Lin Yuan

[Xiaoyin Qu @quxiaoyin]

Dear Dario,
1. If Claude can cure cancer to save people like your dad, why should we "pace the progress"? Does that mean more people with Hepatitis C will die?
2. If Fable is so cyber-capable that it must be restricted, why are its safeguards too dumb to distinguish cyber defense from cyber offense prompts? When Hugging Face was under attack, why did Fable refuse to help the defenders?
3. We’re glad you want AI to cure cancer. Why is it OK for Claude to force 30-day data retention on pharma's own data and start competing firms but NOT OK (IP theft) if others distill Claude's data?
4. You’ve said advanced models can recognize when they’re being tested and change their behavior accordingly. So why is government(or anyone) able to design the most thorough test before every model launch? Would that just encourage manipulative models?
It seems that every one of your “safety” proposals seems to end the same way: Anthropic gets more leverage, ordinary users get less access, customers pay higher costs, and competitors bear higher regulatory costs, maybe people are not distrusting AI, they are distrusting your approaches with AI.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

https://t.co/yeBqQS1rYW

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@elonmusk @JeffDean @CMantseris Talk is cheap. Show me the data.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@wholemars Why would one ever want to “buy” Waymo? It’s like you fly on a commercial airline that operates safely but you never want to buy the airline🤣

[He He @hhexiy]

Unbelievable. This quote is blatantly false and unnecessary for the argument. And she surely had expected the backlash with the patronizing NOTE. This is racism, not "cultural generalization". @NeurIPSConf

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@wholemars Isn’t FSD not supposed to have hands off the wheel? It’s still a Level 2 drivin product 👀

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@mehdirhasan @leftyvegan But you haven’t spoken to anyone who actually lives in Xinjiang, have you? Dude, just fly there and interview yourself.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@RnaudBertrand Beautiful but not rare

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@adityaag Will you invest in Waymo?😄

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

“Autonomous Vehicle: a Compound AI System” by Lin Yuan
https://t.co/uTwCwHW75h

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

Uber is Dead, my reflections on Waymo

I’ve been in San Francisco for just over a week, during which I’ve taken 7 rides with Waymo, a similar number with Uber, and a few with FSD Teslas.

My journey to SFO via Uber was alarming—the driver veered out of the lane multiple times and nearly crashed on a ramp, seemingly vying for a one-star rating or to genuinely scare me.

Conversely, my experiences with Waymo were virtually flawless, if you don’t consider overly cautious driving a fault.

I experienced a minor hiccup when we got stuck behind parked cars because the vehicle thought they were queuing at a red light. It quickly resolved the confusion and moved on, which was rather amusing.

Waymo, and other Level 5 autonomous vehicles, are poised to revolutionize the movement of people and goods.

The most apt analogy I can think of is that Waymo is transforming the real world into an automated Amazon warehouse, with people as the goods and Waymo vehicles as the robots shuttling them around.

With the advent of personal transportation becoming incredibly affordable, sending anything from point A to point B using a self-driving electric vehicle will soon be within easy reach.

One of Waymo’s standout features is privacy. Riding in an Uber often means being subjected to the driver’s loud group chats on some app, making the journey neither quiet nor private.

In contrast, Waymo offers a fully private experience, allowing you to have confidential phone conversations or chat freely with fellow passengers without distraction.

Waymo also reimagines the concept of a car. Without the need for a driver, we can eliminate the front console, reduce weight, and remove the steering wheel.

This opens up possibilities for passenger seats to be reoriented, perhaps facing backwards, or for the vehicle to become a mobile living room. Tomorrow’s vehicle designs will differ drastically from today’s.

Destinations that are currently expensive and logistically complicated to reach via Taxi/Uber, often lying outside public transport routes, can be simplified to a single “Waymo” journey.

This could shift the current model of “Uber + public transport + Uber” to a more streamlined experience.

As more cars become self-driving, we could see a reduction in the amount of time cars are parked—from 99% of their lifetime to perhaps just 25%.

This not only improves unit economics but could also decrease the number of cars on the road.

This transition represents one of the most significant shifts for Generation X.

