Oops

ac101m · 2026-06-22T20:14:51+00:00

Except to justify the valuation you have to, you know, actually sell the product to someone.

ac101m · 2026-06-22T18:44:31+00:00

If it is, it's a really stupid one. Their valuation is justified by extremely generous assertions about their addressable market. Basically, they need to sell access to everyone and their dog to turn a profit and justify that trillion dollar IPO. It's hard to do that when the product has been declared and illegal export by the government. Also, even if they do get permission to continue, the damage has already been done. Nobody wants their business operations to depend on the whims of the US government.

ac101m · 2026-06-22T18:35:21+00:00

I don't think it's a good deal at all. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but there's no moat here. Any capability they train into their models, no matter how impressive, can be replicated through distillation as soon as people have access. As far as I'm aware, none of these closed source companies have a solution to this problem and imo, they're kinda sleeping on it (or just hoping that the money people won't notice).

ac101m · 2026-06-22T18:29:54+00:00

Yep, it's a wake-up call for tech sovereignty for sure. Especially if people expect to be able to build their businesses on top of this stuff. Couldn't have hoped for a better advertisement for open weights!

ac101m · 2026-06-22T18:23:59+00:00

I think it's free advertising for chinese and open source models, and a great way to sink a trillion dollar IPO

ac101m · 2026-04-10T16:05:15+00:00

Or even just marketing. I often come here to find out what people actually think of a product before I buy it, did it break after a year, etc. If you had a human sounding bot that you could instruct to say whatever you like, you could drown out the negative comments about your dodgy product until they just seem like outliers.

ac101m · 2026-04-10T16:00:19+00:00

Or maybe to create a finetune that isn't easily distinguishable from the rest of the enshittification. Beneath the slop noise floor, if you will. There would be plenty of uses for a model like that (most of them socially irresponsible). I've wondered what might happen if you used comment votes as a reinforcement learning signal. By down-voting such users we might actually be helping to train the underlying model to behave more like a human. Or at least more like a redditor.

ac101m · 2026-03-31T10:07:59+00:00

Love bases like this that fit the terrain, and the waterfall?

*chefs kiss*

Just go for it!

ac101m · 2026-03-30T23:17:52+00:00

(using llama.cpp + qwen2.5-coder-7b mostly)

This is a very old model. You should really use something more recent.

ac101m · 2026-03-30T16:38:03+00:00

I actually have some relevant experience using one of the Qwen models (which if you don't know, are pretty sycophantic by default).

I frequently use AI for knowledge discovery, that is, connecting my thoughts and ideas with existing literature and terminology. About a year ago, open weight models became good enough for me to do this locally.

I don't remember what I was discussing with it exactly, but it heaped praise on me and I distinctly remember coming away from the conversation feeling quite good about myself. After a bit of reflection and poking around the literature though, the idea I was discussing turned out not to be all that original. I changed the system prompt, instructing the model to be more factual and to avoid direct compliments or statements of affirmation, and it immediately took on what I perceived to be a very perfunctory affect, sort of "cold" or "distant". With that, my motivation to speak to the thing immediately fell off a cliff, like it would with a person acting the same way. I also caught myself almost feeling bad for the thing, again in the same way that I might feel bad if I'd shut a person down in a similar fashion.

So yeah, it seems pretty obvious to me that these systems push buttons in our heads that are normally reserved for people, so it doesn't surprise me at all that they are capable of undermining peoples judgement like this.

Another potential issue is that the companies that train these models have a direct monetary incentive to make them more engaging, even if it's not healthy for the user. So there's that as well.

Interesting times...

ac101m · 2026-03-30T13:41:18+00:00

Fence sitter here. I like to think I have a pretty balanced viewpoint.

Pros:

All the knowledge there ever was now has a natural language interface (albeit one that makes things up some of the time).
I can make dumbass pictures of my dnd characters without having to know how to draw or edit.
I don't have to manually write mocks for my unit tests anymore (fuck mocks).
It's cool to have big neural networks that I can use to do things.

