Generated header image stinks to high heaven and the first couple lines of LLM crap prose make me sick. I've seen this guy's name on HN a few times and almost never in a good light, seemingly for good reason, who is he and why does he show up here so much?
Well yeah, the LLM header image is basically a joke on his part.
I think the tldr is that Gary Marcus has been hating on LLMs since ChatGPT came out, mostly because of the hype around them. His core theory is that pushing LLM tech just with more training is not going to accomplish AGI. He does have some essays with good writing (not this one), and he typically talks about how we’ll need different techniques to solve things like hallucinations.
I’ve read articles of his which made genuinely good points, and which go against the grain of what the big LLM companies are saying.
The reason there’s a lot of drama is that the LLM hype train (which includes some prominent people) really hated on HIM for saying anything negative about LLM technology, and he responded to that by keeping the flame war going for the past 4 years (as you can see in this article.)
So when any companies do anything that looks like using these other techniques (neurosymbolic AI, world models), he basically tosses a quick article out about how vindicated he feels. Because the companies were all like “attention is all we need” and “we can just build 4x bigger data centers and that extra compute will solve all of our problems with more training,” and he was like “that’s BS”
So, I really don’t mind him showing up, because we get do get much BS on here from the AI companies too. So… Gary Marcus is at least a balancing kind of BS in a way. (For example, it’s hard to trust anything Anthropic says about Mythos, because they have so much money riding on it being insanely capable.)
But that situation isn’t ideal. What we actually need is more thoughtful, critical research which is NOT tied to impossible business goals. And that doesn’t describe Gary Marcus OR OpenAI/Anthropic.
I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.
If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"
The '70s were not hopeful. Economy was terrible, Vietnam ended but still hung over the culture, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Iranian hostage crisis, cold war threatening to turn hot at any moment, double-digit mortgage rates.... and Disco.
Some parts of the US economy may have been terrible (perhaps due to the increased oil price, which became closer to the true cost of oil than that of the previous cheap oil, which was so cheap because it was basically stolen by USA), but in another parts of the world the economy was great in comparison with what followed after 1980.
Moreover, even in the US, the seventies were the greatest time for the electronics and computers industries, when the greatest amount of innovations have been made.
After 1980, there have been huge advances, but all of them were completely predictable, i.e. the electronics and computing industries settled on an evolution path that was well defined for a few decades, with very few surprises.
The seventies were much wilder, when much more diverse things have been tried (and many of those have failed) and they were surely hopeful, especially in their second half.
During the seventies, there were a lot of US companies that I liked and I was convinced that if I bought something from them that was mutually beneficial, because they really tried to make products that fulfilled as well as possible the needs of their customers, while ensuring a decent and reasonable profit for the vendor.
Nowadays there exists no big company in the entire world from which I can buy a product without feeling that this is an adversarial transaction, where they try as hard as they can to fool me into paying as much as possible for something that is worth as less as possible.
Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.
The seventies were a more representative time for technological hopes, during a time when it was not yet clear which are the right technological choices. The nineties were a time of rapid technological progress, but most of it was perfectly predictable, without surprises. The only thing that was surprising during the nineties was how important the Internet became in practice, even if the evolution of its underlying technology was not surprising.
The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market.
Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions.
Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time.
So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
A global view is probably not the right way to look at things, encouraging as it may be. Of course globally hunger rates fell and so did child mortality. If nothing else, by the inexorable progress of science and technology.
But what about comparing the same country/region? After all that's a better sense of how things are progressing locally to you, and when people are asked "are things better or worse" they probably compare the way they live with the way their parents lived.
Would you rather be born in 1980 or 2020 in China? In Poland? No question. Same question but in the USA? In the UK? The West in general? I'm really not so sure.
As an American with severe hemophilia, 2020, without a doubt.
I was born in 1978, and in the early '80s, beat approximately 50/50 odds by not getting infected with HIV from the only available treatments at the time, and as a result of this and other risks including hepatitis, treatments were only used in response to active bleeding episodes throughout my childhood, resulting in arthritis in my ankles and elbows by the time I was around 8.
And I still wound up with hepatitis C from near birth (at which point it was referred to as "non-A, non-B", as the virus would not be identified until the late '80s) until a cure was developed decades later, fortunately never symptomatic.
