swe, speculative investor
A lot of them are trapped in corrupt systems that are very costly and have ethics concerns blocking change. We have the money to feed them, but it would take far more money to turn a bunch of African countries into stable democracies. Overthrowing dictatorships might also raise ethics concerns about colonialism.
The easiest solution would just be lots of immigration, but host population reject that because of our evolutionary pecularities.
In a long AGI world, isn’t it very plausible that it gets developed in China and thus basically all efforts to shape its creation is pointless since Lesswrong and associated efforts don’t have much influence in China?
Why are current LLMs, reasoning models and whatever else still horribly unreliable? I can ask the current best models (o3, Claude, deep research, etc) to do a task to generate lots of code for me using a specific pattern or make a chart with company valuations and it’ll get them mostly wrong.
Is this just a result of labs hill climbing a bunch of impressive sounding benchmarks? I think this should delay timelines a bit. Unless there’s progress on reliability I just can’t perceive.
SWEs won't necessarily be fired even after becoming useless
I'm actually surprised at how eager/willing big tech is to fire SWEs once they're sure they won't be economically valuable. I think a lot of priors for them being stable come from the ZIRP era. Now, these companies have quite frequent layoffs, silent layoffs, and performance firings. Companies becoming leaner will be a good litmus test for a lot of these claims.
https://x.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1889522974467957033?s=46&t=9y15MIfip4QAOskUiIhvgA
O3 gets IOI Gold. Either we are in a fast takeoff or the "gold" standard benchmarks are a lot less useful than imagined.
The point is the money or food just won’t get to them. How do you send food to a region in a civil war between 2 dictators?