It sounds like it is about the information in the books. The titles they're looking for are all nonfiction. Not everything is on the internet, and just because it's a few years old doesn't mean it's outdated.
Speaking from experience, the information density of published books is a lot higher than most internet text. It's very high quality training data.
The goal here is to have all human knowledge in a single file, which is pretty neat IMO.
The internet basically never delivered on the promise of replacing textbooks or even education as a whole. Wikipedia sucks on many topics, has insane internal politics, and is a tertiary source by design (redigesting blogs and books), whereas textbooks are generally secondary.
Booksellers noticed a huge uptick in non-fiction purchases, that is not the same thing as them not targeting fiction at all.
Edit: Actually, I have real evidence, the Bartz in "Bartz v Anthropic" is Andrea Bartz, a novelist, and the complaint specifically lists four of her novels as infringed works.
I see. So it is much less about 150 year old fiction books, but more about 1980s science literature that was only ever printed five times. That makes a lot more sense than what the public debate seems to be about.
… and makers don’t have an incentive to even deliver such features, because people are already buying them?
At least I wouldn’t know what’s stopping them from building actually-useful features, tech-wise. Or was it just always a bad idea because fridge placement is random and items are often hard to find/detect?
The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.
I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.
Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.
Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
I'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.
I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.
It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.
I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
The air exchanges in seconds, yes (as evidenced by the post-door-closing suction), but the air doesn't stop flowing through the fridge as soon as the air changes once, and the air enters warm and leaves cold, so (by conservation) heat is being robbed from internal surfaces. So you're still losing more heat by leaving the door open longer.
Door open --> Door close --> Suction --> No further heat loss afterwards
"In theory but the benefit would be pretty negligible i think. Let's say for argument that most food is water and your fridge is 25% food and 75% air. The specific heat of air is 1 kJ/kgK, specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kgK. But also the density of air is 1.2kg/m3 and the density of water 1000kg/m3. Assume 1 m3 volume. So that would be 250kg food and 0.9 kg air. To change temp by 1C would take .9kJ for the air and 1050kJ for the food. So the air in a fridge holds a fraction of a percent of the total thermal mass of the contents. Whether or not that air changes temperature by a few degrees won't change things much at all. You would spend far more on balloons that you would save on energy."
Good thing it's still very easy to buy simple fridges that come with none of that crap. (Oh, cool, another huge Android tablet that's several versions behind latest and is a cracked door for red team agents to hack my house with and adtech to slurp up all of my refrigeration habits. I'LL BUY TWO!)
I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)
But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol
Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
> Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.
What they don't tell you: when the fridge door is closed the light turns off.
(yes HN this is a joke)
More seriously, in a previous job I did inventory/POS systems for pubs which would track the obvious things like "you got ten casks of beer delivered this morning and have sold 50 pints, at what point do you need to order more beer". It would genuinely be useful to have inventory tracking for fridges. At one point this would rely on barcodes, but machine vision should be good enough for now. The problem is, as with many smart things, it needs to be reliable and frictionless enough that it's better than just the Mark 1 Eyeball.
Also it's very difficult to trust if it might end up integrated into a purchase system. Does "you always have milk in the fridge" sound good? Yes. Is it going to be like "HP Instant Ink", a massive and slightly wasteful ripoff? Well, quite possibly.
Not the person you asked but I can answer that from my perspective:
I am always on the lookout to automatate as much boring, everyday tasks. A Smart Fridge like that would allow you to generate shopping lists and reduce food waste by alerting you to possible soon-to-be-spoiled food.
A bit like what roombas are doing for cleaning. You still need to do it yourself a bit, but they help.
Not necessary, not even a gamechanger but another neat home automation. Would be nice, sad to hear they don't work well.
You should be able to combine two half solutions into a full solution.
It might actually be easier to start with the smart pantry! An in-cabinet kit that can be tested entirely dry and warm and open, and then expanded to the fridge.
What I need is a whole kitchen camera that notices when I put things in the fridge/pantry and then take them out. Bonus if it can say "The lettuce in your fridge is probably expired, use it or toss it today".
The fridge/pantry camera is a useful addition, but most of the value would be a system that just tracks what I put in/take out.
A car is a half solution to going to work. A stove is a half solution to preparing food.
Half solutions are what people need. They’re the solutions we are using every day.
There is this huge problem with advertising that makes consumers think a half solution is a 100% solution. Most smart product makers do that trick. But, apart from that problem, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’
Edit: but no way would I buy any smart or connected fridge from Samsung. I don’t anticipate that being a positive experience
I can't really think of a use case for a grocery tracking system that only tracks a third of my groceries. A system that tracks everything would be massively useful, however.
