How embarrassing.

I have never doubted the transformative impact of 'next word predictors'. I have nevertheless concluded that such models will never have a mind capable of thoughts, wonder, imagination and curiosity.

To the extent the known universe of human knowledge can be collected and some how parsed to flag questionable material, 'next word predictors' will be an incredible tool and change our world. We are already seeing the impact where the data and knowledge is rules based, such as coding.

But the real power of a database containing the entirety of human knowledge, is finding previously undetected patterns and connections in the data that advances knowledge itself. However, LLMs cannot perform that on their own. They do not, and never will, possess conscious understanding. They are not capable of having thoughts; cannot wonder or use imagination or curiosity; or have ideas.

They will never search the database without being instructed to do so and told what to search for. They will forever require living minds to perform the wondering, imagining, and essential curiosity, that produces the thoughts defining the patterns and connections the LLMs are then instructed to look for.

>Americans are deeply divided on the big bad guvmit

But insurance companies are a-ok

Socialism is ok as long as it doesnt benefit minorities.

Like bank bailouts and farm grants.

>>The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.

Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.

However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.

Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.

Historically it was fine because dividends were significant and counted as income.

Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...

>They do lie.

'Lying', 'hallucinating' and other efforts to anthropomorphize a computer program only serves to reinforce the snake-oil being sold worldwide.

The same wealth disparity does not exist in the west. Travel 100km out of Moscow and compare how people live to the same distance from Paris. Then go to the Russian Far East. It’s overtly that not been seen in the west since the 1950s and WWII reconstruction.

We are talking about two different things. You are talking about the nature of poverty. No doubt the most impoverished in Russia are much worse off than the impoverished in western countries.

I, however, am talking about the gap between the wealth of the top 1 percent and the rest of society. When you have billionaires, the gap between a billionaire and every non-billionaire is the same - merely because of the nature of the size of a billion. It is so large that comparing a billion to a million is essentially equivalent to comparing a billion to a penny.

> The same wealth disparity exists in the west.

This is not in line with reality.

> Are you suggesting Russia is the governing model in our future?

If Trump and his buddies have their way: yes.

>California, home to a host of Silicon Valley and Hollywood titans, had an estimated 255 billionaires last year, more than any other state, according to Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm. More than one-third of California’s tax revenue comes from the top 1% of earners.

I'm a bit surprised to see the WSJ conflate wealth with earnings.

I don't care how its accomplished, but there must be a system that assures that everyone shares the same relative burden of paying for the costs of society. Relative burden meaning the financial pain Musk experiences is the same as you and I experience.

Right now, income is the only thing taxed by the federal government. Unlike wage earners, the truly wealthy ( say over 100 million in assets ) only have income if and when they chose to do so. Every billionaire could chose to never pay a single penny of income tax - and remain a billionaire - forever. And that's exactly what they do. They do not pay income tax. Unless they have an asset readjustment reason to do so.

I wonder how $400k worth of stolen lobster would be sold?

I have my own huge collection of my favorite music but, as it turns out, my carefully curated Pandora channel matches my music tastes so faithfully that it keeps introducing me to new music that I just love.

And it almost never plays a song that causes me to hit next. Of course, it took a long time to get the channel tuned just right - but now I play music for 5+ hours without interruption of nothing but music I love.