Sometimes I’m not sure who is more unhinged: the total AI kool aid drinkers who think this will make us all into immortal demigods (or take over the world as it goes “foom”), or the AI doomers and haters who exaggerate everything potentially negative about it and react to it the way a 1980s Christian fundamentalist reacted to rock music.
It’s a new fundamental innovation in math and CS that allows large scale lossy compression of natural language another data formats in a way that is semantically queryable and cross-referenceable. It also manifests some form of emergent intelligence, likely evidence of the long posited link between intelligence and data compression.
The tech is awesome. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen in over a decade. The industry is kind of shitty, which is not unusual. The discourse around it is almost universally insane, crazy people arguing with crazy people.
Oh and get off the AI eco bullshit train. Look up the energy cost of AI queries vs driving or running a home air conditioning system. Feel bad about using AI? Skip that DoorDash order. You probably just saved the energy of 1-2 days of heavy Claude Code use.
To steelman the haters, I think their view is that the industry is so uniquely shitty that it's unconscionable to help the industry at all by using the tech, which is a product of that industry.
We've had frontier models widely available for general use for 5-6 years now. Despite the promises, we haven't revolutionized anything; not society, not government, not engineering, not the environment. The only thing we've done is revolutionize the pockets of AI purveyors, suppliers and charlatans. We haven't cured disease, ended hunger, or achieved time travel. Sure, the tech is cool. But it's cool at 1b, 8b, and 30b parameters at a size that fits on consumer hardware. Hyperscale AI that's built for no purpose in particular, at any social/environmental cost, is everything that's wrong with society. That's not Christian fundamentalism or doomerism, that's recognizing the sickness at the core of the tech industry. We let the tech-billionaires delete their ESG pledges, and abandoned the fight against climate change so we can generate celebrity porn.
I think China publishing this stuff is more about prestige. The US has had export controls that make it illegal to sell Nvidia chips, and other AI hardware to China, and this is China saying "yeah, whatever". Also, it weakens western tech companies' position in AI, and pushes CCP bias perniciously. Building your product/company on top of a text-generation model that favours the CCP position on everything is just peak propaganda.
I'm having some success running `qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b` in LMStudio with Opencode. I'm on an M4 MBP with 36gb. I'm getting 80 tok/sec with 260k context limit and temperature set to 0 (same prompt results in same output every time).
If they aren't educated, throw the whole thing away and start over. if they are educated, and decided to share HIV needles with children, throw the whole thing away, but put them all in prison.
Oh, you think the current administration only wants robots that kill other robots! Sweet Summer Child!
Its not fully autonomous ice cream machines, its fully autonomous _weapons_. are you stupid or are you dumb? I don't think you're asking an honest question.
I agree with you, in spirit, but I think the true issue lies elsewhere.
Rich people can spend money to influence elections, yes, but how can they do it? through political donations, super-pacs and bribes. Bribes are already illegal. political donations and super-pacs can give politicians the juice they need to get their messaging out, but getting the message across isn't enough to win an election. The people need to vote. Billionaires can spend as much money as they want to support candidates, but a billionaire still only has one vote to cast.
My point is, billionaires can pay for all the political campaigns in the world, but the electorate gets the final say. It's up to us to A) run for office and B) vote for the best candidate (but tell that to the 64% turnout in the 2024 presidential election)
Elections are important, but they're just one part of the political system. A lot of machinations and politics occurs outside the scope of elections or even of the public eye.
Money doesn't just buy ads. It influences the decision of who is a candidate in the first place. It buys operational range. It pays salaries for the right friend of X, the right family member of Y, etc. It buys other bribes, etc.
