Whataboutism isn’t a fallacy and is widely misused online.
If someone says “I think x should stop because of y”. It is a valid argumentative response to say “y also occurs with z, so should z also stop?”. It is argumentatively revealing either hypocrisy, or that the original imperative relies on additional, unstated arguments/assumptions/biases.
Maybe I’m confused, but I thought whataboutism was more like “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
It’s a deflection technique, not a check on logical consistency.
> “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
no one is generally expecting or even asking for "let’s discuss that instead". what they are doing is trying to point out that your lack of of care about Y implies that you never actually cared about X in the first place but rather you only care about me doing X.
often times X is actually bad but human nature is such that no one actually cares about it while wanting to appear to when locked down on it. for this reason arguing about X directly is bad optics.
whataboustism is basically an effort to draw attention to the selective enforcement of norms, laws, morality, whatever. hypocrisy is implied.
It can also be used to derail a conversation. I.e. "I find subject X unpleasant, so I am going to imply that you don't care enough about subject Y, which has a passing similarity to it, so that the subject of the conversation turns to Y rather than X. I do not actually care about subject Y, but I won't say that out loud". See also "concern trolling".
I’m not sure how people are looking at numbers that show, even if we wipe off the enormous R&D expenditures, they are still in the red for inference + sales/marketing + admin and responding “this seems positive”.
It’s like being a sold a car and being told “well if you ignore the fact it has no engine it’s a good buy” yet it also has no wheels.
> Unless there's an assumption that R&D costs have to forever go up in order to increase revenue, I feel like this shows that the AI industry is actually on a path to profitability in the long term.
There are three futures right, I’ll rank them in order of fantasy -
1. Someone achieves AGI. At that point the economics of an individual company don’t even matter.
2. R&D costs do have to forever continue, because LLMs can be continually iteratively improved. Much like chip development, there is no end in sight, at least not on a near term timescale. If you are not continually at the frontier, customers will use a competitor or open/local alternatives.
3. LLMs reach a plateau of functionality. Further gains are minimal, quality reaches the apex of what the technology permits. In this scenario the hyperscalers have no business because open/local models will rapidly reach that same plateau as well.
The leaked numbers completely ignore how much of their compute is subsidized.
It also ignores how much of "R&D" is actually needed for the thing they offer to keep working. Looking at the thread everyone seems to be presuming "R&D" is all "training new models", but that is uncertain.
Inference is cash positive: it's research that takes up all the money. So, if you can get ahold of enough users, the volume eventually works in your favour.
The idea is war of attrition and then as your potential competitors run out of money and it costs too much for a new entrant, you raise your prices to be profitable and/or enshittify your product.
Right, but unlike with social products (where the network of users is essential) or transportation/food delivery (where providers will follow the user volume) I just don’t see any stickiness benefit for OpenAI. A user’s conversation history is the only potentially valuable bit, but I think most users treat their ChatGPT history like their Google search history; disposable.
Can someone give me an explanation for why Mike Cardwell, who lives in the UK, blocks Iranian IPs for “your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.” but does not block US or UK IPs for their decision to arm Israel?
The answer would seem to me to be racism – he values Ukrainian lives more than Palestinians and considers non-white citizens in non-democratic countries responsible for their country’s actions, but white citizens of democracies innocent.
I’m not sure if you’re actually asking or not, but in case you want to hear an answer, it’s because Israel is considered to be defending itself after a horrible attack, not that dissimilar to Ukraine really in some people’s view (me included). This goes back to a worldview where residents of a country share a portion of the blame for their country’s actions. This view is not universal, but has a certain mindshare (again, myself included), and if you imagine it fair for residents of a place to share the fate caused by the cumulative actions of that place, it’s not a big stretch to see how Israel’s actions can be considered natural and just by some, and so can the sanctions against residents of Iran and Russia.
The vast majority of the world including the ICC and the UN does not consider Israel to be defending itself. By your own logic, Israelis are culpable for the genocide and land theft committed by their government.
I believe “vast manority” may be a stretch; do you happen to know if there’s a way to quantify that? In my bubble, almost everyone that I personally know and who generally has reasonable beliefs, is on the Israel’s side of this conflict.
Why do we keep having these LLM studies that are completely unsurprising. Yes, the probabilistic text generator is more likely to output a correct answer when the input more closely matches its training sources than when you add random noise to the prompt. They don’t actually “understand” maths. It’s worrying how much research seems to operate from the premise that they do.
"It’s worrying how much research seems to operate from the premise that they do."
They are testing an hypothesis, we don't know if they're optimistic or pessimistic about it. Is it even relevant?
They have studied that LLMs can be easily confused with non-sequitors, and this is interesting. Maybe prompts to LLM should be more direct and foccused. Maybe this indicates a problem with end users interacting with LLMs directly - many people have difficulty on writing in a clear and direct way! Probably even more people when speaking!
If someone says “I think x should stop because of y”. It is a valid argumentative response to say “y also occurs with z, so should z also stop?”. It is argumentatively revealing either hypocrisy, or that the original imperative relies on additional, unstated arguments/assumptions/biases.
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