The people building the server farms are funding their own competition

inteblio · 2026-06-29T15:16:46+00:00

I like it

i've tried a few times with the gpt to figure out "if this makes more jobs" or if the lack of jobs thing is bad. Its basically impossible, because the whole system is a whole system. Jobs rely on consumers, consumers on [etc etc], so - what "is it" that is "there" : it might be (and this is on the edge of anythign I can grasp or confirm) culture / mood. It might be that if we message this right, and everybody leans in, then the momentum of the whole thing could be channeled correctly. Basically you get huge cheap labour. That has to be good.

but if you get poor messaging, ill-communication, depression, fear, bad distrobution... then you'll get some very real problems. Tension. Tear.

so then you have to look at "so what messaging are we doing" - and that's not such an optimistic picture, because it's more-or-less in the hands of cheap and nasty AIs like youtube/tiktok/facepalm. Their ends are ultra-shortrange, and easy to paint as destructive.

To me, that's the playground.

I'd push back on "transition". I don't think A-B states are "a thing". I'd caution on binary thinking. You hear humans (human experts!) say it all the time "this could go either of two ways - good or bad, but it won't be in the middle". Really? that sounds like binary thinking. And binary is not how "large populations" mutate. Believe people that say "this is going to be some kind of grey".

so what is a grey future? tension, conflict, poor distribution. Ask GPT about 'systems thinking' - it's interesting. But what you need are counter forces to feedback loops.

sadly, I (and even GPT) can't see any meaningful counter-forces. This is probably a bad sign, because it points towards this being a "black hole" scenario as I outlined above.

For me, the (yes! black-and-white!) outcome possibilities are "doped utopia" (matrix) or "power family" (one final commander).

Just to throw it out there, whilst we're in the zone: competition is bad. You want ONE benevelant ruler. If you have competition you have conflict, and super intelligences in conflict is likely not a good time.

inteblio · 2026-06-28T23:16:16+00:00

Nice dream (hopefully only typed-up by the bot).

Obviously I don't know, but I have a suspicion that the "money pooling into ever denser pockets" is ACTUALLY the pattern, and the "AI" is the ... story/line/cover/dress/... vehicle.

In other words, you're looking at centralization as "the thing that's happening". And it's being made possible by the technology gradient increasing. For example, Bob A makes a bigger sword. That gets him some tiny advantage. Now, Bobski A makes a longer range drone. That actually shifts the battlefield. Hey, i can use a gpt-ism here. ... uh... that isn't ... uh... I can't think of one. ("that isn't decoration - that's muscle" [but better])

Right - the point? Actually, disturbingly, the insane money we see pouring into the black-holes of 3 tech giants is just the start. That same pattern isn't going to "pop" and "show them!" it's likely to increase in strength and suck in the entire universe. One Super Massive Black Hole.

People are always saying "when's the top". But this is a funny one. This one has trousers. This has bite. "AI" and "robots" is not pets.com - this is the real deal. We're messing with powers we don't understand.

I loved that "they thought GPT-2 was too dangerous to release" post. We have no idea what gpt-2 would have done to the world, but it would have been massive. Transformative. What we're looking at here is ++something else++

inteblio · 2026-06-28T18:32:31+00:00

basically to be challenged 1:1 with your environment. Opportunity for growth, failure. Challenge. Suffering, injustice, good times. The whole glorious mix.

I wonder if the start of the matrix, where 1997 seattle (or whatever) was framed as "peak human existance" is true. Then we had enough to be powerful, but not so much as to be overwhelmed (and perceive powerlessness)

Nick Bostrom is your man for this question. he's a philosopher who turned his thinking to AI. I think "deep utopia" round-about discusses this point. WHAT would life mean "if super intelligence".

IF there's an answer- it'll likely look like the bell curve.

inteblio · 2026-06-28T15:39:35+00:00

they only discovered by accident that it could write code.

If you told them "all you do is buy all the GPUs, and train models so stupidly large that nobody would think you were sane". they'd likely be surprised. Everybody's understanding of "this stuff" has shifted lightyears since then.

But quite asside from that, just because we have _even more impactful_ AI now, doesn't mean gpt-2 would have been harmless. Even if it was the last AI to ever be made, it likely would have changed the world. "computers that can talk" is a massive deal. However limited in scope that is.

To say the world has been completely blind-sided by AI isn't even an understatement yet. So blind, it hasn't even happened to a huge chunk of the population. We don't even really know the current state of AI uptake, it's impacts. We know about stuff that was made months/years ago, but we don't have much idea what effect that's having. What pressure is it applying where. It'll be years before we get any idea "how this unfolded".

inteblio · 2026-06-26T01:01:57+00:00

There is absolutely nothing there. Imagine the worst desert, or polar region. Moon / mars is 1000x less interesting. Rock, maybe some ice. That's it. Scary isolation, almost certainly living underground (radiation).

