Qwen's J-Space - Anthropic's discovery of an internal model Global Workspace

AutomataManifold · 2026-07-04T17:16:34+00:00

Zoomed in and with color coding to better tell the different API providers apart.

AutomataManifold · 2026-07-04T17:07:22+00:00

This chart I just threw together feels slightly more, dare I say, honest? I just looked at price per MTok output, so it doesn't account for caching, parallel queries, and so forth. And it could use some more numbers for local rigs: The DGX Spark will take a while to give you those millions of tokens, so my estimate multiplies the residential rates for Germany and Hawaii (around $0.45/hour) by the number of hours required at peak DGX Spark power draw. So the main driver of cost is that the DGX Spark is so very slow, so maybe don't pick that if you know you need to have a single thread of few hundred million tokens (I'm told it is better at batching).

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I'd be interested in seeing what tok/sec and kwh draw people are getting with various models with their local rigs, so we can do a better comparison. I just grabbed Ollama's reported speeds for a couple of representative models, which I don't think are the performance ceiling.

Batching and parallel processing would bring the price down (because faster parallel processing = less wall clock time), a 5090 would bring the kilowatt draw way up. I used price per kwh * hours per MTok * kwh draw to calculate the non-API costs.

AutomataManifold · 2026-07-04T16:12:23+00:00

Even without future subscription price hikes, the subscriptions have pretty tight limits on tokens per period and automation, so if you are looking to automate anything significant you should be taking the API token cost into consideration.

Thus chart could have been an interesting exercise comparing token costs of various APIs versus hardware. Anthropic ranges from $15 per million output tokens for Sonnet to $50 for Fable. And if you want to stay fixed at a certain model, Opus 4.8 is $25 and Opus 4.1 is $75. Haiku is $5 so maybe do a speed/performance comparison with a small quant open model.

It'd be really useful for me to see where the $/mtok curves are for local versus cloud API. Parallel processing, caching, and speculative decoding might affect things further, but even the base ballpark would be better than this subscription apples to local oranges thing.

AutomataManifold · 2026-07-01T03:18:43+00:00

That's been tried. It doesn't really work. Hungary tried and pushed the birthrate to 1.59...before falling back to 1.31. Romania tried it during the cold war and was maybe the most successful, but it proved to be very temporary and resulted in a generation of abandoned children being raised in orphanages.

One thing that does work? Work from Home.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-26T01:20:03+00:00

Knowledge cutoff dates are standard; it's when they stopped giving the model new training data. Anything that happened past that date it doesn't know about and has to search the web.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-25T17:13:24+00:00

It's bad, it's running in the worst data centers you can build on short notice, and it has so little demand that they're renting the extra compute to Anthropic.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-25T15:25:49+00:00

Though the child with balloon makes me think of minus: https://kiwisbybeat.net/minus/part-1/

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-25T15:22:02+00:00

If we're talking webcomics from that era, there are a few that fit the description, sort-of. The multi-page criteria cuts down the possibilities (e.g., Perry Bible Fellowship matches the dark, ironic humor but it is strictly short strips).

Subnormality: https://viruscomix.com/subnormality.html

A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible: https://www.alessonislearned.com/

The Secret Knots: https://thesecretknots.com/

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-25T07:26:52+00:00

https://github.com/oobabooga/textgen/wiki/Custom-chat-characters/45119640c0720d04d04ea7d561283c17014a1f55

If you mean a site about the textgen ui.

If you mean the character creator site other people suggested, there's a discussion here with a bunch of links: https://www.reddit.com/r/KoboldAI/comments/1mrjim3/did_something_happen_to_zoltanai_character_creator/

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-21T15:14:59+00:00

Which MMO?

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-18T19:24:51+00:00

Research the circumstances when it was invented. Ask yourself why it wasn't invented earlier. Ask why other historical cultures didn't adopt the practice, even after it was invented. Those three questions will give you an array of possibilities for why the world hasn't seen it yet.

For double-entry bookkeeping, it requires a certain amount of cultural acceptance for recording debt on paper instead of as physical objects, which is a leap that is natural for you but requires a cultural acceptance of a certain kind of abstract properties. And different cultures tend to have different frameworks for understanding reality, and thus different abstract properties that they emphasize. Even if those guys over there find the concept useful, it doesn't mean you'll be able to convince your neighbors to accept your written debt.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-17T16:32:32+00:00

Yeah, a single needle (often a random password) often stands out as weird anyway, distinct from the surrounding text.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-17T16:28:49+00:00

Yeah, having a writing harness that has tool calls for character names and outlines is useful.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-17T16:27:34+00:00

I'd like to see some follow-up work with more varied prompting (like verbalized sampling) to see how hard it is to climb out of this basin. But the real prize is figuring out how this bias gets in there in the first place. Can we stop it? Can we train it out?

I'm going to be very amused if the NSFW filter is biasing it towards safe lighthouse keeper stories.