>I can't really think of a use case for a grocery tracking system that only tracks a third of my groceries.
Me too. I think I’m not communicating clearly. Sorry.
What I’m talking about is a system that does only one third of the steps in the total end-to-end process for ALL your groceries. You do the rest yourself, or use other help.
I’m not advocating a broken system that claims to do that complete process, but really ignores two thirds of your groceries. That would be damn stupid.
Seems like it would be better solved with a phone app you can just scan the receipt and log your usage. It would get you out of having to buy a $1000 fridge and also solve the pantry issue. Actively logging your usage vs passively might have other downstream benefits like being more aware of your macros.
Your enthusiasm is catching. I’m not sure I would ever consider a fridge with a built in camera though because of the bad manufacturer incentives. Maybe you could find a wireless camera that you put inside and the fridge related processing - the real point - is done somewhere else?
I always just want to know how much of X or Y is on hand when I’m physically out and at the grocer. You can just buy another but that usually leads to folks storing 5 bottles of ketchup or whatever
1. When you finish the milk, voice record "buy milk" on the phone.
2. At supermarket, listen to voice recordings.
I'm actually working on a pet project to transcribe my 20 years of voice recordings and organise them, then sync them between the phone and desktop. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll know that I needed milk in October 2008.
I mean, there are plenty of voice assistants these days. We use our Alexa for this but both Siri and Gemini could easily do it. Whenever we run low on something, "Alexa, add milk to our shopping list" and then can look at application at grocery store.
Have a shared shopping list with the family. Teach your kid to put the milk on the list after they finish it. Be at least somewhat aware of how old your food is. Problem solved. Somehow we managed this model for a century.
Somehow we also managed to get by before we had pretty much any kind of technology. Somehow we managed without trains, somehow we managed without telecommunications, somehow we managed without refrigeration, somehow we managed without websites and forums.
Maybe we could do better. Maybe we can automate this as well.
Yup, end game is becoming a Guild Navigator. Obese, immobile, suspended in a tank full of dopamine. Why beat around the bush with all this doing stuff and using our limbs or god forbid thinking? Straight to the neurotransmitters, pure efficiency.
I take it you don't bother writing things down, wouldn't want to have the paper take the place of your own memory turning your brain to mush right?
And obviously you just walk anywhere and everywhere. Wouldn't want your legs to grow feeble and useless. Even riding a bicycle is reducing how much exercise you'd get otherwise, it's simply a tool for the weak.
I think the point is these devices sell some kind of convenience. Anyone who grew up of a certain time is seduced with this idea of our world being perfectly in tune with our needs, like the Jetsons.
Now we have generations of people who grew up with surveillance capitalism and broken promises I wonder what the next big wave will be
I instead use the technology of "whiteboard on fridge, where I write what I want or what is running out." That way it works when I didn't even plan to shop, because I vaguely remember what's on the whiteboard on the fridge.
I'm biased working for an online grocer, but isn't the problem really that you are in a store making the decision instead of in your kitchen at home? Half the goods I buy anyways aren't in a fridge, so a smart fridge only solves parts of the problem.
Yeah, if the argument truly is, "I want to be able to know everything I need to buy for cooking," then you need "smart" everything - cabinets, bread baskets, a way of analyzing the produce sitting in a bowl on the counter, pantries, freezers, and so on.
Perhaps it's because I'm the cook of the family, but to my mind, if you're in your kitchen on a daily basis, it's incredibly easy to have a strong idea of what you have at home when you're at the store. It's never perfect and once in a while you double up or miss things, but that's life!
I'm not the only cook in my family though. Last two nights I made dinner, but Monday my wife did. I'm not sure who will cook tonight (I need to get my kids to start doing more of that). The result of that is nobody knows exactly what the other person used up.
We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.
>I'm not the only cook in my family though. Last two nights I made dinner, but Monday my wife did. I'm not sure who will cook tonight (I need to get my kids to start doing more of that). The result of that is nobody knows exactly what the other person used up.
My wife cooks sometimes too, but usually it's fairly easy for me to observe what she made and have a good sense of what went into the meal.
>We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.
Same for us. I wanted to make pinto bean tacos last night but forgot the pinto beans at the store last weekend, because I'd assumed we'd had some. We used it as an opportunity to pivot and have a random meal that involved using up extras in our pantry and freezer. Life will always have annoying moments that aren't always ideal, there's no amount of automation that will eliminate them. It's good for us to experience those moments and use them as growth opportunities (not saying you don't, I'm just speaking generally here).