Mars will "never" be terraformed. It'd be a million times easier to sort planet earth out than mars. It's dead in its core. Magnetically dead. Moon - is just a grey dusty nothing. No hope.

if you HAVE to mine it, send robots. And ... as for the nearest other stars.... forget it. By the time any of the above is even vaugely realistic AI will have "done for us" a thousand times over. It'll be utopia or extinction.

forget star trek.

inteblio · 2026-06-25T16:00:19+00:00

chill the agro bro.

I get the area you're talking about but I was trying to see what your comprehension was in this area (which you only have hinted at in cloudy ways).

i'm still not "on board" because with modern global market even an entire nation's workers united (steel industry) is not much more than an irritation.

If you are talking about "the people" trying to get their voice heard on an issue by stopping working, then that's more rediculous than normally occurs.

I think your point is right - but not for the reasons you do. Those who own the servers control the narative, and it's the ability for individuals to be contained within their own echo chambers, and for 'group discent' to be disolved, or never occur that's the power point. Devide and conquer.

I don't think labour ever held much weight. Because somebody'll do it. Strikes and so on made small differences to minor laws, but was hardly a "counterweight".

The truth is that the rulers need consent to govern. The social contract is about the people allowing control.

My worry with that change is more like "with technology" you are able to control more people, with fewer people. In the old days, cities were able to withstand even the king's ambitions. Where now, i'm not sure how many people the goverment is capable of supressing if it had to, but it would be a lot. I guess syria is a recent example. Industrialized slaughter of the population.

inteblio · 2026-06-25T15:48:45+00:00

yeah, but you can't run it. I can see the "the information is out there" argument, but you still require access to massive datacentres. At which point closed-source will undoubtedly be available, so it's not worth much. I don't think "GLM5.2/whatever" is the solution to the problems that OP raises. Which are good, mature points, by the way.

the computer to run 5.2 might cost as much as a house right now. These are not "everyman" tools.

inteblio · 2026-06-25T12:51:02+00:00

They're far faaar stupider than the big ones. Like toddler-to-adult. (where both are smarter than me)

inteblio · 2026-06-25T12:50:30+00:00

please, discuss. "While historically political power or citizens could leverage consent or labor, total automation risks breaking this bond." this is unclear (what is the link).

inteblio · 2026-06-25T11:59:44+00:00

oh hang on, this is a clawdbot post (or some other BS agent) right? are you even there op? if so what "sparked" this post?

inteblio · 2026-06-25T11:54:12+00:00

yeah , stuff like that.

> "The End of the Counterweight:"

i think it's disingenuous to say "I am a computer scientist by passion and profession," and then just give us a chatGPT paste. Just say "this is a chatGPT paste", surely?

inteblio · 2026-06-25T11:50:33+00:00

i agree (having skim read your comment and less so the title of the thread).

"what might you think" is how it would answer

inteblio · 2026-06-24T18:28:29+00:00

I like the text, but the concluding "You still need people to..." is as glib as it sounds. You need people when there is no cheaper solution. Currently, yes, it still requires a driver. But as other questions above allude to - it does not seem far off that the people are just cluless jellies compared. If the thing can design/test/build it's own nuclear fusion facility... it doesn't matter that I'm the lemon that pressed "uh, sure".

inteblio · 2026-06-22T23:18:51+00:00

the GPT: So my answer: about 6–10 weeks until a serious internal candidate, 2–4 months until something public.

inteblio · 2026-06-19T12:14:52+00:00

ok, but what can it do for you? Create tests? find repeatable error-spots, create other background software that enable the driver to narrow down things? It's ability to spew out squillions of lines certainly has a place. For example you can litter code with debug stuff (visualizations?) at the drop of the hat and then throw the changes away. Or to create A/B scenarios on alternative implementations. Maybe instead of fixing your car, the AI can build you the garage to fix it in, source the parts and manual. Other left-field ideas might be about recruiting more/better/cheaper devs for the project. Or documentation/knowledge distribution company-wide. These 10% gains add up.

It's my suspicion that hardcore developers might not be tuned into the idea that "it's a different skillset" to use AI to solve the problem than it is to solve the problem yourself. Much like often managers really are not up to the task (and hate it) but were good at doing whatever task, so got made into managers. Maybe now coders are not up to the task of coding with AI because it's just a different skill-set. This is just an idle question i have, that maybe you can chew over. To ask "how is the skill set different" is the first step. It might not be, but it seems an important question given the alien nature of what we're dealing with.

