Like most American "solutions" it's a very good idea from a technical point of view but a terrible societal choice
Zos_Kia
joined 6 months ago
Funny cause there's a similar meme in France about a tv host who used to repeat "BUT DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS" with an exaggerated Arabic "rrramas" pronunciation
No what the Chinese do is much more ethical because they actually pay for the tokens. Basically anthropic is complaining that companies use and pay for their product :'(
To clarify, the problem with starlink is that the investment is mostly done (they have the projected number of sats in orbit, give or take a couple thousands) so there is no rational reason for them to raise billions in cash.
In a rational world it would now have to prove itself on its own dime.
I swear that's what I'm trying to explain to ask the people who do idolize tech giants as genius entrepreneurs.
Whatever those guys were at 20 they sure aren't anymore. They've become brain rotted, too-big-to-fail parodies of themselves.
Also they are addicted to sycophancy. Now that they have a convincing yes man in their pockets they are uniquely vulnerable to AI psychosis.
I find it interesting because it forces lots of people to think at least superficially about how they would define consciousness and its boundaries.
Does it need a substrate? Does the substrate need to be constantly active? Does it need to be organic? Does it need to be able to do high level computation and thinking? Any answer you may give is unfalsifiable so it's not like it's a scientific subject anyway. It's all vibes.
I like that it gives anyone the opportunity to wrestle with some hardcore metaphysics.
I think there's a categorical issue in how this whole story is framed, at least for the examples that have been cited by the booksellers themselves. These books are "rare" because they are low-print and have basically no demand, think obsolete technical books from the 60s or university theses printed at 100 copies. This kind of books are routinely destroyed by booksellers, and even publishers, because keeping inventory is expensive and nobody is buying or reading them. That's how AI companies are able to buy them for pennies on the dollar, and whatever they don't buy is probably eligible for recycling or burning by the seller/publisher anyway.
It's basically a way to slurp up a few billion tokens for cheap. They're destroying the copies by chopping off the spine and feeding the loose pages into page-fed scanners, which is way less expensive than those non-destructive scanning robots, but this doesn't work on really old books from previous centuries as the paper is different and fragile and will jam your scanner constantly.
What they're looking for is industrially-produced books with low circulation, not because they are culturally valuable but because they contain prose that hasn't yet been digitized and that's what they need for pre-training.