6 ms·

> If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster. Fun fact, there

by jelder 4mo ago

> If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster. Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize.

cute_boi 4mo ago
Yep. That said, unlike cheetahs, there’s plenty of evidence of leopards attacking humans. And these days, it’s the leopards, the closed-AI types and misanthropes -- telling everyone, “AI will take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
- ctoth 4mo ago
  I keep seeing this and I want to speak to it. When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?" Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out. It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!" It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this. Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
  - somesortofthing 4mo ago
    A US-China AGI ban treaty could prevent superintelligence indefinitely. Data centers are hard to hide. Have fun buying GPUs when you're cut off from all global payments. America would have to make some unpleasant concessions but that seems like a solid trade for preventing a wide variety of nightmare futures.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - leonidasv 4mo ago
      Is very difficult (not to say impossible) to ban a ill-defined thing.
  - mbgerring 4mo ago
    Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid. The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here. I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems. “It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress. “Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.
    - ctoth 4mo ago
      > This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. So, the Baruch Plan? The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year. Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0]. [0]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587 https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587
forinti 4mo ago
There's a story about some Kenyans outrunning a Cheetah in 6km. It had been killing their livestock, so they decided to go after it. Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.
- topkai22 4mo ago
  I think the term is persistence hunting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). There was an intriguing blog post years ago (which sadly I can’t find) about how terrifying a fictional portrayal of persistence hunting would be- grinding down prey through exhaustion, thinking you’ve escaped but being slowly tracked down.
  - foobiekr 4mo ago
    There's also the story "Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird" by Sonya Dorman in the first Dangerous Visions which is like this, in a way.
    - stoneman24 4mo ago
      There’s also “the ruum” by Arthur Porges[0]. We got as part of English class in high school, a long time ago. Try not to read the Wikipedia as it might spoil the short story, there’s the pdf available on the web somewhere [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum
      - sonofhans 4mo ago
        Yes! I remember reading that, as you say, a long time ago. This is the first time I’ve seen someone else reference it. I love that story.
      - Timwi 4mo ago
        I read it too in school. I thought it was super obscure!
  - 4mo ago
suzzer99 4mo ago
Ice yachts get well over 100 mph. I'm not sure how much they were used in pre-industrial times.
implements 4mo ago
Cheetahs (genus “Acinonyx”) are the largest ‘small cat’, apparently [1] - separate from the genus “Panthera“ containing the ones that will attack humans (lions, tigers, leopards). [1] There’s a well known viral video of a wildlife park keeper who sleeps with three cheetahs who behave pretty much like large house cats.
jpfromlondon 4mo ago
Why is this a "fun fact", what is this reddit-tier comment contributing?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
ubermonkey 4mo ago
Fun fact for me personally: because I am lucky enough to know a zookeeper who was in charge of the ambassador animal program at a major zoo, I have direct personal experience that cheetahs purr when you pet them. You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.

by jelder 4mo ago

cute_boi 4mo ago

Yep. That said, unlike cheetahs, there’s plenty of evidence of leopards attacking humans. And these days, it’s the leopards, the closed-AI types and misanthropes -- telling everyone, “AI will take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

ctoth 4mo ago
I keep seeing this and I want to speak to it. When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?" Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out. It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!" It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this. Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
- somesortofthing 4mo ago
  A US-China AGI ban treaty could prevent superintelligence indefinitely. Data centers are hard to hide. Have fun buying GPUs when you're cut off from all global payments. America would have to make some unpleasant concessions but that seems like a solid trade for preventing a wide variety of nightmare futures.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - leonidasv 4mo ago
    Is very difficult (not to say impossible) to ban a ill-defined thing.
- mbgerring 4mo ago
  Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid. The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here. I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems. “It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress. “Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.
  - ctoth 4mo ago
    > This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. So, the Baruch Plan? The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year. Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0]. [0]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587 https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

forinti 4mo ago

There's a story about some Kenyans outrunning a Cheetah in 6km. It had been killing their livestock, so they decided to go after it. Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.

topkai22 4mo ago
I think the term is persistence hunting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). There was an intriguing blog post years ago (which sadly I can’t find) about how terrifying a fictional portrayal of persistence hunting would be- grinding down prey through exhaustion, thinking you’ve escaped but being slowly tracked down.
- foobiekr 4mo ago
  There's also the story "Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird" by Sonya Dorman in the first Dangerous Visions which is like this, in a way.
  - stoneman24 4mo ago
    There’s also “the ruum” by Arthur Porges[0]. We got as part of English class in high school, a long time ago. Try not to read the Wikipedia as it might spoil the short story, there’s the pdf available on the web somewhere [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum
    - sonofhans 4mo ago
      Yes! I remember reading that, as you say, a long time ago. This is the first time I’ve seen someone else reference it. I love that story.
    - Timwi 4mo ago
      I read it too in school. I thought it was super obscure!
- 4mo ago

suzzer99 4mo ago

Ice yachts get well over 100 mph. I'm not sure how much they were used in pre-industrial times.

implements 4mo ago

Cheetahs (genus “Acinonyx”) are the largest ‘small cat’, apparently [1] - separate from the genus “Panthera“ containing the ones that will attack humans (lions, tigers, leopards). [1] There’s a well known viral video of a wildlife park keeper who sleeps with three cheetahs who behave pretty much like large house cats.

jpfromlondon 4mo ago

Why is this a "fun fact", what is this reddit-tier comment contributing?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

ubermonkey 4mo ago

Fun fact for me personally: because I am lucky enough to know a zookeeper who was in charge of the ambassador animal program at a major zoo, I have direct personal experience that cheetahs purr when you pet them. You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.