Charlie Guthmann

ai street interviews, @NIH fellow prev: @akunacapital / failed startup

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@CharlesD353 I have interviewed about 60 people on ai if people are looking for primary sources.

UPenn: https://t.co/ODJvNFMe9k

Flyover country: https://t.co/XyjUl5XTc4

Sf startup cafe: https://t.co/2dAqNCcrZI (unedited, also one on my YouTube )

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@infrecursion1 I agree it seems odd that they would say they didn’t take the instance data for prompts but did for training but I’m not gonna act like I have a strong sense of how quickly oai can fine tune in a situation like this

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

So uh, what the fuck, this is a story for the ages if true, I can’t believe I’m alive rn. I’m too stupid to explain this well but it seems that Levent and an NYU professor nearly solved Navier-Stokes (or vibe collabed with frontier models to do it, mostly Claude and Codex). Per the prof, OpenAI caught wind of it, threw a team and massive compute at it after the leak, and now claims their model finished it. He asked if they’d trained on his Codex sessions with all his drafts in them. No answer. They offered to post their result the day after his and publicly say he “deserves the Clay Prize,” or let him write it up solo with Levent dropped as an author (because he works for ant, this is all about ipo hype ig LOL). He said no and that he’d go public. Open ai C suite guy then says:

“Why would you ruin your career?”

“If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Wtffff am I understanding this right?
Galois-tier math lore (if we don’t get vibe paperclipped first)

[Sichu Lu @lu_sichu]

https://t.co/BRmCMgbLoV so the rumors had substance holy shit lol

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@infrecursion1 I didn’t say they said they trained on it, I said they didn’t answer. Which is what the author said no? And c suite is a bit of a stretch sure but relatively compressed way to say “high up at oai” which I think is fair to say if Sebastian. I don’t think that part is misleading

[Fernando Borretti @zetalyrae]

I wrote about my journey from AI optimist to AI doomer.

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@chowell2000 @TaliaRinger https://t.co/Gjev7jGos3

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@npparikh @TaliaRinger Yes, I'm all for living life lol. I've seen life is beautiful. I actually watched in on NYE in a jewish country club a decade ago, surrounded by people who were only alive because their recent ancestors decided to leave Germany as things got increasingly insane around them.

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@npparikh @TaliaRinger my point is also fairly basic not sure what your confusion is. It's nearly impossible that these events will remain irrelevant to most humans. You are free to make whatever meaning of life you want doesn't mean the future won't come for you.

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@littmath I really loved getting my math degree and I'd want my children to have at least share some of the motivations and incentives I had to pursue it. Things change yes and that's ok but at this rate in 20 years there will be NO reason to get a math degree other than pure passion

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@littmath You were talking the same way about AI making breakthroughs about 6 months ago... If you change your tune when something already happens or when its 100% likely then it's probably too late to stop it. I'm not gonna have sympathy if on that day the government cuts all the grants.

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@littmath You all have a once in a lifetime opportunity to alert the public to what is coming and save humanity from the slippery slope of automating away all of our purpose and instead choose to nitpick pedantic minor points that will be irrelevant by the time first year phds graduate

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@littmath Mathematicians have 0 foresight and I'm ready to stop listening to them

"It's about the ideas not the proof" - the AI will be better at explaining and connecting deep topics, give it 2 years

"it's about understanding" - some grad will put a chip in brain

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

A few musings/stories from my recent life and how it relates to the "inertia" of the economy. I'm extremely ASI pilled and have short timelines FWIW but funny to compare that with my day to day which is still filled with lots of frustrating minutiae.