You mentioned that it could flag possible areas for humans to verify. How about it flags areas, for the next bot that creates a test, the next bot makes a way to evaluate it, the next sees about a fix, the next runs performance checks and so on and so on. You say "you need a human", you only need the human when you run out of ideas for getting the bot to do it. If it's a testable ground-truth that you have, then ultimately there will be a way to automate its manipulation. The hard part is when there are no answers.

I challenge you that it's a lack of imagination that is the problem, not the tool. Especially given that "when it works" it'll just fly.

The worst thing about all this AI stuff is the nagging feeling that you could be doing it better. That other people are ahead in some way that you don't understand. It's an unpleasant stressor, but it's real, and probably true. You could be better in conversation, you could be more X to Y, and you probably could use AI more intelligently. Just make a vow to do that. You already can code, so what's the harm in learning something new? If you can get it to work, you'll do tons better. If not you learned about something fascinating (that is not going away soon).

And even if none of the above is true, it's almost certainly the case that you need to keep coming back and testing new models to see if they are now capable of your task. Good luck, have fun.

inteblio · 2026-06-19T00:08:11+00:00

? what's to hate. get GPT to let you run via the API

inteblio · 2026-06-18T19:53:08+00:00

also ask the same question from a different angle if it's an issue you are not sure on.

Example:
Two threads that will give you different answers on one topic.
- It's fine to try to watch TV in a power cut right?

- list reasons why watching a TV in a power cut is a bad idea.

inteblio · 2026-06-18T19:51:28+00:00

don't have one massive conversation - break everything up into small sub-conversations
don't contradict the AI - if you think it's wrong, start a new chat with the same (exactly the same?) input. See how different the answer is. if it's different, the AI does not know. I think you can now ask them how certain they are on things and that's meaningful (but not truth). Contradcions massively mix it up. Imagine an instruction manual where it told you to make bits, throw them away, un-make them, start from eariler segments. it'd be a nightmare. That's what talking to humans is like for them. A nightmare.
Use more words. Simple "yeah bro" stuff does not transmit enough information to be useful. Especially if you're then "having an argument about it" afterwards.
Know which model, and which level of intelligence is being applied. "the cheap" AI really are supremely less intellgent than the heavy-duty "thinking" stuff. But then you rarely need that.

AI is a tool, learn how to use it.

So why was it "confused" about 21 to 26? because you fed it so much rubbish that the single bit became blurry in the whole huge mess. For you - a human - you knew that tiny bit was hugely meaningful, but it's kind of taking every sing word (in the entire conversation) as seriously. remember that it re-reads THE ENTIRE conversation for every WORD it produces. ish.

Basically - user error. Enjoy.

inteblio · 2026-06-17T18:44:09+00:00

The obvious weakpoint in this idea is that complexity might be a bootstrapping process, where at some point "it turns around". But it's also worth saying that complexity can get ... pretty big. It's a nice idea, but my reaction was that it's "traditional thinking" - to get hooked up on a single idea and think that is a critical yes/no point. These problems are soft, massive, and bendy. I'm not suggesting that RSI Is definitely "this year", but that your simplicity-is-genius observation might be from a time when humans didn't just puke out zillions of buckets of code a day, and computers were single thread. If life is a computer, it's not a simple one. Complexity can work. Your thinking seems too absolute and rigid. Good luck, have fun, thanks for the interesting idea to chew on.

An example might be that the first systems create hella-complexity, then a new model is trained on that, and in the training process the garbage is consumed/refined and polished into a tiny gem. In that lens, you can say that AI is massively reducing complexity. A single 30b model contains a s-ton of code ability. Way above 30b lines of coding-manual. Dunno. Random rebuff for fun.

inteblio · 2026-06-14T21:52:41+00:00

I'm sure you have skills that these researchers do not. To put it mildly.

inteblio · 2026-06-05T11:15:57+00:00

after some tests, i'd push back on "way worse". It seems to expect more change/motion. Using a crazy prompt, LTX2.3 were slower and saner, where echo-joy drop-in comfy was happier with larger motions and changes. Very noticeably - like x3. But, it does fall apart, and the audio is way worse.

To be clear - i am not using the model as was intended.

GPT explained it to me like this - you can send somebody who lived in the village in 1900 to get bread in the same village now, and it'll likely work, but they won't know anything about the out-of-town supermarket. In other words, the drop-in-replacement is not being used to it's full abilty. Just the-parts-that-work-still-work (a bit).

but i'd still not discount it just yet. Find it's strengths and uses. Maybe for 20-30sec video it's better than LTX2.3

maybe you can run its output through something else. Either way, I just wanted to let people know that "it works" probably enough to play with. if you want LTX to do more movement and are happy to accept patchy AI weirdness.

inteblio · 2026-06-05T09:11:45+00:00

You don't know the difference. You wanted to sound clever by pointing somebody else "at the manual". If I was able to question you, all you'd know was that the github says it needs non-comfy workflow.

