Well it is the best way to do a 'fuzzy' filter like that. Rather than trying frantically to chase keywords.
I don't think anyone considers AI to be something useless. It sure has its uses, I use it a lot to help with research. But it is sometimes shoehorned into things it doesn't belong, or its capabilities overblown for marketing. I think that's what people object to.
This is where I’m at. I find AI to be useful but there’s a tendency for it to suck the oxygen out of the room. Other things still matter.
Edit: I'll also note that while its nice to see real novel AI news I find a lot of it is extremely marginal value. I mentally associate most discussion with debating what color of marker to use when marking the edge of your CDs to improve the sound.
Yeah I didn't word that well at all, at least you know it wasn't an LLM.
I meant I don't really care, I keep half an eye on what they are up to (have to live in the same world as them) but I'm not really interested in it at all beyond playing with some local models, the constant onslaught of it has just become tiresome, then I got to YT to watch my usual history content which mentions something I didn't know about so I do a search to see if there is a video on that and that is wall to wall AI slop and that annoys me so I go to do something else, do a search and the results are slop if the AI doesn't try and answer it for me first.
It just feels like if you want to do anything on-line you get force fed slop whether you want it or not and it's damn hard to filter it, can't even block channels on YT without an extension.
In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.
That said, plenty of Chinese people genuinely believe Chinese civilization has been the most advanced since antiquity, and that the sophistication of ancient Greek and Western civilization should be questioned.
Sturgeon’s law is absolutely true. Just look at the religious ideas and worldviews children have been taught for thousands of years, and at the hatred, wars, massacres, and slavery religion has brought into the world. Modern dictatorships like North Korea and China also subject children to carefully engineered indoctrination. I think modern AI, and future AI guided by humans, can do much better than Sturgeon’s law would suggest.
Trump is of course the worst US administration, but at least America is still nominally a democracy. As long as free elections exist, the regime Trump represents can be voted out. The American people and press still have free speech—they can freely criticize anyone, including Trump.
China is different. The CCP will rule forever, no matter how terrible the things they do. No one is allowed to criticize the government. Xi is like Voldemort—no one can say his name, let alone criticize him.
Trump has made some concerning moves around freedom of speech and freedom of elections, but none of it is concrete yet. Maybe it never will be, either because the threat was overstated or because he’s just not competent enough to pull it off.
China does worse on those fronts, but they do so predictably. I don’t agree with many of their goals, but you can generally rely on them pursuing those goals in a manner consistent with their values. Ie I’m not often taken aback by how they respond, it’s within the realm of things I’d expect.
The US is concerning because their behavior is wildly unpredictable, which makes them unreliable even if their values align better with mine (purportedly, anyways). I have no idea when or if Fable will be back, or what kind of modifications the government will demand, or if this will apply to other models, and whether any of that is going to impact Anthropics or OpenAIs ability to release models.
I was already wary of Claude Code and Codex because I don’t like being tied to a provider-specific tool (I don’t trust they won’t cut off swapping the API URL), and now that’s even worse because I’m not even sure either will stay at the front of the pack. I’m sure as hell not using a vendor locked tool tied to the 5th best model provider (if they fall).
China is unpredictable; you never know where their red lines are. An Australian journalist got years in prison for leaking something that was about to be public anyway. The founders of Manus also had their freedom of movement restricted. Entrepreneurs who invested in China have said they can’t get their money out.
If China, or Chinese companies, end up with a monopoly-like advantage in AI, the result will be like the current rare-earth situation. China will absolutely put strict controls on AI models, and that would be much worse than depending on OpenAI or Claude.
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