The phone alerts sound quite dystopian and unsettling. As if the earth shaking and feeling of imminent doom wasn’t chaotic enough, now you have yet another element of annoyance and distress added to the mix as a cherry on top. Just enough of a distraction in a life/death situation to tilt the scales in a negative direction.
There are different sounds for different situations. I don't know the regulations (presumably they exist) that say when a particular sound should be used.
The first is the default fire alarm noise in Britain, probably what I've heard most often.
I heard "LF Buzz" (2:32) in a nightclub, where it cut through the music. (I remember it as even more "yucky", maybe there were multiple sounders in the room.)
It could help people react better too by confirming what they are feeling is an earthquake and not a train or plane or your neighbors. It could also wake someone seconds before so they are more aware when it happens and not awakening in primal panic mid quake.
It isn't a huge help, but broadcasting to everyone in range of certain towers shouldn't be dystopian.
Google can detect major earthquakes about 15-30 seconds before visible shaking because of the huge network of accelerometers on Android phones worldwide. Those seconds can save lives if used properly.
I think it's more than that. I made prediction in earlier 2024 that the main players of AI will stick with transformers while second class players will want to transcend it. The difference is admittedly a bit subtle but ai researchers would get it. I wrote it with mamba in mind back then, but google was still trying to come up with the 'next transformers' and one that can remember using weights and all that stuffs. You can say the same abt lecun's and ilya's now.
My main reasoning was that transformers was the lightning in a bottle and the best work is in extending it instead of transcending it, which requires you to capture another lightning . Which to me appears to miss the assignment. OpenAI, Antrophic, they understand this intimately. Google on the other hand, fell victim to their own ambition.
If your goal is purely commercial, or time critical, then a product-based approach of squeezing all the juice out of LLMs makes sense.
If your goal is truly human-level AGI then this is more of an open-ended research endeavor, and timelines are hard to predict. Arguably we have only "captured lightning in a bottle" once in the last decade - the original 2017 attention paper - and so the timeline for a "few more Transformer-level breakthroughs" might more realistically be estimated in decades rather than years. You could argue that the application of RL to LLMs as a training method was a second "lightning in a bottle" but I don't think it changes the expected timeline of such discoveries by much.
The time criticality seems to have become a huge factor for those pursuing LLMs, and certainly for OpenAI and Anthropic, who regard it as a race.
It seems absurdly obvious (though many would disagree!) that LLMs alone are not going to achieve human-level intelligence and cognitive performance (using a slightly broader term there to include things like creativity, for those that might not consider that as part of intelligence).
If you compare a Transformer to a brain, then the best parallel is that a Transformer is functionally similar - in being a prediction engine - to part of our cortex, but of course that means ignoring the other half our cortex - the feedback paths that enable continual learning, which in turn supports creativity.
Of course people will probably respond "you don't need flapping wings to fly", but if you want to fly you do need SOME way of doing it, so brain comparisons are still valuable... If you look at our brain architecture and identify all the components and connections that have no equivalent in a Transformer, and if the goal is human-level capability, then you do need to understand what each of those brain components achieve functionally, and have SOME way of providing that functionality in your LLM+ or whatever you call it. LLMs' lack of any functional equivalent to our cortex's feedback paths - lack of continual learning - has been recognized as one major functional deficit, but there are probably half a dozen others too, reflecting the multiple "Transformer level" breakthoughs that Hassabis notes are needed.
While you don't need flapping wings to fly, you do need to invent the airplane, and even after 100+ years of airplane advances we've yet to build an airplane even remotely as capable as what some birds and insects are able to achieve.
Maybe 2017 was the Wright Bros moment where humans first learnt to do some of what our brains can do.
You’re on the right track, I think. But, I wouldn’t say it’s about the pay to attract competent workers. I think it has more to do with the incentive structures once you’re in. Incentives and performance management are fundamental problem in civil service. The incentives to set high standards and hold individuals accountable simply do not exist.
The one and only exception is the military, because lives are literally on the line in a way that is not at all abstract.
Usually when people say this they are dog whistling privatization. Which is the exact opposite thing people need in infrastructure, ask anyone who has to deal with PG&E.
Paying skilled people highly does actually incentivize people to do better work, especially if they are actually embedded into the community they are essentially working for. If being a civil servant was as "glorious" as being a techie is SF there would be a very different attitude around the work.
In an environment without accountability, higher pay is just more incentive to lay low and not take any personal risk. Why do anything other than the bare minimum when there is no upside? In a bureaucracy where responsibility is diffused and the culture is purely political and not merit/performance-based, few are willing to step out of line to do the right thing.