Last night I was cooking while my wife took my kids to practice - they got home just as I was putting everything on the above. In short she couldn't observe everything. This happens commonly in my house these days.
> Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.
And costs you nothing. Is easy to roll out. Doesn't ever need replacement. Doesn't ever fall apart. Lasts forever.
The smart fridge will also screw up and not get it all right 100% of the time. And for that, it will cost you handsomely, will be difficult to implement in all your kitchen, will need constant replacement, will fall apart, will not last forever.
Framed like this, the smart solution is actually worse.
I remember when someone got a car to 100k miles - they called all their friends to see the car turn over to all 0's. They had to add oil before they left, and drove off in a cloud of smoke. They had to avoid puddles or the spray through the floors would get mud all over everybody...
Point is things advance. the first iteration might be as bad as you say, but they are likely to fix the bugs and make it better over time.
Well you are still paying orders of magnitude more than a pen and paper grocery list. For what in my mind is no new real functionality. Just the ability to get a bit lazier and think a bit less. I don't know about you but I'm trying not to get senile here. Thinking is actually a good thing, not a chore. A muscle that isn't under use atrophies.
makes me wonder maybe if NFC/RFID strips were cheap enough you could have all the items tagged in the house and your phone could tell you what you have.. but probably causes e-waste though
The other problem is that just an equivalent barcode but NFC product tag isn't going to tell you that you're down to half a stick of butter, it'll just say you have butter. And that's assuming you keep the packaging.
Anything you've prepared at home will also not be tracked by such a system.
Because people are mentally unwell and would rather not spend any time actually in the moment and doing life. They’d rather just free up all this “wasted” time so they can sit on their arse and watch the 8th series of the latest Netflix programme. They live to consume.
It’s not blind insistence, and that framing reveals a real lack of imagination on your part in my opinion. A truly smart fridge that had an inventory of all my stuff, knew expiration dates, etc. hooked up to my chat agent would be wonderful.
Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life. What is there even to automate? If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least... still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week, but something. But that's not even what smart fridges promise. They promise to automate looking in the fridge, an activity that you must do every time you withdraw or deposit food from/into it anyways. Wonderful.
> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life.
I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.
Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.
Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.
> still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week
Actually a cheap microcontroller and a few cameras over the lifetime of the fridge that caused me to open it say 50% less would save more money than it would waste by my estimate.
> If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least
Yeah.
Step 1: fridge with smart inventory
Step 2: hook it up to grok bot
Step 3: grok bot orders your food from Walmart+ InHome
So every piece of this exists except the hypothetical sci-fi fridge.
Again, I’m stunned by the complete and utter lack of imagination and critical thinking here. You guys are the offshore contractors of HN commenting.
> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what?
This is actually a pretty good point. Many people do have poor memory for a plethora of reasons. This would be a great accessibility feature.
Perhaps you could use your wonderfully amazing imagination to imagine the contents of your fridge as you last saw it when you opened it 8~12 hours ago to retrieve food or drink.
I personally can't do that. I deal with aphantasia (I can't visualize anything in my head). I can put something in the fridge and not realize it's there, unless I can see it. Then on the other hand I can create 20+ character passwords (no words, numbers, symbols) and not need to write them down. I have way above average memory recall, but will often forget about items aren't normally in the fridge.
Great comment after being demonstrably wrong on all points. Again, trivial to imagine a scenario where other people use the contents of the fridge too. Or that when someone grabs the milk they aren’t doing an inventory of all the drawers, checking what’s out of line of sight because it’s hidden behind something.
You can’t be a software developer with such a poor imagination and intuition. Debugging would be hell for you. Even worse because you’d fail to imagine the edge cases ahead of time.
> "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life.
I take it you've only ever lived alone then? Its pretty easy for someone in my household to consume food or add food without me knowing about it. And I definitely do not take a full and complete inventory every time I open the fridge.
I'd find it very handy to look at a glance and see the current stock of stuff I have in my house. I definitely don't know exactly how much butter I have at the moment, I don't know what the date is on the almond milk versus the whole milk, I don't know how many string cheese sticks are left after the kids grabbed their snacks for school. I don't know exactly how much salt or pepper or smoked paprika or herbes de provence or curry powder or semi-sweet morsels or baking soda I happen to have on hand.
