> The EU has become ever more dependent on the US in the past few years, notably on energy and AI.

Energy yes, particularly since the Iran war started. AI, not really. Like most Europeans are using US models, but the switching costs are so low here that they could easily swap these out for Chinese models.

It's the cloud/hyperscaler dependencies that are the real problems here.

Yes, they run US models on US hardware and there is no alternative. In principle there are indeed Chinese models, but in practice there are also political considerations.

Europe pretty much does not exist in AI and the political considerations at this point push it towards overwhelming dependency on the US.

US hardware with chips made in Taiwan created with European lithography systems?

Chips developed and controlled by the US. Taiwan is controlled by the US. Europe has no leverage.

Europe does not exist in AI. That is the sad truth, no need to try to pick hole in reality... It's quite healthy to listen to EU noise less because otherwise people tend to drink the kool-aid and believe that the EU (and Europe) is anywhere in most strategic developments (AI and related chips are particularly dire but also missed the boat on EV, struggling on renewables, nowhere in smartphones, etc). Yes, there is Arm so that's that (not in the EU).

It’s mutual dependency. The developed and controlled chips can’t be made without EU lithography.

And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing to not exist in AI given all the damage that is done by AI.

I was amused to see DeepSeek using it recently, as I didn't realize it was installed on my machine (macos with brew).

Ruby is much, much prettier for similar purposes though, and so that's what I'll learn if I ever need to do this more frequently.

Many of them went rogue because of poor security controls on the part of one company who was a subcontractor for many of the labs.

Specifically, the AIs were prompted to break into a company, and the subcontractor who was running the test misconfigured their network so that the AI probed a real external company instead of an internal honeypot with the same name.

Yeah, it's funny. Both of the recent models from the big us labs require you to ask what does this mean before they'll rewrite in simpler language.

Provenance this, gated that. It almost sounds like smart stuff, but then you dig deeper and it's vacuous.

Rao's piece is much, much better. You should submit it as a top-level link!

I took this advice and posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757722. Thanks for the nudge! Just generally speaking, I find Rao's writing to be a really good, well-informed counterbalance to...well, darn near everyone else that writes in the same sectors these days.

> a sufficiently powerful AI

We don't have this kind of AI, and (as of right now), unless humans link the AIs we do have up to a bunch of killer robots (i.e. drones) then this is vanishingly unlikely.

Like, any scenario where AI kills us all requires us to give it the tools that it needs to do this (as well as a desire to do this, as right now they just attempt to generate text to solve a problem/question they are posed).

No one is saying we have it, they’re saying they’re building it.

And what mechanism to control these drones, which are autonomous or remote-controlled machines, do you imagine that humans will be able to use, but AI won’t?

And what in the history of the past five years, gives you confidence that not a single human will give the AI the access it needs to do bad things? Incompetence alone is sufficient to kill us, let alone humans that genuinely, or confusedly, want bad things.

> this effort was for the sake of passing a test for no clear gain

It's actually even worse, because the people building the graders at OpenAI were a bunch of clowns who didn't even implement the correct grader.

But yeah, large collectives of individuals performing loads of work based on a misunderstanding is one of the most human things ever, which isn't surprising given that we've trained these things on essentially all human text.

> I'd say it's mostly feeling a loss of control, which they couldn't place and our politicians were not open enough about explaining that this loss of control of the population was caused by.... the politicians themselves.

Yeah, the EU is essentially run by the national governments.

However, they typically (and the UK were particularly bad here) use the EU as a scape-goat for unpopular decisions even when they'd agreed to them in Brussels.

Understandable, but bad for Europe/EU in general.

They do not, as they're aiming for full replacement rather than augmentation of human users.

Personally, I think this is a bad idea, but someone's gotta build the Machine God I guess.

> But there's a lot of re-inforcement learning afterwards.

That just shifts the distribution of tokens produced. Ultimately they are still just next token predictors.

Like, even "reasoning" models basically work by generating more tokens at inference time, and using them to shift the distribution towards more useful outcomes (in some cases).

They are next token producers. I would only call it a predictor, if it's trained to predict tokens (ie just after pretraining).

Just like humans produce one word after another when they talk, but they don't generally try to imitate other humans.

Don’t people pick up language, vocabulary and dialect from those around them? Perhaps it’s subconscious but humans are imitating other humans all the time?

It's a mix.

Yes, you imitate how others speak, but when you are trying to solve a problem, you don't try to predict how others would complete a text.

(Well, unless you follow 'what token would Jesus pick?' / 'what would Jesus do'.)