It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
Absolutely. I really don't think the future will be humans reading and picking apart an AI-generated codebase, there will be tech debt agents or whatever running overnight.
I think you misunderstand why tech debt lingers around. It's not a capacity or capability problem.
Organisations just don't want to deal with the accountability involved with "touching cold code". Whether it's a human or "AI agent" doesn't change the "It worked in prod, you touched it, you broke it, never touch anything again" dynamic.
That's one dimension of it, but in the context of this thread we are talking about how maintainable a codebase is for other humans. If your codebase is messy you depend on a few key employees and it might be hard to onboard new ones, so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.
Um, no, actually AI makes it better because the cost is lower now. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, obviously organizations already fight against tech debt all the time through a variety of means?
The point there is that it is MUCH easier to get corporate to agree to something when the cost is nebulous and being paid anyway. If you get a senior dev to clean up some tech debt, how much did that cost the company? The dev will have some multiple things at the same time, so you can't cleanly assign a number of hours, maybe multiple people are involved. It's practically just an unknowable. Practically, $0.
So your proposal to handle tech debt created by "AI" being unable to do good engineering is... throw more AI at it? There's a saying about the definition of insanity which comes to mind.
You are assigning intentionality to these mechanisms, but as the other commenter pointed out a much simpler way to view it is that death and senescence are just side effects, not actual mechanisms with evolutionary purposes. Organisms get born and need to reproduce, that's the mandate. There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die, so obviously DNA does not have organismal death programmed in, it has cell death which is necessary for organisms to live long enough to reproduce. Many of the things that are optimal for you to reproduce might not be optimal for you to survive a thousand years, and what happens to organisms outside their reproductive cycle is pretty much irrelevant to natural selection.
> There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die, so obviously DNA does not have organismal death programmed in ...
Of course there is. Without death, no natural selection. First, obviously, it gives precedence to children, who by definition are more evolved than parents. Now of course, you could say that accidental death is sufficient. But is it? Good question.
In practice there also appears to be evolutionary pressure for death to exist. There are very large, very old organisms alive on earth. Organisms old enough to have been alive when Jesus was born, when the Pyramids were built, organisms old enough to have "met" Neanderthals. Aside from a few individuals they were outcompeted in their native habitats.
They don't reproduce very much at all, and they're not very resilient as a species. The theory is that the parent organism occupies the entire habitat, and so reproduction fails. Then, at some point something happens to the organism as a whole and the entire species dies.
So, yes there appears to be evolutionary pressure to die. Ironically, the vast majority of large organisms that die of aging live longer than immortal organisms.
an organisms behavior outside of reproduction certainly can have an impact on natural selection. the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce by your logic their behavior shouldn't have any impact on natural selection. if a non-reproducing members behavior impacts those who can reproduce it will have an impact on natural selection.
> There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die
> what happens to organisms outside their reproductive cycle is pretty much irrelevant to natural selection
Certainly seems plausible for that to create evolutionary pressure: why have organisms still consuming resources if they're no longer contributing to reproduction / natural selection?
1) You forgot to include the actual costs of the GPUs and other equipment, you are just calculating launch costs which will always come on top of the other stuff
2) Datacenters require repairs and hands-on attention, and space provides extra challenges like radiation to deal with
3) They have not provided any evidence that they can solve the heat diffusion issue, which could kill the whole project
4) Musk's track record for outlandish tech is poor (hyperloop, fully autonomous driving, Mars trips, etc. were significantly delayed or not achieved yet), and unlike some of these other things no one else seems to think this is economically feasible
Here is another scenario. You mobilize your local community or even country to choose option 1, communal ownership. Then another country or region follows path 2. If option 2 is more productive (maybe because you redirected productivity gains towards wellbeing instead of more compute) you are toast, you now have a sort of Cold War scenario where eventually the technofeudalists will have the upper hand and could outcompete or destroy the technocommunalists or whatever you want to call them.
Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.
These thought scenarios are bunk. There is no isolated silo in the real world. See foreign interference between Capitalist and Communist countries. Cuba isn’t even allowed to be a sovereign, Communist country in the Carribean (see attempted invasions, embargoes, now the crippling oil embargoes).
> Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.
That’s why socialists argue for international revolution.
This is systematic fraud, and anyone trying those antibodies with falsified data will waste money and time. A lot of papers have been retracted for similar issues. Thermo Fisher is a major worldwide supplier of antibodies, so this has quite a big practical impact.
2. It should be determined whether the fraud was just the display image (imagine a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available) or involved the underlying research (more systemic and worrying).
3. It would be interesting to examine occurrence of faked images along with apparent unreliability/irreproducibility of research that has used those products.
Manipulating images for presentation is an automated process unless you're ripping someone off. The changes would be uniform across whole sets.
The problem with trying to pass off a fake image is that you need to be more knowledgeable in each dimension of the effort than the recipients are in just one. If anyone remembers the folks identifying East German video from background hum it's kind of like that.
"a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available"
It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?
Someone else here mentioned proofers, people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source. I am in no way defending Thermo here. I just meant that the extend of the fraud needs to be determined, from some non-scientist making a decision for short term profits, frustrated that no one saved the picture, or because the pictures showed how ugly the western blots actually are, versus wholesale fabrication of the research from the bottom up.
> people that prepare marketing materials, as a potential source
Scientific advertising and marketing is a small, specialized field, done by people with fairly solid technical backgrounds (we produce a whole lot of advanced STEM degrees, there's plenty of folks available with this sort of background).
So I just want to be crystal, crystal clear here: there's no way in hell anyone involved in this pipeline should have any confusion as to whether "improving" gel photographs by painting out details and/or copying and pasting blots is fraud. "Proofer" or not.
No marketing or design company would duplicate a band from another experiment (taking care to rotate it to make it look different nonetheless). Even in that unlikely scenario, Thermo Fisher is still responsible for the scientific data they publish.
I agree with you in general, but depending on the task I also find that a certain level of encyclopedic knowledge can be very valuable. For example, if you use it for coding, the model will likely not resort to search or RAGs when deciding whether to use a particular package or stack.
reply