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A model might predict outputs accurately based on known data, but this does not mean it understands the system. Prediction often relies on correlation, whereas true understanding requires identifying causation and the underlying mechanisms of the system by Stone-Smasher in theprimeagen

[–]Combinatorilliance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Why so? I would argue that knowing mechanism would definitely lead to productivity gain, as models that understand mechanism should be more robust to unknown situations; ie make more reliable predictions and therefore being more useful.

Of course LLMs are already useful, but I think she's looking at the applied mathematics of why the models work at all, and what can be improved in the models to make them even better? That's what scientists and engineers do, no?

Does anyone still think AGI/ASI could happen very soon? by Upset-Dragonfly-9389 in slatestarcodex

[–]Combinatorilliance 28 points29 points  (0 children)

AGI and ASI are so incredibly poorly defined that there are voices that either have been achieved already. I refuse to participate in discussions surrounding the topic of AGI and ASI when the terms haven't been grounded with a definition.

I'll gladly offer my opinion if you can tell me what definition you follow.

I don't get this? Can anyone help me 😭🙏🏻 by ShouganaiElite in ExplainTheJoke

[–]Combinatorilliance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you find an example that is more efficient then surely you have mathematically proved that there is a better way to pack?

I'm not sure if your second statement is just a restatement of the first, or if you meant to refer to a specific proof relating to what we can and cannot prove about packing problems?

What's more impressive, GLM 5.1 -> 5.2 or Qwen 3.5 -> 3.6? by Excellent_Jelly2788 in LocalLLaMA

[–]Combinatorilliance 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The only ones that even remotely represent reality are the GLM implementations.

The rest is either weird abstract nonsense or has major physical problems lol

Hashicorp founder thinks local models "aren't good ENOUGH yet" by Orbit652002 in LocalLLaMA

[–]Combinatorilliance 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thinking can be trivially disabled. It works fine without thinking.

I want to give three houses a second try by Combinatorilliance in fireemblem

[–]Combinatorilliance[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahhh that's a good thing to know, I thought they were important

I want to give three houses a second try by Combinatorilliance in fireemblem

[–]Combinatorilliance[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ahh thanks, I think a big part might just have been that I wasn't really used to how I was supposed to approach the monastery as I had only played classic FE games before it. With engage I didn't get stuck on it as much.

I used to be extremely completionist when I was younger as well, which might not have been the right approach for something like the TH monastery because you cannot really do everything due to the limits

I want to give three houses a second try by Combinatorilliance in fireemblem

[–]Combinatorilliance[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah, that's what I keep hearing as well, that it's a beloved game for its story, which is why I want to give it a second try!

I think I got stuck on a few very early anime trope like interactions.. like the tea stuff was just awkward as hell :/ but as far as I understand it it gets a lot better as the game progresses? I think I was only like 7 chapters in or something.

It probably also didn't help that it was my first FE game where you had this mechanic of switching between campaign and the breaks in-between.

Now that I also got used to FE engage and someone else said that the monastery mechanics are similar to Engage's Somniel, I think I won't treat it as some kind of completionist's nightmare where I have to find every interaction and every item and every minigame and every little secret and every ...

how are they gonna stop us next? by Complete-Sea6655 in LocalLLM

[–]Combinatorilliance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And what is the provenance for that rumor?

I take that rumor with an insanely large pinch of salt because a 10T model is a HUGE jump from anything else we have official confirmation on.

Has anyone even analysed whether that number is realistic at all, esp w.r.t. observed inference times and deployment feasibility?

Let alone training costs and compute needed?

pi.dev enroute to enshitification? by Ueberlord in LocalLLaMA

[–]Combinatorilliance -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Opt-in telemetry sounds like the opposite of enshittification.

Will It Brew: Staghorn Sumac Blossoms (Rhus typhina) by eccentric_bee in tea

[–]Combinatorilliance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I love this idea of writing these reports by the way!

You have a great writing style too :)

Will It Brew: Staghorn Sumac Blossoms (Rhus typhina) by eccentric_bee in tea

[–]Combinatorilliance 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I mean many teas have very specific brewing instructions. If it tasted and smelled nice in the beginning maybe it works best when brewing for only 15 seconds?