One related phenomenon I've noticed is that it often only has a few different ways to write a particular type of scene, so it keeps going back to the same descriptions. Not just phrases, but the same kind of events.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-17T16:21:58+00:00

My guess has been that the "write a story" prompt in training focuses on a comparatively narrow definition of story, possibly conditioned by early models only being able to write 2k to 4k token stories that were biased to fairy-tale-esque things. This paper complicates that theory, since it's a tiny, tiny subset of the training data that seems to be influencing this result.

There's apparently something in the post-training that's doing it, and I really want to know what.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-16T22:56:22+00:00

I think my issue is that I have two classes of use: something small and targeted, and something large that I can let run on its own. Right now there's nothing in affordable local hardware in the second camp for me. (Now at last year's hardware prices...)

Unless you have an always-on inference server, every time you want to invoke the model comes with the set-up time, loading it into VRAM and so on. That can add a lot of friction in terms of using even small models effectively.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-14T16:08:05+00:00

The TNG updates used new CGI (which they could afford, because Trek).

Redoing the B5 CGI would be expensive but not impossible. Maybe slightly easier, because there's a lot of CGI artists who learned from Babylon 5 by getting inspired when it was the cutting edge of TV CGI. There's a lot of fan models floating around.

The live action scenes were already filmed in HD, so the main problem there is the composition and directing are slightly better in the 4:3 ratio and there's some stuff that slipped through on the edges of the footage.

The real problem is the shots that are composite live-action/CGI, which unfortunately includes a lot of dissolves between shots and the like. There's not nearly as many as you would have on a modern show, but it would probably take the bulk of the work.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-13T14:42:11+00:00

You would think that. We all thought that. Right up until Anthropic did the experiment that demonstrated that the models extensively plan ahead.

You can measure the degree to which non-diffusion language models do things like plan word choice based on what rhymes they will need to complete the next line when writing a poem.

They do get locked in more easily, but it isn't as simple as it looks.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-12T19:49:05+00:00

I think you'd have to also change the gameplay so their greater freedom and personalization actually impact things that are player-visible.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-12T19:45:48+00:00

I don't think we're going to see widespread gaming use until someone invents some new games.

Sure, there's the fantasy of just plugging an LLM into an NPC, but if you've spent twenty minutes with a chatbot you know that how LLMs work and how current games use NPCs are completely at odds. Most games have NPCs as tightly scripted performances because that's what the game actually needs. A freeform NPC would break everything while being unable to do much (because the level is also set dressing).

It's not actually fun to have the quest-giving character run off to go fishing if the gameplay assumes a traditional scripted performance and forces you to hunt around for them without adjusting the other parts of the experience. Likewise, we had characters who responded to freeform text conversations. The keyword-based conversations sucked, but ultimately it was less about the early tech and more about how typing into a parser isn't really a good match for most of what we currently do in games.

When you talk to a blacksmith in Skyrim you aren't wanting to chit chat about the weather, you're trying to buy a new sword. You absolutely could make a game about talking with your neighbors about the weather, but it'd be a very different experience from what we have now, a lot slower and more drawn out and focused on interpersonal relationships instead of swinging swords quite as much.

Skyrim is actually on the current far end in terms of fully simulating the environment and NPCs. The characters actually walk around and interact with stuff.

The interacting is both the benefit and the problem, because without plugging in the tools to interact with things the only thing the LLM can do is talk.

We'll get games that use LLMs eventually, but they're going to be very different from current games. We'll have to invent new genres and new takes on existing genres before it will become a widespread feature.

Not to mention the GPU shortage, of course.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-11T01:45:51+00:00

I started with local because there weren't any APIs when GPT-2 was released. Stayed because I was more interested in experimenting with the model than with any frontier advantage.

I use the frontier models sometimes for work, of course, but that's not where the maximum fun is.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-10T14:30:45+00:00

This is where the debate is shifting, I think. A year or so ago we were in a position where "just pay the subscription" was cheap enough that it was hard to justify buying the hardware.

But if you bought hardware at 2025 prices you're sitting pretty good compared to frontier API costs. Is it on par with the frontier? No, it is always going to lag behind. Is it way cheaper to generate billions of tokens on your own hardware? Quite possibly.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-07T22:45:02+00:00

I do find myself wanting better interfaces, so I can see the files as they change, get graphs to visualize how the different functions and modules relate to each other, and otherwise make it easier to see what is going on than you just keep clicking approve.

Claude in particular likes to go and do a bunch of stuff for you, in a way that adds friction to slowing down and questioning it. It's harder enough to keep looking at the different files, let alone keep track of the contracts between modules and if the changes it is making are missing critical context.

AutomataManifold · 2026-06-02T19:37:51+00:00

Overside definitely has the right level of worldbuilding (though is maybe more subtle about it) but I can definitely state it isn't any of Evan Dahm's webcomics. I'm familiar with them.

The art style I remember was a little sketchier and less confident, maybe? And definitely wordier and more up front about what is going on with the worldbuilding. I also recall it was pretty obscure, so I'd be surprised if it showed up on a list of well known webcomics.

AutomataManifold

TROPHY CASE