It seems like Alzheimer’s and prion diseases like Kuru share a core molecular mechanism with misfolded proteins propagating and causing brain lesions. I find it really interesting that the gene protecting against Kuru has evolved naturally when according to Wikipedia, prion diseases don’t seem to have any effective treatments.
Cells have machinery for removing worn out proteins (tag em with ubiquitin and send them to incinerator [lysomes]). Doesn't surprise me too much a useful mutation (this folding is wrong detector) could work its way in.
I understand they have been criticized because they play capitalism particularly well, but there are many good points in the original article and it didn’t sound like an outright PR.
Do we have any solid evidence these models can outperform Western models in terms of quality? Or is it more: because they are forbidden, they can't get enough training data, visibility etc. to compete?
Spoiler alert - they are all towards the bottom of the leaderboard. People come up with a wide variety of excuses for why they are not used despite being offered for significantly lower cost, but the answer is simply because they don't perform well enough for now.
LM Arena uses human side by side voting, which limits its applicability to complex tasks.
The ARCPrize leaderboard does have Deepseek V3.2, which only scored 4% on ARC-AGI 2 (while the top models score over 80%). It also Kimi and Qwen, but they also didn't perform well.
Different regions play complementary roles in the global economy. The oversimplified description is that the US drives innovation and risk-taking, Europe prioritizes social welfare and sustainability and Asia powers manufacturing. Forcing everyone to compete in the US-style growth race would be disastrous - imagine the burnouts, resource drain and market instability if every country tried to be Silicon Valley. Plus, many Europeans simply don't share the "get rich quick" mentality - they value work-life balance and social security more. Whether we're being pushed into this growth-obsessed game is another debate. Ideally, regions should focus on their strengths while maintaining independence. Europe can keep its social model while smartly adopting tech, Asia can focus on sustainable industry, and the US can lead in innovation. It's like an ecosystem - diversity makes it stronger. The goal shouldn't be for everyone to play the same exhausting game, but to maintain different approaches that complement each other.
A few luxury brands and a well preserved history and culture that is nice for tourism. Lots of high value human capital if only they could truly unlock it and allow it to thrive.
Today's Europe is just milking what it can as it continues its decades long crisis of identity and pessimism. Demographics are destiny and it's extremely problematic for Europe's future. There's no real leadership and it's one large admin state that can only agree to fund people's lives today at the cost of tomorrows lives using whatever assets it has left from its golden age before the wars. It's no wonder no one is having kids as they know the future is bleak. Just let the admin state manage my life and take it easy and not worry too much and fade away into the future until it's all gone...slowly and then all at once.
The jungle produces strong creatures and much of the leading world is much more full of jungle animals than the zoo animals the people of the European continent have become generation over generation.
If you consider complex forms of life serving as an entropy-increasing phenomenon, then you might as well consider that the evolutionary algorithm is governed by such goals. It's even plausible to take the human behaviors like increasing consumerism and growth-orientation as being connected to this fundamental thermodynamic drive. Perhaps we'll find even more efficient principles to drive our consumption further. <extending on your rant obviously />
I tried taking notes for learning and brainstorming over the years but found it incredibly difficult, not because of a lack of note taking frameworks, apps or technologies but because _sustaining_ this process is hard. Reading posts like these makes me quite envious of author’s dedication. Recently I was contemplating about a possible lightweight middle ground solution where I think a more polished software would certainly help - _highlighting_. Imagine if you could simply highlight/select any text/image on the screen of any app (ok, let’s start with the few), optionally assign different colors, tags and have those highlights automatically synchronized in a sort of a searchable personal diary format. The main feature of such tool would be cropping and indexing what’s already read and seen as opposed to having to summarize/rephrase or enrich it with your own notes. Why I think software in this case reducing friction to a minimum would help? As opposed to taking notes, identifying illuminating corner-stone paragraphs and sentences mostly feels like an implicit process that happens naturally at least in my experience.
GPT3, Stable Diffusion etc. will really kick off. People will start accepting these blackbox Big Data sequence prediction models as a new norm, a powerful assistance for all sorts of domains. There will be some resistance but the argument that one doesn’t need to understand digestion in order to eat food and survive will eventually settle and the path of these models becoming a natural extension of our minds will be laid out. We will see different interfaces (speech recognition, OCR) and pipelines being created to fit these models into real problem solving pipelines and address their inaccuracies, i.e., with additional fact/spec checking and computation logic. some successful startups and products will emerge mostly from folks who already started their ventures into this space.
Fully agreed, the way I'd approach this would be that the said mathematical proofs about certain truths "by definition" rely on human logic as the main building block and substrate. Logic is a human basis of agreeing which seems necessary evolutionary. Counting and separating observable objects turned out to be quite necessary for survival as well. Hence this statement seems to imply that aliens would need to have a corresponding logic reasoning system and observational abilities. If that was the case perhaps there would be a strong inclination to believe that the isomorphic reasoning would be deduced.
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