I don't know the technology to seamlessly track all of this is realistically at hand, but it sure would be nice. I do agree, every smart fridge today either doesn't even try with this or just totally sucks at it.
But hey I guess you just have all that data totally memorized and you're entirely omnicient about everything your household consumes. Sure seems nice.
My idea of a smart fridge: a fridge with Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensor connected to my Home Assistant automation system that alerts me if things get out of whack.
My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.
This wouldn't work in today's environment because any engineering capacity won't be directed towards making the thing useful when Samsung or whoever can sell the inside of your fridge in return for "recommended products".
It would be nice if that was all they were, but evidently a software update can render the fridge unable to run, so it is clearly much more. These things have transitioned from IT to OT.
Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.
Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.
We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.
Why does it have to be a camera? Surely there are other sensors in this age of untethered innovation that could apply. Give me a "smart nose" that will explain whether the unusual smell is coming from the vegetable drawer, dairy section, or no man's land in the back of the top shelf. Give me a top-of-the-line thermometer that can warn me if leftovers are going into the fridge too hot.
These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.
They have started trying it when the problem was much more difficult than it is now. I think a fridge that does this itinerary well is not too far away.
Why do you want that? Generations of humans have existed just fine with modern refrigeration without any of these extra... What you would call features and I would call simple bullshit.
The trouble here is that this smart fridge put safety-critical features behind a single internet-connected piece of shit. Appliance manufacturers really need to take inspiration from automotive manufacturers in terms of redundancy and localizing failure.
You break nothing much, don't worry - I was taking about equipment failure or malfunction, not targeted attack. Like, your power brakes or ABS can fail but you can still brake. Power steering can fail but you can still steer. Hell, steering wheel can pop right off and the steering geometry should still try to relatively prefer the center (not always ideal, but like, better than going fully insane like a shopping cart wheel). My point is there's no single CPU executing the entire vehicle where any malfunction can spontaneously cause the entire vehicle to stop functioning so badly that it won't perform any of its duties. Sure an ECU could fail and not run the engine, but that won't make you lose the ability to brake or steer if it happens in the middle of a highway. Something malicious can still command the rest of the vehicle to stop functioning one by one, but there aren't many single sources of that much failure.
At the very least, the system that maintains the temperature of the fridge (critical for food safety) should not be brought down by an exception in the system that displays advertisements on the front panel...
>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.
Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.
If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.
Stores already have that in the form of having cheaper and more expensive products in the same category (for example, 5 different brands of tomato sauce).
The practice that needs to be outlawed is invisible and per customer pricing. It would be the airline for the same class of seat charging different amounts because, for example, their profile of the flier shows they recently searched for "casket" and so they are likely heading to a family funeral.
It would be as if the airline for their economy class offered the flight for $1000 if you don't play, $600 to attract customers into buying, and $800 if they find their customer is desperate. All for the same seat.
They already do charge different prices for the same seat, based on their assessment of the type of passenger you are.
You've picked an "evil" example, but what price discrimination really tends to look like is charging richer people more.
Prices are generally lowered for poor people because they'd rather have your $300 than have an empty seat. If you don't have $800, no amount of desperation will make you pay it - you'll just miss the funeral.
Nobody is saying you can’t have different classes of service or product offerings. But if I’m buying a banana or you’re buying it, it’s the still a banana.
Different air travelers can pay very different prices for the same seat.
Airlines can't directly tell how much money a customer has, so they find indirect proxies.
Business travelers (reimbursed by their employer and thus not very price-sensitive) have identifiable patterns. They prefer particular flights on particular days of the week, tend to buy tickets close to date of travel, etc. Airlines exploit this to charge them higher prices.
If two consumers purchase the same item at the same time, it should be the same price. That's what we're debating. If an airline raises prices closer to departure, then that's not a violation of privacy, nor discriminatory in the sense we're discussing here.
I do, however, object to firms aggregating any individual's purchases across different interactions. That data should belong solely to the individual and it should be illegal to retain enough information to aggregate interactions across interactions with the same customer.
> If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.
Handmade watches are a tiny, niche market; they survive only because they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. Quartz watches are both cheaper and more accurate.
There is not room in the world for more handmade watchmakers, and there's not going to be room for much "artisan software" either.
A coordinated slowdown is anticompetitive because it allows them to reduce their R&D spending without risking their market share, letting them pocket more of the profits.
Each AI company is currently spending $100B+ on R&D every year to beat each other's latest model. By agreeing to slow down model releases, they will be able to cut this spending, allowing them to make bucketloads of money from the models they already have.