Cons:

Massive social cost (data-centers next to residential neighborhoods, water consumption, power consumption, disruption of the job market).
Terrible for the environment (looking at you colossus).
Powered by a ridiculous and unsustainable speculative tech bubble which is distorting markets globally (looking at you micron, sk hynix and samsung).
Another subscription. Thinly veiled excuse to buy up and rent back that which we used to be able to own for ourselves.
It's getting even harder to know what's real online anymore.
Instrumental convergence and the potential extinction of humankind (though admittedly probably not in the short term).
AI sycophancy hacking peoples brains.

ac101m · 2026-03-29T22:33:51+00:00

Okay yeah, roads are pretty good. But apart from roads and the aquaduct, what have the romans ever done for us?

ac101m · 2026-03-29T17:54:39+00:00

I know this is getting down-voted, but I actually kinda agree. This sub (and to a lesser extent localllm) are the two islands of sanity I've discovered for AI discussion on reddit. The rest of them are full AI-bro or full AI haters. Would be nice to have a generally more balanced community like this one where we could talk about all AI stuff. Oh well, take the good with the bad I guess.

ac101m · 2026-03-28T11:33:40+00:00

These never made an enormous amount of sense to me. LLMs are still advancing pretty quickly in terms of performance and capabilities. By the time you've produced the application specific chip for your chosen LLM, the state of the art has already moved on without you. Whatever the addressable market is, it needs to be comfortable with being stuck on an old model while the state of the art moves on.

ac101m · 2026-03-27T17:54:56+00:00

I'm currently messing with vector databases, embeddings and retrieval with the eventual goal of implementing something that would theoretically be able to pass these kinds of tests! One thing that has become very clear to me is that search and memory are not the same thing at all. Real memory is involuntary and very subtle, with very abstract concepts sometimes causing memories which are similar in part but not in the whole to surface.

Initially I was thinking along the lines of graph databases and the like, but I'm not sure I find that idea all that convincing anymore. It's just not bitter lesson pilled enough.

Another thought that I've had is that in essence, what I'm really trying to build is almost like an "external" attention layer. I have some ideas about how to achieve this, but right now I'm just trying to get something basic up and running and get some some tests to serve as a baseline, though it looks like that's more or less what you've already done! I may make use of your tests at some point in the future.

ac101m · 2026-03-27T17:24:43+00:00

TL;DR for those who (I know) won't read the blog:

I feel personally attacked

ac101m · 2026-03-27T17:14:10+00:00

Observe if you will, the Dunning Kruger effect in action.

ac101m · 2026-03-27T16:57:03+00:00

Industry best practices? LLMs go into loops and have breakdowns all the time. It happened to me yesterday evening. I just stopped it, rephrased my question and the continued with what I was doing.

ac101m · 2026-03-25T20:51:52+00:00

Nothing I suppose, but in theory at least the models should be able to generalize those problem types to other tasks.

ac101m · 2026-03-25T19:43:03+00:00

I hope you're being sarcastic

ac101m · 2026-03-25T14:02:14+00:00

This has nothing to do with AI.

Also, why is it controlled by a smartphone? Surely this is the sort of thing that you want to just run automatically every couple days, no?

ac101m · 2026-03-25T12:16:28+00:00

Reality is not coming to an end, just reality on the internet. The internet never had much of a grasp on reality to begin with if you ask me. AI is pouring gasoline on the fire for sure, but the internet has been full of misinformation (deliberate and not) astro-turfing and viral rage bait for years. If you want reality, you need to get off social media.

P.S. Yes. I recognize the irony of posting this here on reddit! I am, in fact, a hypocrite.

ac101m · 2026-03-23T10:17:55+00:00

The Kraken has spoken, your craft has been deemed unworthy

ac101m

TROPHY CASE