So, while I beat the odds, my life expectancy from birth until much later would have been considerably longer had I been born in 2020, and my joints would work a lot better.
Oh, and as someone who grew up with the Shuttle and attended both Space Camp and Space Academy in Huntsville, inevitable political nonsense notwithstanding, I'm elated about the successful mission.
As for the odds, given the opportunity, I wouldn't even hesitate unless they were worse than 1 in 10.
Objectively never a better point in history, subjectively never more people miserable and misled.
Wild stuff really. There is a book about it, using an Abe Lincoln quote he said hoping that the civil war wouldn’t happen, “better angels of our nature”.
Of all things there's a relevant Tumblr post from nearly a decade ago that I often think everyone should consider (in agreement BTW):
"If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
That's a reflection/continuation of a very old meme (from before we called them memes). "Why your idea won't work" checklists were passed around USENET and other forums, and one of the checklist items was almost always something like "your idea requires immediate total cooperation from everyone at once".
This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.
I think it's as realistic as it is simplistic. The State gets a monopoly on violence so that you can sue someone who wrongs you instead of killing them. When conversation and cash fail, violence is all that's left, and we concentrate that power in groups of people tasked with deciding when the alternatives have failed. It doesn't always work but it's a better alternative than the individualized bloodlust disappointingly endorsed elsewhere in this thread.
I was wondering about that too, I assume maybe there was some additional adjustments needed to land in the right spot, but they didn't mention it on the stream.
I’ll note, since it is supremely interesting to me, that Starship is able to communicate with the ground during its whole reentry due to its sheer size and ability to connect with Starlink satellites. I assumed loss of signal due to reentry was a given for any spaceship!
Shuttle in its last days had antennas that protruded outside the plasma just enough for telemetry. Apollo and Artemis reentry are also direct entry from Lunar-Earth transfer orbit using ablative heat shields, so the plasma would be hotter and thicker than suborbital Starship shots with Shuttle style ceramic tiles.
I'm pretty sure it did not stick anything through the plasma sheet- that is impossible. You would eithe melt the thing or just shift the plasma sheet a bit. It forms as air is compressed on contact, simple as that.
What IIRC was actually done was that some antennas were placed on the back of the shuttle & its size was big enough that the plasma bubble would not fully envelope it - it would be open up to space. And that antenna on the back would communicate with TDRS satellites through this gap, enabling contact through the whole re-entry.
Starship does basically the same, just with Starlink satellites instead of TDRS.
Would this capsule had been been able to communicate if it was integrated with starlink or is the size more important? I'd imagine if they could have achieved communication via Starlink they would have done it, but just curious.
It's a function of the shape. On a capsule-sized spacecraft, the ionized plasma completely surrounds the craft, so no radio communications can get in or out. For an oblong-shaped spacecraft, like the Space Shuttle or Starship, the descent tends to be angled such that you have a "hole" in the plasma you can get a signal through.
No, the plasma forms a teardrop shape around small craft like Orion, completely cutting off radio comms. Larger craft like starship or the shuttle which have a roughly cylindrical shape (vs Orion’s circular cross section) aren’t fully enclosed by the plasma. The shuttle had a transmitter attached to its tail for later flights, which could send back telemetry during re-entry.
"Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,000 km/h; 7,600 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,400 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat. The high temperature caused a plasma to form around the missile, requiring extremely powerful radio signals to reach it for guidance. The missile glowed bright white as it flew."
Awesome, thank you! I wonder if some kind of very long-tethered deployed antenna could enable this for the capsule or if the ratio of long-enough-to-work vs thick-enough-to-not-burn-off-completely just doesn't work. Time to read about the shuttle.
Also Orion and other capsules fall like a rock (steep reentry profile ) compared to shuttle/starship, which intentionally slow down the reentry and kinda glide (ballpark 10min with capsules compared to 30min with shuttle/starship).
tl;dr: capsules get fully enveloped in plasma due to their shape, size and reentry profile
The space shuttle, too, was able to communicate. I imagine the smaller the craft the smaller the angle you can "speak" out of and, below a certain size, it just doesn't work.
They don't write the guide because by the time they've written the guide to an appropriate level of specification, the result they've produced is an off-the-shelf service provider not unlike the ones they're railing against.
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