The consumer is harmed because they miss out on better models that would have been developed in a properly competitive market.
But that lets companies that aren't colluding to catch up technologically and maybe sell their services for a lower cost. How is that anti-competitive?
They slow down model releases, but don't slow down research and model development. They're not suddenly going to tell their army of researchers to go home. (In fact they can then focus/spend more on research, instead of the engineering needed to keep churning new models for production.)
This protects them from continuous model distillation by inferior models. So they only release a new model when a 3rd competitor catches up to their public production models' capabilities.
And the public gets a new model in 6 months or a year instead of every few months. But the new model would be a (1) gigantic leap in undisputed capabilities, (2) catastrophic in terms of job losses/replacements worldwide and they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it, and (3) the public would have access to the "tiny/medium/..." models while the big money/gov clients get the real super juice hidden behind the gates.
> they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it
There is little to no political will for preventative measures. Conversely, there is an overabundance of political will to react to disasters.
Thus, there are preventionists whose plan B strategy is to write legislation and wait for a disaster to leverage newfound will to get it passed. Better late than never.
All that said, there's no political will to prepare for the politics of AI. It doesn't exist. The best we can accomplish is to be ready with a plan for when disaster hits.
Which has really only been accepted because 99% of people don’t understand how it works. Hard to be outraged by something you can’t see or understand. In my book, the practice is akin to malware. I recently opened a website for an AI service in incognito mode, because I didn’t care to have it in my search results. Despite avoiding third party cookies here, the site still fired off a tracker to Meta, who then correlated my home IP address with my Facebook account, and filled my feed with ads for this AI service. When I was tracked like this despite a somewhat informed defense, which defense do normal people have against this? None.
If you pay OpenAI full price, this machinery should never be used. The only paying customers getting ads are the “ad supported” tier.
I think you can easily imagine a future where the subscription model token subsidy ramps down and is replaced by ads, but it’s important to use precise language about the current state of the world.
I think few will argue it's ethically or legally fine for my website to pay by installing a keylogger through a zero-click Chromium RCE, burying it in the EULA.
TL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day.
This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo.
A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.
> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.
Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.
The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.
Most contemporary stories around AI include the implication that AI did something humans couldn't. This is because the big players have been shilling AGI hard for a while, and their valuations depend on maintaining the sentiment that serious progress in that direction is being made.
Washing machines can’t do anything humans do, they just remove labour. Trucks don’t do anything longboats can’t, it just need less labour and time/effort to build roads rather than canals. Computers can’t calculate anything humans can’t dry run by hand etc.
Everything in reality is about reducing time/effort/material/cost or achieving more with less resource.
Yes. I'd also argue there isn't anything humans couldn't do in theory, other than things strictly prohibited by known laws of physics. It's been pretty conclusively shown in the last 100 years, we're past tipping point of civilizational knowledge and scientific infrastructure.
What stops us from doing any specific thing is always allocation of resources - there's finite amount of time/effort/material/labor available, and past trivial amounts we need more and more people to agree on some allocation. Reduction of time/effort/material/labor costs of any thing is what moves it closer from "infeasible" to "feasible" for us to do. But again, short of violating laws of physics, it was never "impossible".
What I mean is that "can be done by humans" is ill defined. Are you allowed to use pencil and paper? That's not part of your body? Do you have to be strapped into a coffin for it to count as human-done? How about wheels, sticks and stones? Allowed to use those tools? How about an abacus? Or is electricity the line to draw?
No, they don't - that implication is in the heads of people who believe AI is magic, or believe AI is advertised as magic, or believe that humans are dumb.
The actual implication is, and always been, different: AI did something humans theoretically could, given enough time, motivation and budget, but they didn't, because it wasn't the best use of time or money. AI therefore demonstrates its value, by opening up problems that were previously uneconomical to solve.
> that implication is in the heads of people who believe AI is magic, or believe AI is advertised as magic, or believe that humans are dumb.
Yes! I believe that class of people are called "investors."
Your point is basically correct, I think, but the illusion of value that a corporate entity offers, and the reality of the value that the corporate entity is creating, are distinct things.
I'm not sure I agree. More is different. Being able to execute logic at a higher scale and speed would make some previously infeasible intelligence tasks possible, resulting in a new level of intelligence.
> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.
I read that as saying that a human typically wouldn't have the time or the patience. But now with a sufficiently smart LLM, the problem becomes tractable.
Long-term, if we allow AI to manufacture machines, the set of such things is empty.
