I am immediately skeptical of anyone who goes on Rogan's show. Looking him up the guy has a PhD in education psychology, and his masters was in electrical engineering. I'm curious how much expertise he truly has on the subject and whether this was just spin for his company's work vs the natural option of psilocybin.
Not that I doubt the benefit of a non-psychoactive treatment. Just the adjacency of this idea to Rogan makes me immediately suspicious.
I’m a skeptical person to, you should be skeptical, it’s healthy! I just find guys like this super interesting and it was a really fun listen.
He talked about how his whole career he just followed whatever was most interesting to him at the time, hence the different disciplines. He also talked about programs he ran at universities where he was in charge of bringing different disciplines together & the challenges of that since academia is incredibly siloed. Departments don’t talk to each other.
So I think people like him are very valuable, since they aren’t afraid to think it if the box, work on taboo subjects like “psychic” abilities, and see the universe in novel ways.
He mentioned they’ve done trials in mice and chimpanzees with very positive results. I’m not saying it’s some crazy breakthrough or anything, but it’s interesting and something worth keeping an eye on. It sounded also like the killer feature is the nasal delivery tech. I don’t think the are the first ones to study non psychoactive psilocybin like compounds, but the nasal delivery that can cross into the brain directly seemed important.
They're pissed about distillation "attacks" and locking down transformer based work to prevent that, would be my guess. Its how they'll protect "their" IP (Model Weights and other features) now that they've plundered the rest of the world's.
The announcement details it. They're storing 30 days of data on all surfaces, first and third party. They claim it is for security purposes so they can review and check for long term jailbreak and distillation efforts.
They also, FWIW, say that they've instituted new policies on their end such as logging any human access to the stored data and automated deletion after 30 days in "most" cases (with another link to a document detailing that further).
Valve did that little more than a decade ago, the original Steam Machines. It didn't take, and despite the success of the Deck and current techy trends, Linux does not have the % to make the ROI worthwhile if it isn't simple for developers. Proton is a wedge in the door that will help Linux get there.
A potential change in Valve's culture/management aside, "let valve do the work" is a feature, not a bug. Studio spends all their budget targeting one platform (which still has ~90+% of the PC gaming market), and get Linux support for free.
Windows' monopoly on game dev isn't just market share either, since game dev isn't just code. You still need Photoshop, Maya, etc. and in smaller studies there's typically a crossover where some devs are doing art as well. Visual Studio's C++ debugger is still one of the best, and the tooling elsewhere hasn't caught up yet (compared to DX + PIX).
Then you also have to solve distribution and handling the fragmented display & audio stack. It's gotten a lot better, but its still a factor.
I'm fine with most of the work going into Wine/Proton. A stable ABI for Linux is a boon, if it happens to be Win32 then so be it.
Hardly a monopoly, and the tooling has gotten there, on macOS, on PlayStation, on Switch, even on Android, it is better than GNU/Linux.
Valve isn't going to be around forever porting Windows games into Proton, which is actually hardly any different if they would start selling Nintendo games with Dolphin, if we ignore the legal implications for a moment.
And yet where are the native games for the platform?
Note how game developers rather spend their working hours in Windows with all its issues, even if they happen to have Linux servers for running their MMOs.
> And yet where are the native games for the platform?
My Steam library is full of old win32 games that run better on Linux than they do on Windows 11. There are some native games appearing because of the Steam Deck, but the fact is they aren't necessary.
Valve aren't simply better at running a platform business, they've thoroughly subverted Microsoft's old one and have done a better job at running that than Microsoft themselves.
Look at the absolute state of the XBox business: all native games, tens of billions spent on something, and yet it's just a trainwreck from top to bottom.
... after you watch these ads, or pay for our premium subscription. After all, those games aren't going to host themselves and your license doesn't allow an alternative.
He's made so many statements that fall under the "boy who cried wolf" category that even if he _does_ believe these statements he needs to be managed better. I'll never forget Anthropic's huge "Oh my God, the AI blackmailed a researcher to save itself!" and the prompt effectively told the AI to do that and gave it forged emails with easy blackmail targets, as if this isn't a common trope in mystery or suspense books/television/fanfiction, all of which Claude (and others) have been trained on.
It's a common trope, all through the training data, and all the modern AIs have read it, and would probably act similarly? Is that what we should take away from your comment?
so we have nothing to worry about. Makes sense. Really, it's just a common trope.
I'm saying the existence of the trope, within the training data, and the experimental setup, negate the breathless "Oh my god it did something unexpected in order to preserve itself!" as if an LLM has any sense of identity or self.
Many, many other bad things are in the training data. For an example of how this can manifest bad things that people don't seem to be discussing too much check out the recent Behind the Bastards episodes about how an AI Chatbot became a Cult Leader (The title is an exaggeration that the host explains while raising some excellent points about how LLMs have ingested a lot of cult leader material and can therefore mimic those speech patterns and impact people vulnerable to such things)
Imagine you're in a car and the car is driving towards a cliff. You shout at the driver "oh my god we're about to go over a cliff!" And he says "you said that two seconds ago, but we're still alive, you're just like the boy who cried wolf. Do you know exactly when we're going to go over a cliff? No? Maybe you're imagining the cliff."
I think it's very improbable that AI is as dangerous as Yud et al fear it is. But it's too soon to say and there seems to be significant long-tail risk. Mocking or criticizing people for being concerned about that risk seems counterproductive.
Seems like the life cycle of huge tech companies like meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon is "do whatever's necessary to take over the world, then enshittify." I don't take it for granted that Amodei and Anthropic seem to not quite be maximally power hungry?
Re: second half of your comment. Understanding a threat doesn't neutralize it. Anthropic didn't make that big a deal of it either; it was news articles that blew it out of proportion.
The inspiration may have been all "crazy" but the implementation was still really neat, and it takes a lot of effort and skill to get to the point he did before his death. The thing about people who lose touch with reality is that their efforts to create or express something often make no sense to the rest of us. TempleOS, however, works. Terry create an OS from scratch, an entire new language (or variant of a language) in the form of HolyC, and not only does it all work together in a way that requires no disconnect from reality, it works well for his goals and philosophy.
The entire thing may be the result of a person suffering from schizoaffective disorder, but that person still held a great deal of skill to implement that idea and enough of a touch with the reality of computer hardware to make it happen.
Given that Terry described the manic episodes as "a revelation from God" I think theopneustos is an accurate description. It just means "God Breathed" or "Inspired by God"
Not that I doubt the benefit of a non-psychoactive treatment. Just the adjacency of this idea to Rogan makes me immediately suspicious.
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