Ok, it seems the American butter knife is a deadly weapon. The butter knife I mean has a rounded tip usually not even a serrated edge and it’s basically impossible to cut anything with it. Except butter.
I always get mad when my wife mutilates a bread roll trying to cut it with a butter knife. That’s what a bread knife is for.
You need to stem yourself against the tide of specialised kitchen utensils otherwise you will be buried by it.
But butter knifes aren’t sharp. And easier to get under the lid. Best by test.
Or just use a butter knife. Which will also teach you that it is indeed the vacuum that makes jars hard to open.
I also don’t have aphantasia and can relate to that description a lot.
When I was eight or nine we had to draw our family at school. My friend glanced over and said: Doesn’t your mom wear glasses? I didn’t know and really had no way to figure this out except by going home and looking at my mom (who has been wearing glasses all day and every day since she was a kid).
On one cognitive test I scored 99.9th percentile in logical thinking and 23rd percentile in image memory (which explains why I get lost everywhere). My coworkers think I’m a genius, my wife thinks I’m retarded.
I also read books like Ross does and never understood my fellow nerds obsession with maps, which seem like a complete waste of a page to me.
When I visually remember people I almost always remember a foto of them which I have seen many times. I dislike new places but moving to a new apartment is basically no problem—after a week or two I have forgotten the old place.
I used to think that other people experience life as a series of anecdotes, while I just don’t. Though over the years I did figure out how to tell anecdotes (preparation).
I guess I can count myself lucky that in my case this is not as extreme as for Blake Ross.
I feel these are very specific and different scenarios from a “vanilla” economic singularity. When people go “The economy will double every month!”, they don’t add “Because the solar system will be plastered with ever larger statues of the great leader”. I am aware that this kind of exponential growth would be technologically possible, and it’s also not difficult to come up with scenarios in which it would actually happen, I just don’t see how that is the normal extension of current economics.
Sure, but I wrote “as long as humans keep control”. Is your model that those that control AI will just start building Dyson Spheres?
Ok, I understood nothing of this (and only skimmed it), so possibly this is a dumb question, but I have long wondered why consumption growth rates do not preclude extraordinary gdp growth rates. Right now everything is produced because at some point down the line there is a human who wants the product. So as long as humans retain control, the growth rate of the economy should be limited by how fast humans want more stuff. I never see this mentioned, people just go: The economy will double every month! But I can’t help but wonder, who is buying a car every other day?
The argument is not really about “AGI happening”. It is about the speed of improvement of which Anthropic’s revenue growth is a measure. What is circular is not the argument, it is the definition of AGI. If you taboo “AGI” you are left with “at current revenue growth Claude will take over huge parts of the economy in the next couple of years”. Which is really all Thomas was saying.
There is not really any problem with the structure of the argument, just with the term AGI.
Sure, I read every 5 minute as hyperbole. That would be a continuous brawl. Also, lot’s of variation of course.
That’s not my experience, and I don’t just mean of my own kid. Even quite young children can spend plenty of time in even quite large groups without that happening. Something is wrong if kids are constantly hitting each other.
Big difference between siblings and non-siblings. Even kids who never ever hit other kids get into physical fights with their siblings. A lot.
“These values are hard-coded instead of being extracted from the groundtruth excel, that can’t be right.”
No shit, Claude …
Pray tell, who might have faked these groundtruth values when he couldn’t find a way to extract checkmarks from the excel?
That must have been the one I read and which informed my decision to minimise daycare hours for my son.
I read an anecdote about a nobel prize winner (maybe Nils Bohr?) who went on walks with his two sons and they played battleship against each other in their head, while he was the arbiter keeping both setups in his head. That always sounded impressive to me because it seems so off the cuff.
When I went on walks with my girlfriend and my roommate we used to play chess against each other. Also just in our heads each against each, so each playing two games at once. Despite this being much more complex than the battleship example, it doesn’t impress me much, because I know that this ability comes from playing lot’s of chess and is the norm in strong chess players.
My roommate could also remember long random strings within seconds, very impressive, but based on memo-techniques, i.e. learnable.
When I had dinner with a famous scientist, he mentioned something growing at x%. I said, ok, so it doubles every y years. He gave me a surprised look, but it’s just a trick (dividing log(2) by the growthrate gives the approximation of the doubling time).
Point is: It is hard to use anecdotes as evidence for unusual intelligence. People can learn many impressive seeming abilities. Everything loses luster once you know how the sausage is made.
This reminded me of the lord of the rings—first you get 200 pages about the genealogy of Meriadoc Brandybuck and how one of his paternal great-grandfathers had big hairy feet, then it turns out the story is about some other dude who stares into space a lot.
I enjoyed it because it also reminded me of my math study days in <redacted> city, where all the boys were smart and all the girls were … also smart.
I am however confused about the title: How does solving an inconsequential puzzle in the most inefficient way possible showcase “returns to intelligence”.
I read a review about daycare which came to the conclusion that daycare before the age of two had clearly negative effects on the kids, between two and three it was mixed, and after the age of three it was positive (no daycare wasn’t an option for us but this was the reason we reduced hours as much as possible). The reason given was that it is stressful for little kids to be separated from their mom. But now I wonder whether infections don’t play a bigger role than that. Luckily my kids are pretty robust in that regard.
Does it also give you more of a kick?
I replaced coffee with a guarana mixture for stomach reasons, but I really miss the coffee hit (and the smell, taste, preparation and everything else about coffee but what can I do).
I mention Opus 4.6 because it is the predecessor model and this allows a comparison between the numbers that pop out of my analysis and the “official” METR values.
My analysis at least recovered the exponential improvement of time horizons with similar doubling times as the METR analysis, but the concrete values depend on modelling assumptions.
If I find the time I might write it up after all, but here is a short sketch:
Two assumptions:
The logistics fitted by METR tend to have quite similar slopes (at least the later models), so I take the average slope for my fit.
The task time completions of SWE-bench verified are log-normally distributed, I derive the concrete distribution from commit timestamps by cleverly trying to correct for pauses. Here different modelling assumptions don’t change the trend but can change the time horizon values.
With the slope and the distribution I can find for each percentage the position of the logistic which gives me the time horizons.
I think the realistic assumption is that many people state this because it goes against the current vibe that Claude is better. Those that prefer Claude do not feel the need to belabour the obvious.
My own experience is Opus > GPT-5.4 > Sonnet but Claude seems a lot better at data analysis and GPT-5.4 probably has its own areas of relative dominance.
The reason why I prefer butter knifes is that they are much easier to get under the lid. They are only sharp enough to cut butter so you can also grab it close to the tip if you need to.
Yes, don’t use anything that can stab or cut you even if for some weird reason you call that a butter knife.