Immediate-term, it's pretty clear that natural division of labor is that computers do the thinking, and humans do the menial, manual work that requires mixing precision and power movements in field conditions.
Ironically the person verifying the output does both the thinking and doing in that regard. For without this - the output of an llm could be of zero value.
I'm sorry, where does it say the German operator mistyped the key? The article says indeed that the message remained unsolved because it was sent on the wrong date, but I can't see the bit about the mistyping anywhere.
It's doing something that wasn't worth the squeeze for a human. Seems like a perfect use case for AI. Sure, I can do X or I can do Y but if it takes me a few weeks but AI can hash it out in hours, it now makes it worth it.
I think it is legitimate to argue that the process here does not fit the usual definition of "brute forcing". Traditionally, brute forcing would refer to something like a dictionary attack, where an algorithm tries to match all possible combinations of words to eg. find a password. Here, the approach was more common sense based, using historical records and possible error sources to narrow down the possibility space enormously in advance, try out a much more limited set of options within that space until you got a result that made sense, and finally validate those results using historical records. It's the exact same kind of "brute forcing" a human expert would do.
If the final set of possibilities is astronomically smaller than a naive one, calling the whole process a "brute force exercise" draws attention to an astronomically insignificant part.
It obviously is? See above. Or do you not feel the clarification is important? AI being able to solve things no human bothered to try is great, but it is very different from AI solving things humans tried to solve and failed. And the latter is what pops to mind seeing these titles.
Wait a minute. We've had AI that is as capable as a human and even more so since the 1950's.
I keep banging on that drum but the first AI system to prove mathematical theorems was Logic Theorist by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, presented at the Dartmouth conference that named the field of AI in 1956. Wikipedia says:
Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of [Alfred North] Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3]
The first system to outperform human experts in medical diagnosis was MYCIN, an Expert System from the early 1970's at Stanford. Wikipedia again:
An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members.[9] This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment.[citation needed]
And then of course there's the long history of human-dominating AI players for traditional board games starting with DeepBlue's win against GM Gary Kasparov in 1996.
Again: we've had that sort of AI for a long, long time now.
It would be great if any claim of "moving goalposts" has better be very well informed about the history of AI and its accomplishments, as well as its failures, first.
The main difference between the systems you list and the systems that we have today is closed world reasoning on very narrow formalised tasks, vs. open world common sense reasoning on open ended tasks with vast search spaces.
Common sense is ironically the hard part of AI, not the fix-point rule application.
So any exclamation of "it was just using common sense", is missing the forrest for the trees.
>> So any exclamation of "it was just using common sense", is missing the forrest for the trees.
I don't know why you say this, I didn't say anything about common sense.
However, you mention CYC. That's a system that is perfectly capable of common sense reasoning and very much like an LLM in many ways. And that should be no surprise: LLMs are giant Expert Systems trained on a human knowledge-base, i.e. the web. OpenAI basically managed to achieve what Doug Lenat was trying to achieve except they did it with machine learning over massive data and compute instead of painstaking manual coding, but it's the same kind of system in the end.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. Unfortunately it's not easy to try the current version of Cyc and there's not a lot of information about it easily accessible either.
You can also consider Watson, different to Cyc in that its knowledge base was built with a lot of machine learning, including some neural nets. It wasn't an LLM but the original version (before corporate went at it and destroyed it) was perfectly capable of interacting in an open-ended manner, notably winning at Jeopardy years before BERT was a glimmer in Jacob Devlin's eye.
I note again that you were the one who brought common sense reasoning in the conversation but there's a large literature on rule-based systems that do that based e.g. on non-monotonic logics. You should familiarise yourself with that literature before engaging in dares with strangers on the internets.
Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
To the best of my knowledge zero of the people passionate about programming that I know have spent a meaningful portion of their career at non-tech companies. Internships or first jobs out of college are common, but the passionate people end up going somewhere where the thing they're working on is more than an incidental cost center for their employer.
I'd guess it makes sense that if programming is a passion for you then probably a non-tech-centric F500 company probably isn't where you'd choose to work.
For context: my current company with ~400 employees (not just engineering) is the largest company I've ever worked at.
I wonder if carpenters, plumbers and electricians, etc have the same kind of love for their jobs in comparable ratios.
I certainly don't ask when I hire one.
I mean I got into it because I loved it as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And I still loved it in college. Turning it into a job quickly crushed any love I had though.
Speaking from experience, the information density of published books is a lot higher than most internet text. It's very high quality training data.
The goal here is to have all human knowledge in a single file, which is pretty neat IMO.
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