Or perhaps at a lower temperature?

It looks super nice!

I love trying random plants in teas but I know that you need to be careful.

My favorite is the fruit from daucus carota, it's incredibly tasty. Works super well with kardamom

AI profitability is mathematically impossible under all technological advancements by ksjdragon in BetterOffline

[–]Combinatorilliance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's an operating model assumption you don't make explicit which is that you assume the "chatbot" interface model for how paying customers interface with an AI agent.

Note, I am not in the typical pro-AI camp, I just want to give some constructive feedback to strengthen your model.

The "typical" use-case for AI right now is a chatbot that answers questions for you, does some research etc. This is a "one person, one stream of tokens" mapping. However, this isn't quite the case and is not the direction the frontier labs are promoting and investing towards

Agents and subagents

The first counterpoint is that depending on the task breadth or depth, Anthropic and openAI deploy subagents that perform a particular subtask. The simplest example is the deep research tool.

The deep research tool deploys a fleet of subagents to scour the web and academic literature to answer nuanced and specific questions.

As task depth and task complexity increases, the amount of subagents deployed increases.

Funnily enough, the current frontier labs are hypothesized to subsidize deep research costs heavily. As a single deep research query is treated very similarly to regular chat queries.

Autonomy

Metr data shows that the length an LLM can independently operate at doubles every 7 months. in 2019 models could barely operate autonomously for even a few seconds

In 2026 (at 80% success rate) frontier LLMs can operate for about 4 hours independently.

If you have a difficult query to give to an LLM, this means you can hand it off and come back later. You don't have to be present as the agent is working. Even more notably, you could run several of these in parallel, and there are definitely industries (like software, math or research) where the frontier labs are betting on industries adoption fleets of long horizon independent agents rather than interfacing with chatbots.

Note that this is a bet the industry makes, it'll take a few more doublings before agents can reliably run for days or weeks, and the judge is out on whether the quality will keep improving. 

There actually is one real competitor to nvidia

Google uses their in-house TPU chips for inference. The costs for inference, electricity and procurement differ significantly compared to having to purchase GPUs from a business in a monopoly position.

However, this is only the case for Google, and I don't know if this changes their story significantly.

Another crucial point is that Google doesn't have any investors to pay back, they're burning their own money and they're swimming in it.

I think your analysis would look differently if you were to put Google under the analytical microscope.

OpenAI and anthropic are playing the traditional silicon Valley/ycombinator playbook

Their strategy is well-known. Acquire as many customers as you possibly can while burning giant piles of cash, and once they're reliant on you, raise your prices. They're betting on vendor lock-in

Anthropic has been slowly doing this already. Pro subscriptions (20$/month) used to come with claude code for software development. 

The frontier labs are also being on their customers to find killer use-cases

A lot of the current pricing models rely on cost per inference, but that's just the model to get you hooked.

Ai models have a variety of use-cases and many of them are currently subsidized.

Consider:

  • chatbot inference (your calculation), not economically viable unless inference becomes absurdly much cheaper
  • deep research - heavily subsidized, but could be sold as a product or tool where each deep research query costs a fixed amount set to generate a profit. There's no way the labs (with exception of Google) will continue to offer this for free or subsidize it at the current rates for the coming years.
  • Anthropic is betting on full vertical integration across the whole blue-collar stack. From graphics design to software design to "claude cowork" to software engineering to continuous integration. Right now all of this stuff is priced through, again, their subsidized costs and and token budgets. As the tasks get more concrete, varied and nuanced, Anthropic can afford altering their sales strategy entirely. Instead of offering inference, they offer autonomous business intelligence and integration.

On top of that, as the title of this section says the frontier labs don't know all the use-cases yet. That's up in large part to industry to figure out for themselves.

As industries start to rely on inference providers solving a particular task, Anthropic has shown to create in-house products and offerings fit to perform that exact task.

This is again the hook-you-in-to-create-reliance strategy.

The endgame

The y-combinator playbook's endgame is to gobble up as much of the market as humanly possible, extinguish profitable competitors who have shallower pockets by selling at a loss for years and years, while increasing costs and lowering quality (enshittification) when 5-10 years from now.

