I went a little further than I did previously, thanks to it being 2026 and I can antagonize half a dozen frontier LLMs :) My original was bolted onto a Transformer-XL that was trained from scratch.
It doesn't. This is extending an earlier PoC where someone created a tensor representation of a CPU and you prompted it with the code you wanted to run.
This will be interesting when something similar to a CPU can be triggered off of the LLM's own internal state representation - but imo we're far away from that.
LLM != CPU hardcoded into the same architecture used for an LLM. The non-determinism did not go away - all this is doing is intercepting tool-calls produced by qwen and executing that in different layers.
depends on what being good at grammar entails. If it's just following rules, then you're not wrong. If it involves adapting concepts to novel circumstances, we're doing well.
Imo, the right is experiencing an intellectual renaissance rn - but this is much more aligned w/ recovering normative morality, re-enchantment and multi-polarity than it is with the libertarian, anti-democracy strain of thought that you describe. I was stunned to find out that a friend was using the word "monarchy" in it's premodern sense, denoting distributism and strong practical limits to the enactment of power, which is totally opposite to how libertarians used the word. There's a lot going on that is interesting, useful and hopeful.
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
I, for one, am profoundly thankful that the ~300 year mania around innovation and newness is beginning to wane. You don't need to read that many history books to appreciate that the values that we have today are profoundly different than what they were previously. It takes a few more books, and a pinch of humility, to appreciate that today's values are neither universal nor the necessary outcome of a teleological evolutionary process. The reworking that Tao suggests here reaches far beyond math. The fact that mathematicians are starting to wrestle with these questions is cause for great optimism. Once VCs do the same thing, we'll be on the other side of the storm.
99.99% of finance is freshman level math if at that. Then 99.99% of the remaining 0.01% is somewhat more complicated but still not frontier level.
There are very-very few cases where you need truly advanced math in finance. The problems that need solving are generally vastly more pedestrian.
You need to deal with terrible data quality, terrible formats, noise in every aspect of your work, disruptions, lack of standards, inability to generate new data (and repeat experiments), conflicting and often opaque incentives, technical problems ranging from shitty APIs to having to squeeze nanoseconds out of your network stack, etc.
These are all difficult problems, but they are crucially not frontier math problems (by and large).
The quant side of finance is stochastic calculus and chaos, that’s what they’re talking about. Mandelbrot himself published a pop-sci book about the new fractal math of the stock market
> How to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance?
Tell me you have no clue about quant finance without telling me you have no clue about quant finance.
You probably think it’s abstract topology and Ito calculus, when in reality it’s linear regression and PCA. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll see a sigmoid function.
If someone in finance is using LLMs, it’s for marketing purposes (recruiting new grads or impressing investors). Jane Street and DE Shaw are notorious for this.
> This is mostly true, but there are exceptions (e.g. Renaissance Technologies).
Nope.
Let me guess: you listened to The Man Who Solved the Market and think RenTech uses/used unpublished frontier mathematics to predict the market.
There are plenty of firms with both higher annual % returns (consistently over 15-20 years) and higher absolute $ returns than RenTech/Medallion fund, especially post-2010. And they’re not using “frontier mathematics”.
A lot of alpha comes from how well you know the VP at the exchange. Not math. Not tech. But good ol’ politics.
Don’t like a market participant? Tell the exchange to issue violations to that participant. Get them banned for a few months.
Fat fingered a trade with wrong price or quantity? The exchange can and does undo a trade after the fact. All in the name of “orderly markets”. Similar to when governments use “national security” as an excuse.
reply