The people who climb to the top aren’t the ones who took a risk and got the reward. Quite the opposite, they’re the ones who learned to play the game and didn’t upset the power structure by rocking the boat. No one is going to tell the emperor he has no clothes when the path to power is political and has no grounding in reality.
Highly conscientious, intrinsically motivated people will do the right thing in any environment. And those people don’t last long in political/bureaucratic environments where the incentives are misaligned.
Your comments show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you have never worked for the federal government and likely have never worked in state or local government.
>In a bureaucracy where responsibility is diffused and the culture is purely political and not merit/performance-based, few are willing to step out of line to do the right thing.
Federal employment is merit based. Advances are earned, not doled out to the teacher's pet or the ass-kisser with the most perfect pucker. You have no idea what you're talking about.
I have no idea where you or anyone else got the idea that a government employee has no responsibility or incentives and works strictly for political ends and even worse, where none are willing to speak up. You clearly have no experience in that space and should focus your comments on things that you better understand through direct experience.
>And those people don’t last long in political/bureaucratic environments where the incentives are misaligned.
This is bullshit and you are grossly misinformed. Plenty of people fight the polarization of the system on political lines from within the system. They use the laws that are in place in order to prevent systemic abuses. They may not win every internal fight but they do go to battle for the right reasons.
I don't think your attitude here is in keeping with the guidelines (or constructive discourse for that matter). You've made a number of uncharitable assumptions about the other party on the back of which you then launched into baseless personal attacks.
Notably everything in the comment you replied to applies equally to the public and private sector. They are neutral observations about systemic motives and the associated perverse incentives.
Also it's not clear to me that any of the utilities in question have anything to do with the federal government so I'm not sure why you dragged them into this.
>I don't think your attitude here is in keeping with the guidelines (or constructive discourse for that matter).
I'll make a note of that. Any comment that I make on this site is made in the hopes that there will be discussion generated. Sometimes that happens and other times it doesn't. I don't spend any part of my life wondering why people choose to or choose not to engage. Most of us have busy lives and this (HN) for us is an opportunity to catch up on interesting things.
>You've made a number of uncharitable assumptions about the other party on the back of which you then launched into baseless personal attacks.
I am not sure that noting that a poster has no experience in a subject and has no idea how it really works in practice becomes an uncharitable assumption. It may look like a personal attack but it is based entirely on the content of the user's own posts, which support the conclusion that I reached.
>They are neutral observations about systemic motives and the associated perverse incentives.
From /u/moscoe original comment in the thread:
>Incentives and performance management are fundamental problem in civil service. The incentives to set high standards and hold individuals accountable simply do not exist.
These two sentences here demonstrate that /u/moscoe does not have any experience working in the public sector for federal, state, or local government entities yet somehow they feel qualified to speak confidently (incorrectly) that those who have worked in that capacity are ham-strung by the system and disincentivized to make waves. That is false.
I mentioned federal employees specifically because they are civil servants (referenced by /u/moscoe above) and someone close to me has worked a long career in the federal government under several administrations from both political parties.
I think you have your opinions and you are entitled to those opinions. I am also sure that you are wrong about the content of my post. It was not uncharitable nor were there any assumptions. The conclusions that I drew were supported by the statements made by /u/moscoe. If it ends up looking like a personal attack then there was a basis for that personal attack.
It's possible that you read my comment without reading the full thread so some of the context was missing.
Corporations have even less accountability to the public than public utility districts. If you don’t like what the organization is doing, vote in different commissioners and make them aware of your concerns. But if you don’t like what your water service is doing, good luck drilling a well to get away from them.
Why do you assume that PG&E has a good incentive structure, or that the public sector must necessarily have a bad one? My only objection to the preceding comment would be that struggling with perverse incentives isn't limited to civil service. Incentive structures are a core struggle of approximately all large groups of people.
I think the big problem is administrative capacity.
There are better run governments than we have in the US.
The contempt for the state is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The state is incompetent because many of us believe it is inevitable that it will be. Compensation is just a part of it; coherent administration with continuity is even more important.
Agree. Being smart, competent, and high in conscientiousness is more important than any highly specific “qualification”. It’s not about checking a bunch of boxes. If you have a track record of getting shit done, you’ll have something to contribute.
Turns out, SOTA llms are great at finding and fixing bugs in code. Too bad companies like Anthropic are doing everything they can to stop these reprehensible acts of safety.
They heavily implement guardrails where you can ask about anything cybersecurity related and Anthropic constantly talks about the risk of openly releasing models without aggressive AI safety rules, while only letting a small group of organizations like Apple have access to them. Their own fear mongering around this safety stuff with Mythos led to Fable being briefly export controlled by the US government, despite Fable already being kneecapped for security research.
