies, balancing class sizes by hiring and redistricting, you know. The obvious shit.

But those things don't attract the attention of the debt metabolism, they're too obvious and don't include more leverage for short term futures. To believe there is a future for the next generation is risk inherent and ambiguous. You can only invest in that it if you actually care.

Procreate is an example of what good AI deployment looks like. They do use technology, and even machine learning, but they do it in obviously constructive scopes between where the artist's attention is focused. And they're committed to that because... there's no value for them to just be a thin wrapper on an already completely commoditized technology on its way to the courtroom to be challenged by landmark rulings with no more room ceiling to grow into whooooooops.

No joke but actually yes?

Short story: it's smoke and mirrors.

Longer story: This is now how software releases work I guess. Alot is running on open ai's anticipated release of GPT 5. They have to keep promising enormous leaps in capability because everyone else has caught up and there's no more training data. So the next trick is that for their next batch of models they have "solved" various problems that people say you can't solve with LLMs, and they are going to be massively better without needing more data.

But, as someone with insider info, it's all smoke and mirrors.

The model that "solved" structured data is emperically worse at other tasks as a result, and I imagine the solution basically just looks like polling multiple response until the parser validates on the other end (so basically it's a price optimization afaik).

The next large model launching with the new Q* change tomorrow is "approaching agi because it can now reliably count letters" but actually it's still just agents (Q* looks to be just a cost optimization of agents on the backend, that's basically it), because the only way it can count letters is that it invokes agents and tool use to write a python program and feed the text into that. Basically, it is all the things that already exist independently but wrapped up together. Interestingly, they're so confident in this model that they don't run the resulting python themselves. It's still up to you or one of those LLM wrapper companies to execute the likely broken from time to time code to um... checks notes count the number of letters in a sentence.

But, by rearranging what already exists and claiming it solved the fundamental issues, OpenAI can claim exponential progress, terrify investors into blowing more money into the ecosystem, and make true believers lose their mind.

Expect more of this around GPT-5 which they promise "Is so scary they can't release it until after the elections". My guess? It's nothing different, but they have to create a story so that true believers will see it as something different.

The weird thing, is. From my perspective. Nearly every, weird, cringy, niche internet addiction I've ever seen or partaken in myself, has produced both two things: people who live through it and their perspective widens, and people who don't.

Like, I look back at my days of spending 2 days at a time binge playing World of Warcraft with a deep sense of cringe but also a smirk because I survived and I self regulated, and honestly. Made a couple of lifetime friends. Like whatever response we have to anime waifus, I hope we still recognize the humanity in being a thing that wants to be entertained or satisfied.

Watching this election has been amazing! LIKE WOAH what a fucking obviously self destructive end to delusion. Can I be optimistic and hope that with EA leaning explicitly heavier into the hard right Trump position, when it collapses and Harris takes it, maybe some of them will self reflective on what the hell they think "Effective" means anyways.

Audacious and Absurd Defender of Humanity

Your honor, I'd rather plea guilty than abide by my audacious counsel.

A certain class of idealists definitely feel this way, and it's why many decentralized efforts are fragile and fall apart. Because they can't meaningfully construct something without centralization or owners, they end up just hiding these things under a blanket rather than acknowledging them as design elements that require an intentional specification.

Oh absolutely! This is the entire delusion collapsing on itself.

Bro, if intelligence is, as the cult claims, fully contained self improvement, --you could never have mattered by definition--. If the system is closed, and you see the point of convergence up ahead... what does it even fucking matter?

This is why Pascal's wager defeats all forms of maximal utilitarianism. Again, if the system is closed around a set of known alternatives, then yes. It doesn't matter anymore. You don't even need intelligence to do this. You can do with sticks and stones by imagining away all the other things.