Because it did not top the open source leaderboard on any benchmark, except the agent one maybe. The hosted versions are not currently cheaper or faster than the other open source models, either.
From the perspective of China, it probably makes sense to try and train on local chips and try to dethrone Nvidia. I guess this means PRC thinks AGI isnt around the corner and they can catch up on hardware.
It also seems reasonable for me to think AGI isn't around the corner given how much current AI technology has failed in all fronts to deliver anything both general and intelligent.
Not even Altman thinks AGI is around the corner. It keeps the hype and money flow alive though.
is that why he's talking up Dyson Spheres in interviews? the guy is a lunatic and conman, either completely insane or evil, no other option. here's the stupid quote:
Sam Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.
Theo Von: Do you really?
Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”
Why is that wrong? If like Altman you think that energy is the bottleneck to intelligence, and social and economic power grows with intelligence, then predicting that intelligence will optimize for energy collection seems reasonable. It isn't evil to predict that. And if he is insane to predict it, then I must be insane for not dismissing it.
Cassandra wasn't evil or crazy, she just had bad news.
But there is no proof more energy == more intelligence. In some areas I am smarter than the best ChatGPT model and my energy source is Taco Bell double deckers. Clearly there is a lot of low hanging fruit for efficiency before needing to encompass the entire sun and suck it dry of energy. It's an absurd thing to suggest. It's exactly the type of thing a conman would suggest. Something cool, fantastic and completely impossible to actually implement.
I think you underestimate how much energy in your food is.
1 kcal = 4200 joules
1 Watthours = 3600 joules
The Taco Bell double decker has 310 kcal = 1.3M joules
1.3M joules = 0.35 kWh
If each AI prompt takes 0.3 Wh, you could do ca. 1200 prompts per double decker. Which is a lot.
If he really thinks the shortest path to building a synthetic brain is to build an entire Dyson sphere I would submit his bottleneck is the algorithm, not energy.
Because we are talking about likely outcomes, not optimizing for one tho to the exclusion of all else. Even if AGI is right around the corner (which is a pretty low percentage bet these days) cost alone would prevent such an outcome from being likely. Altman knows this, but being reasonable rarely sells.
I think he's just thinking about a longer timeline.
i.e. A prophet for profit
They're already making the robots to run these models, which are the complements they are commoditizing.
No space between paragraphs and blockquotes definitely hurts, and the subheading formatting is clearly not right. But the same content is posted on multiple sites. Maybe you'd find e.g. the Substack formatting more readable?
This blog is excellent in general, particularly the AI posts. Yes they go extremely deep in places but the author freely admits that they are designed to be read selectively / skimmed in places.
I mean it’s just a huge blob of text with emojis
Jup, shame really. Just a little bit of better formatting and typesetting could really go a long way there. :)
Because it did not top the open source leaderboard on any benchmark, except the agent one maybe. The hosted versions are not currently cheaper or faster than the other open source models, either.
From the perspective of China, it probably makes sense to try and train on local chips and try to dethrone Nvidia. I guess this means PRC thinks AGI isnt around the corner and they can catch up on hardware.
It also seems reasonable for me to think AGI isn't around the corner given how much current AI technology has failed in all fronts to deliver anything both general and intelligent.
Not even Altman thinks AGI is around the corner. It keeps the hype and money flow alive though.
is that why he's talking up Dyson Spheres in interviews? the guy is a lunatic and conman, either completely insane or evil, no other option. here's the stupid quote:
Sam Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.
Theo Von: Do you really?
Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”
Why is that wrong? If like Altman you think that energy is the bottleneck to intelligence, and social and economic power grows with intelligence, then predicting that intelligence will optimize for energy collection seems reasonable. It isn't evil to predict that. And if he is insane to predict it, then I must be insane for not dismissing it.
Cassandra wasn't evil or crazy, she just had bad news.
But there is no proof more energy == more intelligence. In some areas I am smarter than the best ChatGPT model and my energy source is Taco Bell double deckers. Clearly there is a lot of low hanging fruit for efficiency before needing to encompass the entire sun and suck it dry of energy. It's an absurd thing to suggest. It's exactly the type of thing a conman would suggest. Something cool, fantastic and completely impossible to actually implement.
I think you underestimate how much energy in your food is.
1 kcal = 4200 joules
1 Watthours = 3600 joules
The Taco Bell double decker has 310 kcal = 1.3M joules
1.3M joules = 0.35 kWh
If each AI prompt takes 0.3 Wh, you could do ca. 1200 prompts per double decker. Which is a lot.
If he really thinks the shortest path to building a synthetic brain is to build an entire Dyson sphere I would submit his bottleneck is the algorithm, not energy.
Because we are talking about likely outcomes, not optimizing for one tho to the exclusion of all else. Even if AGI is right around the corner (which is a pretty low percentage bet these days) cost alone would prevent such an outcome from being likely. Altman knows this, but being reasonable rarely sells.
I think he's just thinking about a longer timeline.
i.e. A prophet for profit
They're already making the robots to run these models, which are the complements they are commoditizing.
Recent and related:
DeepSeek-v3.1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976764 - Aug 2025 (253 comments)
This blog is unreadable
No space between paragraphs and blockquotes definitely hurts, and the subheading formatting is clearly not right. But the same content is posted on multiple sites. Maybe you'd find e.g. the Substack formatting more readable?
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/deepseek-v31-is-not-having-a-m...
This blog is excellent in general, particularly the AI posts. Yes they go extremely deep in places but the author freely admits that they are designed to be read selectively / skimmed in places.
I mean it’s just a huge blob of text with emojis
Jup, shame really. Just a little bit of better formatting and typesetting could really go a long way there. :)