No way you know what character.ai is well enough to have this strong of a reaction, but didn't expect them to lobby in DC the moment states started trying to legislate AI chatbots for their products driving children to suicide
I don't know if this is maybe a denial because of a personal connection to the company, but there are subs where kids as young as 12 openly talk about withdrawls and coach each other through relapses from C.ai and "the purple ghost app" (Polybuzz)
>I don't know if this is maybe a denial because of a personal connection to the company,
No, I'm someone who's lived through 30-odd years of 'think of the children bullshit' political manipulations to spot them a mile away.
I've lived through enough moral panics to know the stink of them. Your source is checks notes a link to a sketchy AI activist site[1] and an obscure subreddit (and those are _never_ astro-turfed, nor are they vulnerable to botting ;-) ;-)).
The Alliance works toward
Securing AI for America and All of Humanity.
We are at a critical time in history. The advanced AI revolution is here, and we are not ready. With artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the horizon, we must be prepared. The Alliance for Secure AI is working to educate the public about what needs to be done to prepare for this unprecedented technological revolution.
With effective safeguards in place, we can ensure that the United States leads the world in AI innovation, that our leaders put our national security first, and that the AI revolution empowers humanity. The risks of advanced AI are too serious and uncertain to ignore.
/quote
I don't buy your sources, but I won't lower myself to accuse you of being a shill -this is hacker news, after all -we have higher standards here.
Alright you're clearly linked to them (maybe as a customer upset by moderation children bought) or just having an episode.
There were multiple suicides linked to the app with multiple states trying to legislate their vertical... at that point this diversion about who's confirming they did the obvious thing of hiring lobbyists is pretty moot.
That is literally a subreddit of first hand accounts with this app having kids talk about relapse and withdrawl.
I agree that reply was unnecessarily rude, but... idk man. I'm a huge cheerleader for Google [1], use 3.1 Pro via AI studio, I'm on a Pro plan... and I can't access this model? Not even a "4 chats per hour" type thing?? I mean, I have video generation access for some reason (no good for me), but Google's policies are baffling to say the least.
Ofc I know this isn't your fault in person, but I really wish Google would get its shit together.
...As a long time tech enthusiast I should probably stop being so delusional. Heh (cries internally)
1: lol I know who cheers for a trillion dollar company but I'd rather not cheer for OpenAI
There's nothing unnecessarily rude about my comment, they are literally unable to get their act together on product.
The top level comment blamed cheerleading but let's apply critical thinking for a second as product people and look at the funnel:
1. Potential users sees new release
2. Potential user takes time to install and set up Google harness (you already lost 90% of people here, the funnel better close quick!)
3. Potential user cannot use new model.
Then what? You hope they developed good will towards your model through this experience?
You stuck a two week wait in your funnel? Is that the definition of not having your act together or what?
We're on HN, how many of us have heard from Google staff this kind of stuff is a result of them growing so big that AI Cloud has to compete with Vertex Cloud, and AI cloud exists because Vertex Cloud needed 2 years to get OAI/Ant style API keys working and were losing dev mindshare in the meantime?
Maybe instead of screaming you can take this as a chance to level up your engineering.
Good engineers don't treat approach as A == B or even A like B, when extremely integral parts of their applications differ.
Zero-shot isn't just "more convenient", in a low data regime: it's the only workable solution, and 100x so if your plan involves the acornym "BERT" (because even the largest of those models has the world knowledge of a fart to draw priors from)
Better ergonomics while being faster and cheaper as the existing things really is enough to justify callling what you've done a new thing, in a world of finite resources and time. It's actually making me scream how many people don't get that.
> in a low data regime: it's the only workable solution
Low data regimes no longer exist in the age of LLMs, one can trivially generate a training and eval set and distill a good classifier on any domain within a day.
But I do acknowledge zero-shot is more convenient. Personally I don't think Jev has any moat so I won't bother with their model specifically, but yes I do anticipate using this type of thing more in the future.
> one can trivially generate a training and eval set and distill a good classifier on any domain within a day.
This might be possible, but it’s not ‘trivial’. Even getting my favorite agent to do it would involve a lot choices about what to tell the agent to do, and a bunch of testing.
With Jev, I can just write my questions and get an answer - or get an agent to write code that generates questions and gets answers. The answers are pretty good! And the whole thing is pretty trivial to understand (where ‘trivial’ here is an order of magnitude more ‘trivial’ than in your comment).
> Low data regimes no longer exist in the age of LLMs, one can trivially generate a training and eval set and distill a good classifier on any domain within a day.
They do exist and you can't easily generate them. Distilling is also pointless.
I don't think jev has any moat either, but interestingly the distillation you described sounds like something imo someone would pay for. Convenience again.
Personally I wouldn't.
I suppose that just makes it a commodity.
I'm going to crash out at the stupidity and earth-shattering banality of that first paragraph if I try to respond faithfully, so I won't and agree to disagree.
