LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes, I think an unusually numerate and well-informed person will be surprised by the 28% figure regardless of political orientation. How surprised that kind of person is by the broader result of "hey looks like legalizing mobile sports betting was a bad idea" I expect to be somewhat moderated by political priors though.

Appreciate it! Cheers.

My concerns about AI-risk have mainly taken the form of intentional ASI-misuse, rather than the popular fear here of an ASI that was built to be helpful going rogue and killing humanity to live forever / satisfy some objective function that we didn't fully understand. What has caused me to shift camps somewhat is the recent gemini chatbot coversation that's been making the rounds: https://gemini.google.com/share/6d141b742a13 (scroll to the end)

I haven't seen this really discussed here, so I wonder if I'm putting too much weight on it.

Technically it was a dropdown rather than a tab per se, but the option to switch to the chronological timeline has been present since 2018: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18145089/twitter-latest-tweets-toggle-ranked-feed-timeline-algorithm. (IIRC there were third-party extensions to switch back even before then, however).

Creating an inhumanly good model of a human is related to formulating their preferences. A model captures many possibilities and the way many hypothetical things are simulated in the training data [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Thus it's a step towards eliminating path-dependence of particular life stories (and preferences they motivate), by considering these possibilities altogether. Even if some on the possible life stories interact with distortionary influences, others remain untouched, and so must continue deciding their own path [LW · GW], for there are no external influences there and they are the final authority for what counts as aiding them anyway.

I'm pretty sure there were no tabs at all before the acquisition.

“Game theoretic strengthen-the-tribe perspective” is a completely unpersuasive argument to me. The psychological unity of humankind [LW · GW] OTOH is persuasive when combined with the observation that this unitary psychology changes slowly enough that the human mind’s robust capability to predict the behavior of conspecifics (and manage the risks posed by them) can keep up.

Short version: AI won't eliminate NVIDIA's software moat; although AI may lower the cost of replicating existing software capabilities, overall investments in software will continue to increase as markets grow and the returns on optimization rise. AI will create new opportunities requiring significant investment, and simply having access to AI models may not equalize production costs or erase NVIDIA's advantages.

I often see the argument that, since NVIDIA is largely software, when AI automates software, NVIDIA will have no moat, and therefore NVIDIA a bad AI bet.

The argument goes something like: AI drives down the cost of software, so the barriers to entry will be much lower. Competitors can "hire" AI to generate the required software by, for example, tasking LLMs with porting application-level code into appropriate low-level instructions, which would eliminate NVIDIA's competitive advantage stemming from CUDA.

However, while the cost of matching existing software capabilities will decline, the overall costs of software projects are likely to continue increasing, as is the usual pattern. 

This is because, with software, the returns to optimization increase with the size of the addressable market. As the market expands, companies have greater incentives to invest intensely because even small improvements in performance or efficiency can yield substantial overall benefits. These improvements impact a large number of users, and the costs are amortized across this extensive user base. 

Consider web browsers and operating systems: while matching 2000s-era capabilities now takes >1000x fewer developer hours using modern frameworks, the investments that Google makes in Chrome and Microsoft in Windows vastly exceed what tech companies spent in the 2000s.

Therefore, as AI becomes a larger part of the overall economy, I expect the investments needed for state-of-the-art GPU firmware and libraries to be greater than those today.

When software development is mostly AI-driven, there will be vast opportunities to optimize software with more spending, such as by spending on AI inference, building better scaffolding, or producing better ways of testing and verifying potential improvements. This just seems to match our understanding of inference scaling.

It’s also unlikely that the relative cost of producing the same software will be much more equalized; that anyone can hire the same "AI” to do the engineering. Just having access to the raw models is often not sufficient for getting state-of-the-art results (good luck matching AlphaProof's IMO performance with the Gemini API).

Rapid technological progress tends to erode competitive advantages, as it increases the likelihood of substitute technologies emerging. However, the argument that 'AI automation of software will eliminate NVIDIA's moat' misunderstands how AI development and software costs scale.

Creativity is RL, converting work into closing the generation-discrimination gap wherever it's found (or laboriously created by developing good taste). The resulting generations can be novelty-worthy, imitating them makes it easier to close the gap, reducing the need for creativity.

Why doesn't lesswrong have a library, perhaps one that is curated by AI?

Well, arguably it does: https://www.lesswrong.com/library [? · GW]