Tim

New Tier 1 actually; Shanghai is very much China for amateurs, of course - but that’s irrelevant; you might not realise this but the vast majority of Chinese also don’t live in Shanghai.

I mean, I’m not particularly bothered about convincing anyone else, but personally I am absolutely 100% sure that no technology that is cogniscant of absolutely nothing but tokens of language (entirely arbitrary human language at that, far from any fundamental ground truth in itself), that is entirely incapable of discerning any actual meaning from that language other than which tokens appear likely to follow another, is absolutely never, under any circumstances, going to lead to AGI.

Yann LeCun is probably heading down a more realistic path to AGI with his world models - but for as long as my cat has a few orders of magnitude more synapses than Anthropic’s most world beating model has parameters, I’m not going to get to stressed about that either.

The thing is, all this can be true (and I don’t really understand why you’re being downvoted,) but it’s also true that LLMs are no more evidence that we are close to AGI than Eliza was.

AGI is inevitable, but it won’t come from an LLM, and all the hype in that direction from Anthropic, OpenAI et al is just so much bullshit.

The problem is, we don’t need AGI to experience the catastrophic consequences; as bad or worse will be idiotic human intelligences putting very-much-not-AGI in charge of things it has no right to be in charge of because they drunk their own koolaid (or rather, the investors did.) That, unfortunately, is the future we are speedrunning - SkyNet never needed AGI, it just needs fucking idiots to put an LLM in charge of a weapons system.

(As for AGI, my gut feeling is that it will come from the intersection of neural networks and quantum computing at scale - I’ll be filling my bunker with canned goods when the latter appears to be close on the horizon…)

Of course; that’s why PPP is the only sensible way to compare economies when you’re discussing individual experience.

There are much more interesting reasons than “ugh, me big rich western man, proud overpay not europoor” why Romanian internet is cheaper than western though; after all, GDP PP PPP in Romania is 60% of Denmark or half of Switzerland (and only a shade off the EU average these days), but fibre internet is between one fifth and one eighth of the price apparently. Particularly surprising when you consider that Denmark must be the easiest country to wire up in the world (very small and geographically unremarkable.) I would think a curious mind would want to know why…

1Gb/s symmetrical fibre 9eur/month here in Romania… And happy to say it’s rock solid/advertised speed.

Alas, Digi’s 10Gb/s product seems to be mostly vapourware (the installer asked if I wanted it - for an extra eur/month IIRC - but any mention has disappeared from the website.) That said, I said no anyway because the thought of upgrading all my equipment to actually do anything with it doesn’t make me at all happy…

This is apparently a different China than the one I’ve worked in for the last decade.

You may have a theoretically fast connection - but even then it’s not particularly cheap (I pay less in Romania and Thailand for FTTH,) and the actual qualify of Internet bandwidth is beyond atrocious for any non domestic traffic (i.e. anything crossing the great firewall.)

Which is not to be negative about China, it’s got a hell of a lot going for it - I’d live in China before I’d live anywhere in the US - but great Internet is not one of those things.