- 3 Weeks ago my computer was stolen out of the mail. The longer story is quite bizarre but the short version is that I think my neighbor stole it, I asked my landlord for the ring footage. My landlord said I needed to file a police report to get the footage (this isn't legally required, I checked). I went to the police station at 11:00 on a Tuesday (can't do a report online in Philly). There were two people in line. I waited for 3 hours. The process was that an officer listened to your story and then tried to write the story into a structured form that was probably made in the 1980s, the structure of the form not at all flexible enough to fit the variety of different classes of police reports. So they kinda just randomly scribbled notes on the form; it would have been better if it was just a blank sheet of paper. Then they brought the paper in the back and typed it onto a structured form on the computer to enter it into the system. I presume they watched a 15 minute youtube video after typing each one as well. They told me it would appear on the site within a few days. It never appeared.

- I was moving out last week. I put my furniture on facebook marketplace about a week before. Facebook marketplace's UI is pretty meh and it's of course impossible to use programatically. Just remembering how to use it wasted about 20 minutes of my time. I have no other choice though, because the government refuses to regulate network monopolies if they are digital. Then, I receive dozens of messages from people asking to buy my furniture over the next two days. Every single message then ghosted me or told me they didn't actually want the thing that they had asked to buy from me minutes or hours before. I know, I also spam message sellers on marketplace, I'm not blaming them. My furniture was only worth like 250$ in total anyway, I really just did it because the idea of throwing it out made me feel bad. But after the 25th ghosting I took down the listing and threw the stuff in the trash because It wasn't worth my time. It's very clear facebook doesn't care that much about marketplace, and yet their network effects are so strong that merely by having a marketplace they largely crowdout any competitor from existing. Seems like the type of thing agents could probably handle seemlessly right now but what do I know.

- I messaged 10 people on craigslist about subletting their apartment/ or MTM rentals, wasting a bunch of their time. 7 didn't respond to me. The three who did got back 1-3 days later, and asked me questions like "do you have a dog", after I said no another day later, they got back to me, another day later, and asked me to fill out a form that was like a background check or credit score check or similar. There is in theory a preponderance of available data and technology that should allow me to seamlessly find a place to sublet for a month if it's available, but in practice it takes 5-10 hours of friction and not much easier than it would have been 40 years ago, and maybe more difficult.

- I decided to just get an airbnb instead of subletting because I have executive functioning issues and didn't want to keep emailing people from craigslist back and forth. I know I know, a lot of this comes from a place of privilege, most people can't afford to waste an extra hundred dollars to not deal with banalities of life, I'm lucky and I get that. Anyway I'm also quite frugal in other ways, so I rented the cheapest airbnb I saw for 2 weeks. Turns out it was in the middle of the hood, I don't know philly that well lol and didn't do any research, yea I have some issues. Anyway things seem pretty similar here to what I would imagine they were like 20 years ago, and i'm not sure why that would change any time soon. Not trying to be judgemental or overlay any morality here, but I'm not sure what people on twitter are expecting. The people here will not be adopting agentic workflows anytime soon. If things change with a bang it won't be because most of society quickly starts integrating AI in all the nooks and crannies of their lives all at once.

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@phl43 @theojaffee What follows is that he was paid to post this

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@TaliaRinger Genuinely starting to believe humans need a brutal war every generation or they will forget how bad things can get if you don’t stay on the ball

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

@TaliaRinger I’m not even against what you are saying but it’s also completely absurd lol. Ice cream and swimming pools are a concepts that have only existed in a bubble within a bubble within a bubble. The natural state of things is violence and terror, there is no ice cream by default.

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

If the government forced open data protocols I think we might see some stuff change very very fast. But don't think this will happen!

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

It's weird but doesn't surprise me atp. Economists still use STATA. Now think about the average person rural america or in the hood. Amazon and shortform are pretty much the only recent behavioral changes for most people. Anyone who has done a B2C startup has experienced this.

[Aprii *️⃣ @ApriiSR]

i think mundane society just has like a weird amount of inertia

like probably seismic things will happen but i also expect that to not stop society from going on roughly as it is

for a time, anyways

[Charlie Guthmann @cguth_7]

For a few months now, Agents should be able to help us with furniture markets, sublet markets, gig economy work, daily plans, etc. But has any of this stuff happened? How can any company acquire the relevant data?