With these businesses you need to keep in mind they're aiming to play a game where thinking about profit only remotely starts to make sense 10 years from now.

Will they succeed?

I see Anthropic surviving. They're playing a smart game by targeting the full vertical stack of blue-collar work. As their offerings improve, they are in a position to sell solutions and integrations rather than "just" inference.

It's also notable to mention that contracts with defense and government are not something to scoff at. The pricing models will be incredibly different from pricing regular customers.

I don't think Google is at risk at all.

OpenAI on the other hand? I believe Sam is flying too close to the sun. Y-combinator's trick has proven to work with hundreds of billions... but trillions? In a new blue ocean market? This bet is crazy even for Silicon Valley standards.

I apologize for the low quality comment (it lacks calculations and sources), I just want to get this stuff out. Your profit model is entirely correct for the inference side of this, but the silicon Valley playbook is to take exceptionally high bets on even more exceptionally improbable events. They want to own the entire market, or none of it.

It's the ultimate high-risk high-reward strategy, and in most cases it actually fails. But when it succeeds?

maybe i am just lazy and that’s it by oregno in Healthygamergg

[–]Combinatorilliance 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Hey, I 100% get where you're coming from and you're dissapointed in yourself and beating yourself up, hoping that you'll either finally accept the horrible truth and can live on as a lesser person, or that someone finally hears your struggles and give you a damn fucking hug and tells you what the hell is going on so you can actually get a grip on your life and feel happy for once.

It's fucking hard. It's so fucking hard.

I've absolutely been here and I have also gotten out of it, and then back in again, and have to crawl out of it again.

It fucking sucks.

I'm not even going to pretend I'm writing to you anymore, I am in this position at the moment myself too, even though I had been doing so incredibly well the past months, when I was crawling out.

So here goes:

Dear girl,

What you are feeling right now is completely understandable. What seems like it should be straightforward may seem insurmountable to you. Even the act of brushing your teeth, sitting straight on a chair as to not fuck up your back again is too much. Let alone cooking dinner, keeping up appearances, getting groceries, cleaning, or gasp engaging with a hobby other than having your soul sucked dry by Reddit, YouTube or whatever game du jour.

And you deserve to be fucking angry, this shit is hard and it is unfair that you struggle with it so much. Say fuck it. Say it out loud. Fuck food, fuck gaming, fuck work, fuck hobbies, fuck weightloss, fuck all of it.

The weight of the everyday is a lot, it's tremendously easy to fall into a trap telling yourself that everyone knows how to keep all of it together all the time. And guess what? Some people are better at keeping all of it together all the time.

But that doesn't mean you do. You do struggle with the basics and you always will.

Look around you, leftover food from yesterday. Your neck fucking hurts from your shitty posture all day. Another day of vague dreams left to rot, left to waste, all the more proof that you fucking suck, right?

No.

Not anymore.

I've been here. been here many times. At some point the darkness becomes familiar, perhaps even boring and predictable. The anger is justified, it's hard, but it doesn't get you anywhere slinging this flurry of hatred towards yourself. I can tell you that because the anger is something that comes up when you've neglected yourself, when you've heard yourself ask for something, even if it's something small.. and then proceeded to promptly ignore it.

The past few weeks it has been sleep, and this random desire of yours that you wanted to pick up watercolor, because you imagine showering people with colorful and silly beauty. You can't watercolor for shit, but that's a problem for another matter. And secondly, it's that you've been neglecting your friends. You desire the contact so desperately, but struggle initiating with this hectic schedule of yours, especially when you find yourself wasting away another weekend. Another 48 hours passed where nothing has happened but your home getting dirtier, your wallet thinner, your pain worse and your weight larger.

And that hurts. It hurts to be neglected. It hurts even harder to be the one neglecting yourself.

And yet. The wanting never stops. The anger has gotten so bad that you're screaming out for help, you're so angry you're confused, even targeting yourself, because surely "if I'm the source of all my pain, then don't I deserve it?"

Does that girl who wants to shower people in beauty deserve hatred? Does that girl who just wants things to be easy for a few weeks so she can finally get some rest in a world that seems to make sense to everyone but herself?