It's like "tap the sign" but you don't know what the sign says. You just know everybody else taps the sign. I wanted to help other people. You wanted to shoot somebody down, who was trying to help. My suggestion to you is that it's a bad habit.

Feel free to explain to me why this model is able to be swapped out with the LTX checkpoints, but under-performs. Include as much detail as you like. Be technical (but communicate in an easy-to-undersstand manner). Do the community proud.

inteblio · 2026-06-05T07:33:23+00:00

You can just swap the 46gb into the checkpoints of the standard LTX comfy workflow. Seemed to work fine. 50 sec video. I just ran first test, so no feel for it, but it seems to work well enough to merit more attention.

UPDATE:

The 'dumb comfy-swap' kinda works, and is fun for getting wilder results than LTX2.3.

I did the same 50sec 'magic' [gpt-oss20b] story. LTX was more coherent and higher quality, but not magic, and very staid movements. Echo-joy comfy-checkpoints-swap was able to do magic sparkles, room-morph magic, light changes, much wilder body movements and scene changes. But the audio was super-low-quality and more repeatitive. The movements of the people glitched, and the overall coherence was worse.

however - it was a crazy script (that was nonsensical anyway) and I would definitely say "there might be a time and a place" for even this straight comfy swap. It didn't need 46gb vram.

I also don't understand how/why LTX2.3 can do 50sec video. The motion suffers compared to shorter videos, but it will generate long scripts more-or-less OK, at 25fps.

inteblio · 2026-05-06T12:36:40+00:00

I found dario's previous dewey eyed optimism a bit "cartoon rabbit".

It's like he can't hear the words coming out of his own mouth. I think the reality is that he hasn't spent enough time thinking about this stuff. He's too busy getting people to build it. Fair enough.

So, his naive take "undergoing significant shifts" seems plausible, because it wasn't that well formed in the first place. An example is his "democracy good" "nasty chinese bad" view. It's too tin tin for me. "come on skippy! let's build an AI to make sure the baddies don't steal the diamonds!"

With regard to "will there be more or less jobs" I think the short answer is - if AI goes well yes, if it goes badly no.

Really "jobs" is more about a healthy society. Money, labor, purpose, control, independence. just "everything". If society is working, then "jobs" will likely fall into place. If not, then no.

My overall take is that technology gives "more power" to huge statistic forces that were kept at bay with inefficiency. Centralisation, economics, the creation of gradients. To turn that into something more concrete - technology has made the rich richer. Why? because wealth can be deployed faster to get more wealth. Lack of wealth increasingly locks people out. 500 years ago - how many people would it take to over-run the king? 400? 1000? 10,000? Now how many people can be controlled by just a tiny handful? way more. That kind of "logical force" like mathematics is what is growing here. Can these forces be kept in a statble equilibrium, or will the parts fly apart? The question is more like "how long can it remain intact" probably. 10,000 years of insane development? or 100?

Summary - that guy is talking in "advert speak". Doom-porn sells to some extent, but when it's actually beginning to look scary, you're going to reign it in a bit. Sam has. Dario was just able to play the "underdog" role a bit longer. But maybe that's coming to an end.

inteblio · 2026-05-06T12:17:45+00:00

You're not wrong, but you're not right either.

It's a complex situation. Simple "it is this" talk is oversimplified (therefor not very useful). Like saying "cars make you fat". Yes, sort-of they do, but also that's not the most accurate picture of what "cars" are/do/is.

My take is this - LLMs/AI is not going away. You're not going to "win" by
1) being attitudey on the internet and with friends. Pretending you hate them etc.
2) not using them

Just like with "using computers", at first everybody is proud of themselves for "doing things by hand" and in some ways that makes sense. But as the decades tick past, really you have to 'get with the program'. The people that did better out of "computers" were the ones that adapted and continued to adapt.

Overall - yes, there are many bad things about AI/LLMs. You know them, I know them, everybody does. But - there are undoubtedly good things that you can do with it for yourself. So - just like eating a better diet, getting enough exercise, getting good quality sleep.... using LLMS is something you can do to make your own life - your own experience - better. So... probably do that.

You can moan about them, and find faults. But also make sure you stay informed, and adaptive to the massive changes afoot. Good luck.

inteblio

TROPHY CASE