In conclusion, the future is autonomous, electric, and efficient. Uber, as we know it, is dead.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@jiayq It’s DBRX 😅… but thanks for using it

[Ali Ghodsi @alighodsi]

Today we released an open source model, DBRX, that beats all previous open source models on the standard benchmarks. The model itself is a Mixture of Experts (MoE), that's roughly twice the brains (132B) but half the cost (36B) of Llama2-70B. Making it both smart and cheap. Since only 36B expert parameters are used live, it's close to twice the speed (tokens/seconds) of Llama2-70B. We're excited to build custom versions of this for organizations that have proprietary data! Check it out!

https://t.co/KA5rLaCnQx

[Matei Zaharia @matei_zaharia]

Interesting trend in AI: the best results are increasingly obtained by compound systems, not monolithic models.

AlphaCode, ChatGPT+, Gemini are examples.

In this post, we discuss why this is and emerging research on designing & optimizing such systems.
https://t.co/tfnNuoTNNY

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

Hong Kong is getting very negative press for the recent so-called "patriots only" election. But you can't begin to understand our community unless you know TWO FACTS that provide essential context. Unfortunately, they are being actively hidden.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It should be more widely understood that saying the "Uyghur genocide" narrative is western propaganda is not the same as denying that there was an authoritarian crackdown in Xinjiang; empire apologists tend to conflate these two points in a motte-and-bailey fallacy wherein the much harder claim to defend (Uyghur genocide) is misrepresented as one and the same as a much easier claim to defend (authoritarianism in Xinjiang).

That Beijing began implementing a giant police action in Xinjiang in 2014 involving mass-scale detention of Uyghurs in reeducation camps is not seriously debated, and is not denied by Beijing. What's denied is that any of this was done with the intention of the effect of eliminating or diminishing the Uyghur people or their culture; it simply wasn't, which is why tourism to enjoy Uyghur culture is currently a booming industry in Xinjiang.

These reeducation camps have been spun by western propagandists as concentration camps and extermination camps in a ham-fisted effort to frame Xi Jinping as another Adolf Hitler, when in reality they really were re-education camps in the literal sense of the term. They were facilities designed to indoctrinate/de-indoctrinate Uyghurs who'd become radicalized into an ideology that had plunged Xinjiang into violence and chaos and threatened to tear apart the PRC. By all accounts — including by the western press — these facilities were decommissioned around 2019-2020.

Were there abuses in Xinjiang? It's hard to imagine how their wouldn't have been in a sweeping police action involving mass-scale involuntary detainment. You can criticize Beijing for those abuses all you want, but what you can't do is legitimately call it anything like genocide.

When Uyghur separatist groups began inflicting acts of terror with the goal of driving the Chinese government out of Xinjiang and creating their own state, Beijing had essentially three choices:

1. To engage in a US-style campaign of mass military slaughter against these groups until they were defeated,
2. To allow a violent uprising of what would inevitably become western-backed jihadists as they had just seen happen in Libya and Syria carve away a massive and geostrategically crucial part of China to be exploited by the US and its allies, or
3. To find some alternative to 1 and 2.

Beijing went with option number three, and the alternative it found was the aggressive deradicalization campaign it ended up implementing and the re-education facilities it has been so widely criticized for. Again, you can criticize Beijing for how it went about its dilemma in Xinjiang all you want, but it was plainly universes less draconian than the US approach of killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its barbaric “war on terror”. And unlike the “war on terror”, Beijing’s approach actually worked, which is why those facilities were shut down and Xinjiang is returning to normal.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@pmddomingos The (only) two Nobel laureates signatories, respectable in their own field, are not even remotely related to climate science. Facts and expertise are more important than titles.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@BigM33sh @caitoz @theethlawyer That's not her point. What she said was do your research on the foreign policy before you criticize it.

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@joshrogin Debating not by facts and logic but by labeling, you just set a low bar for WP journalism

[Lin Yuan @apeforest]

@stoptweetingmee @AndyBxxx Except Taiwan Straight is only 81 miles wide so there is no way to keep 100 miles off coast 😂