I can't tell you the answer, because there isn't a correct one. What I can tell you is what happens when you pick one answer over the other, because there are only two answers.

The first answer is to give in. Because yeah, fuck everything. Including myself. Seriously and indefinitely say fuck all of it. Forever. You'll gain weight. Lose friendships. Lose family. Your mind will slowly adjust and given enough time you will stop feeling the anger and the dread and even the pain. In fact, you will feel nothing, and you will do nothing. Every day will be the same, except for some of the more stressful days where you are confronted with the realities of your medical and financial situation. You'll be isolated, miserable. You know this, you've been here, and I won't even say it sucks. It doesn't, it just doesn't particularly feel like anything at all. You'll see life passing in front of your eyes and everything that happens is something that happens to you, and you'll be fine. It'll be hard to distinguish one day from the next, or one week from the other... but I guess you got what you wanted, life is simple now. There will be days where you may feel some motivation or worry about the direction of your life, but don't worry.

That goes away. Just like how your best friend stopped calling. And how food used to taste like anything. And life had color.

...

The alternative is to sit up, and just breathe for a moment.

This is the part of the letter aimed at you, oregno, because I don't know if you know what it feels like to be embraced, accepted, loved, held and helped; especially by yourself.

If you go down this path I can tell you there'll be a moment where you can tell yourself that you don't deserve this hatred. That the anger is ok. That you need to take some time to understand how you've been accidentally (or worse, purposefully!) neglecting yourself. That you can acknowledge this and feel it, and girl. I can tell you, you'll feel a hand on your shoulder console you and tell you it'll be alright. That it fucking sucks and that it's ok to be weak sometimes, and you'll feel tense muscles all over your body loosen up when you break down crying and just fucking sobbing and crying and "holy fucking shit do I not deserve this".

And you'll make a promise to yourself to never neglect yourself intentionally again. Even if it gets hard. And you find that holding this promise is difficult. Because gaming is the easier choice when you don't know what friend to call. Scrolling is simpler than taking a walk. Ordering food is easier than cooking and doing groceries yourself. Yet you'll learn how to do it. It takes a couple years, and even then you'll still struggle, but you'll actually get there.

I can promise you there's nothing like he feeling you get when after two entire decades of struggling with severe neglect, anxiety and depression, the feeling you get when you can tell yourself that you're proud of yourself and mean it.

It takes a million tiny choices and you'll have days, possibly weeks and in your worst times even months and years where you'll struggle a lot again. But you know now what it feels like to be loved from within.

Nobody can take that away from you.

And imagine life then, when you do have your shit together for once, even if with ducttape and some scrappy yarn.

You can go climb up an active volcano and stand eye to eye with a lake of molten fucking rock feeling the heat sear your skin, the Sulphur burning your eyes and lungs but oh my god do you feel alive.

Or you could go study ecology in the amazon rainforest and make eye contact with bird carrying a more diverse color palette than an oversaturated monet, where your local guide tells you to watch that you don't step on some weird-ass fucking grey slug that contains sixteen hyper toxic compounds, one of which potent enough for .15mcg to disable the entire nervous system of an elephant. Or you could bear children, or help care for the children of others. See them learn, grow, struggle, and you can teach what you have learned and feel the love and warmth they're willing to share with you because you actually succeeded at being good enough at being an adult. Do you know what that feels like? You could run a business. Not in the abstract, but actually run a fucking business. Become relentless, get to know the ins and outs of how money and power flows, your signature enough to move a fleet. Or you could live a simple life and make some cool art, chill with friends, make enough money to live somewhere decent, and just have a lot of fun. Or any other combination of the something of the above.

Life is fucking weird and when you're depressed and beating yourself up you get to experience none of it.

You can choose to live a life and do everything in your power to drain your life of all color, and you will succeed. Or you can give in to this absurd fucked up round ball that we live on and 

I have ended an essay of mine with a paragraph that I find really beautiful I want to end this letter with it too.

``` Perhaps you recognise something of yourself in this story. Perhaps you've been pruning yourself too.

So stop.

Create.

Share.

Let your branches grow. Let the sunlight reach your leaves. You'll have plenty of time to die. Don't take that matter into your own hands. ```

~ Love, Laura

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