I'm going to think you believe you're the first person to claim synthetic data replaces data.
You worded it as if it was some pithy gotcha, and I'm sure "lOw dAtA rEgiMeSs doNt eXist aNymOre" would have done numbers on LinkedIn, so maybe you thought it was new.
But no, it's right up there with "the cost of software is zero" and "saas is dead"
Refrains of the clueless grifter who deserves all the condescension one can muster.
It's actually pretty rare people need to be reminded of this because it's self-evident and platitudinous.
Much more commonly, the statement is used by writers who want to wax poetic without actually having to commit to any meaningful position on the topic at hand... which is exactly how the AI-written article in question uses it.
Their entire benchmark is deeply flawed and every model release they astroturf it (and I appear to call that out, but only after someone else independently verifies that it's bunk)
Decisions voice isn't a product for anyone else who was confused: it's a canned guide for hooking up a voice model to the decision model browser use thing
I've seen the opposite: if you're doing work that doesn't need the frontier, it's really hard to beat lower-tier frontier models.
Luna is obviously very competitively priced, and I'm expecting Haiku 5.5 will be strong based on this release and get back to more competitive pricing since the model family shrank this generation (though Anthropic has proven my expectations wrong on the latter before)
Where GLM, Kimi and co shine for me is when you need to offer near-frontier capabilities in your product and straight up can't afford frontier models: if you're offering Opus in a product with API pricing, $20 a month Claude Pro is offering about $500 of comparable usage in a harness that flexes to a lot of tasks.
Offering GLM/Kimi increases the max complexity of problems you can solve successfully compared to stepping down to Luna/Haiku, while letting you offer a reasonable amount of usage. Once $20 a month Pro is comparable to "just" $100 of usage in your product, it's much easier to close the gap with UX, a better constrained harness, etc.
I know this isn't a model thing, but why do all the labs blow at product outside of models?
Aren't you still getting paid more money than god to write React if you work at Anthropic? I wasted 5 minutes digging into random stupid nooks and crannies in the desktop app to find where I could update: only to find on Linux you need to use apt.
How hard would it be to put a notice where the normal Check For Updates goes that says "This install is managed by [package manager], use [command] to update"
AGI is going to be so awful for product quality on the more basic things. It feels like these are small papercuts that humans would implicitly smooth over, that RL'd models are actually getting worse at dealing with because of their single-mindedness about completing the given task.
I used to think like this, but eventually I realized it's mostly just a way to pat yourself on the back. And ironically, I rarely saw people doing significant things waste energy talking like that, since there's no benefit in the exercise.
Very few things can't be reduced to insignificance. MacOS was just cribbing PARC, Facebook is just a glorified PHP forum, Dropbox is just SFTP, etc. etc.
Even in deep-tech, Zipline is just wrapping from deeper-tech (batteries motors etc), GLP-1s were a VA throwaway that dusted off, etc. etc.
LLM wrapper doesn't mean anything, it's an implementation detail. Besides being an LLM wrapper what is a given thing?
The beer app wasn't just a beer app, it was the intersection of the first time accelerometers were doing something that the average consumer could interact with in their pocket, the first time there was something to spend money on for your phone besides a wallpaper, a ton of things.
If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
> I used to think like this, but eventually I realized it's mostly just a way to pat yourself on the back. And ironically, I rarely saw people doing significant things waste energy talking like that, since there's no benefit in the exercise.
I don't get what exactly you are talking about as a reply to my comment, what exercise exactly? Deciding if something is worth spending time if you're having fun with it?
> If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
Sure, if you're having fun (and in fun I include a sense of accomplishment, curiosity, whatever tickles you) with that, go for it.
It's a strangely arrogant reply to my comment, perhaps you read something into it that I didn't say and replied to that?
The exercise is trying to reduce the world into significant/not significant efforts and then write some things off as only worth it if you don't care about the former.
Also I honestly thought we were two arrogant people conversing in good faith: you don't find unarrogant people saying things like "If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world..."
> you don't find unarrogant people saying things like "If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world..."
I think text distorts what I meant with that, I personally don't care much about adding something significant to the world, not anymore at least.
I found my peace by pursuing what interests me personally even though I know it might not be of much significance to anyone else, and that I won't be pursuing the path of "adding something significant" just for the prestige of it in my life.
In a sense it's the opposite of arrogance since I care much more that the person is enjoying the process of whatever they are doing rather than the results of it. I've seen too many bright friends end up miserable chasing it, I've felt too miserable myself when putting too much focus on that, I'd rather have people enjoying doing what they are interested at if it's not something harmful.
https://secureainow.org/clipping/ai-lobbying-shifts-congress...
I don't know if this is maybe a denial because of a personal connection to the company, but there are subs where kids as young as 12 openly talk about withdrawls and coach each other through relapses from C.ai and "the purple ghost app" (Polybuzz)
https://www.reddit.com/r/character_ai_recovery/
https://www.reddit.com/r/character_ai_recovery/comments/1wzz...
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