Petropolitan

Don't you see a contradiction between your earlier line of argument "OpenAI should have designed GPT-5 to fit on 8 H100s in FP8 despite gradually getting B200s with more HBM and FP4 support" and "one can deploy across several nodes it's just less effective"? Selecting the size of a future model for the hardware you are getting rather than one which dominates your park right now seems a wiser solution in light of your latter thesis.

Also, checking EpochAI's free estimates, Microsoft had roughly as much Hopper compute as Blackwell in Q2 2025, and B200+B300 pa... (read more)

The DeepSeek report you cite is over a year old and seems to imply they quantized most (all?) weights to FP8 but the SemiAnalysis post states that by February 2026 "most frontier labs and inference providers are not running FP8", especially since NVidia introduced native support of three 4-bit float formats on Blackwell last year. A cluster of 8 B200s has 1.5 TB of HBM3e and fits at least 2T of 4-bit params, maybe more. Hypothetically (a rough estimate due to questions in brackets which follow), think of 2200A110B plus 400 GB left on KV cache (or specifica... (read more)

Can't say for you but LLM replies to questions I ask are grounded in the extensive training data and/or web search results, hence they are normally very rich on substance. I don't ask questions where I expect an insipid response, while most of the LLM writing online is quite substanceless

>"example given"

It's actually https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exempli_gratia (and I do read it this way in my head! I also use it a lot in my writing, occasionally with a comma)

The war in Ukraine shows how conflicts between drones and riflemen go; the war in Iran shows how conflicts between the informed and the uninformed go.

I don't think these conflict show what you think they show.

In the former case, drones and riflemen fight together on both sides, with both sides capable of innovating and copying innovations. If anything, the conflict shows that thanks to drones, infantry grunts are as important as ever and expensive armor (although not obsolete and still necessary) is relatively less important than a generation ago.

In the la... (read more)

Is there a statistically significant difference in how Democrats, Independents and Republicans rank different risks from AI?

Does the company present the statistical uncertainty, or do you have to calculate it yourself?

the remaining third is split exactly in half on whether preventing AI x-risk feels like a Democratic or Republican issue

I expect this to change soon: there's a very large difference between the parties regarding trust to experts in general and academia specifically (and we know academia and industry have different opinions regarding AI risks).

And do you think you could poll on other AI risks you identified? I expect there to be a party difference there.

Also, maybe you could poll respondents for their political affiliation before asking the questions

The most common reason people stop counting as participating in the labor force is that they grow old and living off savings, passive income, pension and/or social benefits is better than continuing working, which we call a retirement. With global graying of the population, 50% of formerly working people will necessarily become permanently unemployable in this sense eventually even without the AI progress.

Also, note that Finland has ~10% unemployment rate and they are quite OK because of the social safety net. If AI was to be heavily taxed and these funds ... (read more)

I realized I'm not sure how you define "50% of people permanently unemployable". Surely it isn't about global population? Is it about global labor force (which is ~45% of global population) or about developed countries only?

As of 2019, about a quarter of global labor force worked in primary agricultural production (mostly smallholder farmers who might only be impacted by AI indirectly, such as natural gas going to data centers instead of fertilizer plants) and half as much were employed in "off-farm segments of agrifood systems". Surely people need to eat ... (read more)

the pace of conceptual work on AI algorithms is like >100x faster

In such a case I expect these AI researchers to pick all the low- and medium-hanging fruit at the then-current compute level/hardware technology, and then the algorithmic progress gets saturated until new-gen chips are produced in quality. Check this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sGNFtWbXiLJg2hLzK

Why can’t Lockheed and Raytheon simply make way more of them?

The problem is not technological, it's political and economical. We know how to scale the production (it's really 20th century tech), the Congress just doesn't give the funds. Half a billion dollars for a new plant is not really that large a figure for a country which spends over a trillion dollars on defense annually, but the priorities are not there (or maybe I could have said "the lobbyists are not there" but I don't want to go deep into politics).

E.g., Raytheon claims to have the capacity to ... (read more)

Well, there are plenty of long takes on X which are obviously based on authors' ideas but LLM-generated (even before ones runs them through a detector) and still get pretty popular, audience not smelling an LLM. Do you count that as good or bad writing? I honestly don't enjoy reading them for some reason even when I agree the underlying ideas make sense, but on the other hand, these authors reached a wider audience than they would presumably have without an LLM

“dynamite” (no relation)

Really? I have always thought your nickname is a pun on this word!

Check this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PiD8eS33umRrvGcMe/david-james-s-shortform?commentId=k4jpWmksetk3M9xdK

As long as there are only few nuclear states, absence of nuclear wars doesn't seem unusual or unexpected, but if the non-proliferation paradigm was to fall apart and multiple new states got bombs in a decade or two, the situation would be likely to worsen significantly

If a company mines crypto on scale and gets caught, what would be the punishment, if any?

A Manifold market: https://manifold.markets/MaxHarms/did-alibabas-rome-ai-try-to-break-f

Note that cryptocurrency mining is prohibited in China, although I was unable to find legal details (presumably it's punishable by fines proportional to scale).

See also https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sakana-strawberry-and-scary-ai from 2024

entity, person or corporation, listed as owning the property with the tax

Why can't the land be owned by tax-exempt organizations such as churches, charities or universities and then rented to rich people? It seems for me your suggestion is as loophole-prone as other ones proposed in the past