I second the video recommendation.

A friend in China, in a rare conversation we had about international politics, was annoyed at US politicians for saying China was "supporting" Russia.  "China has the production capacity to make easily 500,000 drones per day.^[1]", he said.  "If China were supporting Russia, the war would be over".  And I had to admit I had not credited the Chinese government for keeping its insanely competitive companies from smuggling more drones into Russia.

1. ^{^}

   This seemed like a drastic underestimate to me.

Huh, I didn't expect to take Gary Marcus's side against yours but I do for almost all of these.  If we take your two strongest cases:

• No massive advance (no GPT-5, or disappointing GPT-5)
  • There was no GPT-5 in 2024?  And there is still no GPT 5?  People were talking in late 2023 like GPT 5 might come out in a few months, and they were wrong.  The magic of "everything just gets better with scale" really seemed to slow after GPT-4?
  • On reasoning models: I thought of reasoning models happening internally at Anthropic in 2023 and being distilled into public models, which was why Claude was so good at programming.  But I could be wrong or have my timelines messed up.
• Modest lasting corporate adoption
  • I'd say this is true?  Read e.g. Dwarkesh talking about how he's pretty AI forward but even he has a lot of trouble getting AIs to do something useful.  Many corporations are trying to get AIs to be useful in California, fewer elsewhere, and I'm not convinced these will last.

I don't think I really want to argue about these, more I find it weird people can in good faith have such different takes.  I remember 2024 as a year I got continuously more bearish on LLM progress^[1].

1. ^{^}

   Until DeepSeek in late December.

Cool, yes, I agree.  But the reason other insiders don't like that public criticism is because it reduces their status by association.  Your colleagues paid to get a position in a status hierarchy which you are devaluing, and they make you internalize those costs.

I don't think I agree at all.  Relevant quotation, Larry Summers talking to Elizabeth Warren

> “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice.  I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.

People come with features vectors of which clusters they are bucketed into (Harvard graduate, east bay rationalist, FTX employee, etc).  Your reputation is tied to the reputation of that cluster, whether you want it to or not.  

Whistleblowers are rare and their effects are minor.  In-group cooperation and collusion is a large part of human affairs.

EDIT I agree with you, and just didn't understand what you said.  My rephrase would be the article had it backwards:

Prediction: If consortment was less endorsement—if it were commonplace to spend time with your enemies—then it would be more commonplace to publicly report small wrongs.

This is reversed.  It's the wrong-doers who are avoiding interactions with anyone who might publicly report small wrongs.

Online advertising can be used to promote books.  Unlike many books, you are not trying to make a profit and can pay for advertising beyond where the publisher's marginal costs equals marginal revenue.  Do you:

• Have online advertising campaigns set up by your publisher and can absorb donations to spend on more advertising (LLM doubts Little, Brown and Company lets authors spend more money)
• Have $$$ to spend on an advertising campaign but don't have the managerial bandwidth to set one up.  You'd need logistics support to set up an effective advertising campaign.
• Need both money and logistics for an advertising campaign.
  • Alphabet and Meta employees get several hundred dollars per month to spend on on advertising (as incentive to dogfood their product).  If LessWrong employees at those companies setup many $300 / month advertising campaigns, that sounds like a worthwhile investment
• Need neither help setting up an advertising campaign nor funds for more advertising (though donations to MIRI are of course always welcome)

I'm very glad you've used focus groups!  Based solely on the title the results are excellent.  I'm idly curious how you assembled the participants.

Do you have a way to get feedback from Chinese nationalists?  ("America Hawks" in China?).

Given the potentially massive importance of a Chinese version, it may be worth burning $8,000 to start the translation before proofreading is done, particularly if your translators come back with questions that are better clarified in the English text.  I'd pay money to help speed this up if that's the bottleneck^[1].  When I was in China I didn't have a good way of explaining what I was doing and why.

1. ^{^}

   I'm working mostly off savings and wouldn't especially want to, but I would to make it happen.

It's a reference to the title of a novel by Fred Hoyle.

"I think you are being insufficiently truth-seeking" is definitely a thing I would want people to say to me sometimes.  Sometimes I think dumb things (like rationalizing) and it's obvious to other people but I have no idea.

Its a function that eats points in a manifold and spits out (linear functions that eat (linear functions satisfying Leibniz rule that eat (differentiable functions that eats points on a manifold and spit outs real numbers) and spits out real numbers) and spits out real numbers), obviously.