vslira's blog

     Related links: Reddit thread , HN thread     A few thoughts:     I fully understand the schadenfreude on the part of the SWE community. These things are possibly an existential threat to their livelihoods and the negativity is fully understandable if not misguided, but these victory laps seem to be repeating a common pattern of not waiting a couple months(!) before these systems improve, very publicly, from a mix of better models and now actively incremented training data from MSFT employees. This is the worst this system will ever be and looking in the improvement rate of the last few months should teach people to wait a little bit before condemning the effort fruitless     On a tangential note, I wonder if this public effort is somehow related to Github's new updated rate limits ( hn discussion ). All this juicy data PLUS expert human feedback out in the open ready to be used for distillation is an obvious target to upstarts trying to...

As I write this post, the board of directors of OpenAI is under extreme pressure to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO and giving him complete control of the company while they're at it. If they don't do that, it's likely that they'll lose the company's financial backers, compute enablers and a significant portion of their most important employees - the proverbial members of technical staff. Oh, and be sued to high Heaven by Satya  Nadella. Far from accusing Sam of being just talk as the title of this post may imply, but however intelligent he is what he brought for the company certainly wasn't his AI development capabilities, but the external and internal support that the company needed to move forward. Contrary to everything I would like to be true, this skill - convincing people, selling to them - is more important than being able to build what they want. Technically being able to, I mean, because actually forming a team to deliver, and presenting it in a way that c...

Intro My media consumption is too provincial, mostly focused on national publications and major US outlets. I feel like there's a lot of stuff happening outside my view, so I started listing English language news publications around the world to use as references for significant events in the future and maybe following different perspectives on trends. I started with East and Southern Asia due to a mix of the region's share of global economic activity and population and focused on business-oriented publications because I was interested in understanding how different regions(' economic elites) read global developments. I don't know if these papers lead their respective geography, or how meaningful they are, but I tried to get major names from a not too deep Wikipedia reading. Greater China Mainland Caixin Global Hong Kong Interestingly enough, I didn't find on Wikipedia an obvious English-language business oriented publication. I'm sure there is one, or many, but...