It feels there is a bit of contradiction in your post. You posit love, struggle and basically the current human experience as meaningless and yet you pitch biological immortality.

How would we spend this immortality? Seems good to have this sorted out before gambling everything on it.

2) Unintentional side-effect affecting millions of Vietnamese people? Hundreds od thousands of children born with birth defects.

Is your argument that the resulting birth defects were intentional? If not, I'm not sure where you're going with your response.

The civilian cost was intentionally not part of the equation. The toxic effects were known and the numbers show that it was not a few isolated accidents but a intentional disregard for the human cost.

The toxic effects also impacted the area where I grew up here in the Southern US - there’s a road that’s known locally as “Chemical Ranch Rd” where there’s a ~100 acre property that was used for testing Agent Orange.

The wording seems to confirm it was part of training data at some stage. If not, they would be able to prove it quite easily I assume.

Same can be said about human review if the argument is non-determinism.

Human review is about learning and there's an implied social contract in that someone is giving you their time to make you better. It isn't necessarily necessary but replacing it with AI shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why it is part of the process.

Its a problem of the individual institutions and countries. The budget required for AI tools currently is negligible compared to other university expenses. We don't need to call everything a systemic disadvantage when the disadvantaged (at the institution level) have agency here.

Can you tell me what is the budget necessary to supply AI tools capable of substantial research assistance to all academic staff at a university?

You seem to have a good estimate in your head; I definitely do not.

From personal experience, ChatGPT 5.5 (the Plus tier) is excellent for programming tasks and also for various teaching related tasks but I have not observed the research benefits that Tim Gowers has when I asked it questions in my area of expertise. So the costs are definitely higher than a few dozen $ a month per PhD/professor.

You might be right that universities should immediately spring into action and demand funding for research level AI resources and hardware. One thing you might be mistaken in is that public universities are unfortunately very inflexible institutions; one reason for this is that they have a large internal leadership structure AND they are funded by the state, so even if the entire university agrees on something, the funding is at the whim of the ministry of education and thus the current political leadership.

> Can you tell me what is the budget necessary to supply AI tools capable of substantial research assistance to all academic staff at a university?

I think the GP meant that *if the tools provide substantial benefit* to staff, their costs can be compared to salaries and other large expenses of the university. The $100/month subscription costs less than your office space.

Which is good, since public money is tax money, so it better be spent wisely and not just thrown at the latest hype without thinking properly about it. It's a feature that public spending moves slowly, we should all be thankful for it.

> The budget required for AI tools currently is negligible compared to other university expenses.

Is it? Do you have any idea what the salary of a mid-tier university researcher in an Eastern European country is? Or in Africa or south-east Asia? With sota LLM pricing you easily get into the same order of magnitude, so essentially labour cost would double for researchers at such universies. Not "negligible" at all.

I feel like this is one of the most advantaged times in history in terms of regular citizens having access to cutting edge tools.

Looking online it seems like the low end estimate might be $30k a year for such math researchers? And ChatGPT pro or whatever you want will run $100 a month, and should be coverable by grants. I’m quite sure matlab alone cost more in the past

I don't think number of parallel agents is the right productivity metric, or at least you need to account for agent efficiency.

Imagine a superhuman agent who does not need to run in endless loops. It could generate 100k line code-base in a few minutes or solve smaller features in seconds.

In a way, the inefficiency is what leads people to parallelism. There is only room for it because the agents are slow, perhaps the more inefficient and slower the individual agents are, the more parallel we can be.

Yeah, I don't disagree with your assessment at all. I think the H2A ratio is still a good metric for the AI adoption rate of an organization. At a higher H2A ratio, you will also start to hear people measuring things using token volumes, which I think is also a similar metric (because most models nowadays run on a relatively fixed Tokens/second speed).

All of this is not a direct signal to a productivity boost. I think at higher volumes, you will need to start to account for the "yield" rate of the token volumes above: what are the volumes of tokens that get to the final production deployment? At which stage is it a constraint on the yield? Is it the models, or is it the harness, or something else (i.e. Code Review, CI/CD, Security Scans etc...)? And then it becomes an optimization problem to reduce the Cost of Goods Sold while improving/maintaining Revenues. The "productivity" will then be dissolved into multiple separate but more tangible metrics.

> Parents can’t help but worry about how a lack of AI preparedness will affect their kids’ future career prospects.

The parents I've interacted with who have this worry tend to be the least tech/AI literate. It reminds me of the pressure some parents in my non-English speaking country place on kids and English teachers. Usually the parents who don't understand English well themselves and are full of anxiety about it.

Realistically, it's been just over 3 years since ChatGPT arrived and the paradigms shift every year. All of us had to learn on the go as adults, in a short time, and we did. So why worry so much about kids missing out?

I am afraid that in a total war, all available resources will be used.

My point is that there aren't that many resources available to make a war big enough to worry about. Unless nuclear, like I said.

UMA's security model assumes the cost to corrupt the oracle exceeds the profit from corruption. It is quite interesting because it doesn't consider the Polymarket side at all in the calculation.

Doesn't this whole model break down when the Polymarket market far exceeds UMA's market cap?

Wouldn't UMA tokens increase in value proportionally to Polymarket's market cap, considering they're basically a unit of control of that market cap?

I am pretty low confidence here but I think in theory it should but in practice there is no mechanism enforcing that?

UMA's current market cap is $68M. There are some Polymarket markets far exceeding that.

Not really, because unless you control 50% of all tokens they are worthless.

Only if you assume literally all other tokens are voting against you

> - (~2023) Ok, it can write a full function, but it can't write a full feature.

The trend is definitely here, but even today, heavily depends on the feature.

While extra useful, it requires intense iteration and human insight for > 90% of our backlog. We develop a cybersecurity product.