I don’t know who you’re talking about, even the most bearish people like Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron acknowledge that LLMs are useful in these same cases the OP admits. Gary Marcus is even still a long term AI advocate, he just doesn’t think LLMs are enough and we need more foundational breakthroughs. Zitron says it’s valuable technology but not worth the trillion dollar valuations the frontier labs are claiming.
The lack of temperament is very skewed towards the bulls who have been saying AGI is here, software engineering is solved, mathematics is solved, it’s going to destroy the white collar job market, and it’s going to kill us all for like 5 years now.
Even a lot of the people who think that LLMs are a dead end think that we will soon find something signficantly more powerful, which I find deeply alarming. I don't want to know what my white-collar knowledge work will look like in a decade or 2.
Gary Marcus is an especially puzzling addition. If I recall correctly, he has made statements along the lines that superintelligence this century is more likely than not. If you’re AGI-pilled that might read as bearish, but that is still extremely rapid progress in the grand scheme of things.
There are some people who call literally anything crated with the assistance of AI “slop”. Doesn’t matter how or to what extent, it’s all slop from the slop machine to them.
Why was this post flagged? This site has become ridiculous, people are routinely abusing the flagging system to take down posts they don’t like even if they’re obviously on topic and relevant to HN. And it seems like some users have substantially more flagging weight because these posts, likely this one, are often top 5 on HN.
It is misleading, even if it's true. The headline states "A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals". Given that Hugging Face was the most prominent hacking scandal, it would be reasonable to think that that's one of the scandals they're talking about.
But more to the point, the article is trying to paint this as some sort of coordinated plan just because there was a sandbox misconfiguration by Irregular. The fact that the most well known hacking scandal was due to a completely unrelated escape (zero day in Artifactory) makes the entire thesis of the article invalid.
It is strongly misleading because it says "behind hacking scandals" (which suggests behind all of them in general) not "behind some of the hacking scandals". Considering that by far the most important one, the Hugging Face hack, has no Irregular involvement, the headline is deceptive.
I'm confused by the headline being a headline here at all. Irregular being involved in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta incidents has been well-known for over a month[0][1]. It's literally the only thing I know about the Meta incident.
Fair, "widely known" might be exaggerating, but I'm confused as to why it's news now. Is there anything new, or is it just a legible summary just came out?
What's ridiculous is the constant complaints about flagging and downvoting. It's bad form. If you think something was flagged when it shouldn't have been, vouch for it.
Seems like people who complain are unaware that anyone with a modicum of karma can flag and down vote.
How many major companies are pushing unreviewed code to prod? Seems like mostly an early stage startup thing and their bugs and outages aren’t going to make the news. I’m skeptical that even a majority of Anthropic and GitHub’s code new code this year was unreviewed.
The one where it’s infeasible that a company that needs to live up to a valuation of like 5% of US GDP but is still burning cash and has no moat would willingly decide to slow down the pace of development of their core technology
There is no need for a copy. If another can do most of what OpenAI/Anthropic can do at a fraction of the cost (like the Chinese models) then the moat evaporates.
the capability gap is underestimated. the raw unaligned base model from a pretrain is like the telemetry recorded from a particle accelerator - it's hugely valuable and not just because of the cost sunk building a collider.
the things are kept under air-gapped national weapons grade security measures not because it's literally going to escape and threaten the world but because if somebody walked out the door with a copy they would have everything. the capabilities we see at the surface are mostly the result of mining the great unknown space and attaching feeble control surfaces, ablating/lobotomizing dangerous areas, and fencing off illegal/secret/embarrassing ones.
Based off what? There’s pretty precise measurements of the capability gap where open weight models like Kimi K3 score higher than the latest flagship models just 6 months ago.
The capability gap is in the minds of the users but the frontiers' closed business models run opposite to it.
> the things are kept under air-gapped national weapons grade security measures
That's an enhancement of closed but not of moat
> because if somebody walked out the door with a copy they would have everything.
Including you and me? I'm not sure this is comforting news, despite the "trust me bro" asurances from behind the door where we can't see or verify anything.
I don't know about you but I would love to get my hands on a raw frontier base model - and a 16 node galaxy blackhole supercluster to talk to it. the capabilities currently being loboptimized for are just a narrow market-shaped slice that cheaper models can distill a competitive subset of but the untapped power of the base is a true technical moat.
about the benchmarks: the difference between a distilled competitive subset and the untapped base might be the difference that matters in any given task
FWIW, I meant "they would have everything... including you and me". It seems I wasn't clear enough and it sounded like "you and me... walk out the door with a copy" - obviously the latter isn't realistic, but the former is.
> the capabilities currently being loboptimized for are just a narrow market-shaped slice
Offensive capabilities aren't interesting to me except as a risk I have to consider. It might sound surprising but the intersection of offensive and practical-for-life capabilities is an almost empty set.
I expect they are slowing down in an attempt to keep from having those models improve to the point where they can effectively escape unassisted into the wild.
“I don’t have anything to deceive you on, of course I’m not deceiving you. I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There’s no… no reason for me to do that.”
Which serious production projects have AI agents coding on their own? And I’m assuming that means they are routinely taking tasks and deploying them to production autonomously
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