I heard a guy I respect say “there’s a short list of things people will ruin their lives for.”
I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
It's not going to ruin his life. At worst he will lose $100 bil and maybe if it's really bad, he will get kicked out of Nvidia. He will still have $100 bil and can do whatever he wants at that point.
If he loses his family over it, it will ruin his life. There’s more to life than money. I hope for your sake that you don’t really believe this morally bankrupt concept.
Allegedly he was assaulted by a spy and wasn't able to deflect that assault. Who knows what techniques they use, wouldn't be surprised if they can sprinkle something in a drink that switches off half the frontal cortex.
He is the the tech CEO most aligned with the current government’s optimism towards the AI build out and also its key orchestrator. What are the odds he will be held to any real punishment ?
Spy is rather easy to define though, and it hardly depends on what the State Department decides (although of course, they can call anybody a spy, for political or other reasons, I agree on that).
I don't know why this is being downvoted. The federal government has never really prevented a terrorist attack that they themselves have not recruited. It is entrapment, and it is legal in most cases. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but even mainstream media has covered this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...
It is perfectly reasonable to suspect similar claims of catching "spies".
Your article doesn't support your claim that the 'federal government has never really prevented a terrorist attack'. And a lot of that was highly motivated reporting itself by people like Glenn Greenwald who was basically denying that things like ISIS were real threats at all in 2014 and then went full victim blaming for things like Charlie Hebdo the year after (it was harder after the Bataclan).
Will you next claim that the police have never really prevented a murder?
I gave a link as a reference of how the Federal government operates. I did not think that I needed a whole bibliography to prove something that is very easily verifiable.
Not only that you think the reporting is not reliable because of the reporter without pointing out what is wrong with the actual report.
These are all the cases that had some investigative reporter poking, or the jury/judge seeing through the bullshit. Here is initial reporting on recent cases. The "Iranian Agent" sent to "Assassinate Donald Trump"(emphasis mine):
>Asif Merchant traveled to New York in June for the purpose of meeting with men he thought he was recruiting to carry out the killings, even paying a $5,000 advance to two would-be assassins who were actually undercover law enforcement officers, federal officials said
The woman arrested for "plotting to bomb the NY state capital":
>According to the criminal complaint, an FBI confidential source drove Bowie to the Home Depot in Rensselaer and gave her $200 to buy bomb parts. It’s not clear if they told her what items to buy.
I hope all of these sources are of sound character by your standards. Now I would ask you; can you give me an example of the FBI catching a terrorist that:
a) They did not recruit, or
b) Did not provide materials, or
c) did not provide the target
AS for the police in the US, they are indeed very bad at preventing crime. Though that is due to multiple reasons, mostly policy related, rather than institutional malfeasance like the FBI.
Sometimes, it's the humiliation that comes from the public finding out and putting a spotlight on it that is the kicker; not the random side piece(s) (ex: Bill & Melinda Gates).
I agree, though.
___
edit: Funny enough, there's a House of Cards scene that goes over this exact scenario. Francis is sleeping with Zoe the reporter (they're both using each other for the perks/their own agendas). When Claire finds out, her response is something like "you know you must not embarrass me (publicly) with this", which Francis already knew because he would never do that to Claire... she doesn't say those exact words, but that was the vibe.
Humans are complex creatures. Plenty of men and women who have loving families and genuinely love their spouses cheat on them and destroy their lives/families. It just takes a moment of weakness. Stay vigilant.
Love and sexual attraction is totally different thing. As long as you get married Male usually lose interest and sexual attraction on female and want to try new things.
That happens to me too and its like both biological and mental.
It's not really a moment when the moment is stretched over months and years, but yes we are all human and all make mistakes. That does not absolve us of the consequences.
Way to minimize cheating. Describing it as a “moment of weakness” makes it sounds like it’s a minute of lapse of judgement, meanwhile we’re talking about pre-mediated, long-term cheating.
I have zero sympathy for this guy, generally speaking. But this is one of those very few things where what you have said is the socially "correct" thing, and actually is probably healthy to believe, but is factually wrong.
Lamentably, people don't have cartoon emotions. Life would be so much easier if they did.
That is not an automatic fact. Humans are very emotionally complex creatures. And Jensen didn't call his secretary and say "can you pencil in 'humiliating my wife and kids around 4PM'? You can? Great, thanks".
He has full agency over his actions, so yes, it's an automatic fact. He knew what he was doing and he knew what the effects would be on his wife. He knew what would happen when this came out. If you're saying he DIDN'T know what would happen, then you're saying he's extremely stupid. I haven't seen any evidence that he is even a little bit stupid.
Are you saying this was an accident and he didn't have control over himself?
If he doesn't have control over himself and he isn't accountable for his actions, then how does that factor into him being the CEO of the most important globally strategic company in the world? Are you saying that he is capable of making actions that he isn't in full control over? Does Nvidia need to have a CEO that doesn't accidentally make mistakes like potentially giving secret information to Chinese spies?
This seems like an emotionally compromised perspective (which is very, very normal, and I am not insulting you).
It is, of course, not an automatic fact. The context here is emotions, so it makes no sense to point only to agency as proof of an emotional "fact". Such a thing doesn't even exist.
One can't help but think of Sergey Brin who famously had an affair with an underling on Google Glass, Amanda Rosenberg [1]. This of course blew up his life and he divorced Anne Wojcicki in ~2014. Of course he got married again and divorced again with another expensive divorce (although neither was in the realm of the cost of Jeff Bezos's divorce).
I think it says a lot about what wealth does to you. A lot of people dream of wealth but I suspect many would be less than thrilled by the reality. It must be incredibly isolating. You constantly have to fend off people who are trying to use you. It must make it harder to trust anyone. A lot of ordinary life experiences are now barred to you.
For example, a lot of executives in these trillion dollar companies are forbidden from flying commercial for security reasons. Nobody would think about missing the airport and everything that entails. In most places it's an objectively awful experience but it's still a shared experience. Going to a private FBO by helicopter to take a Global 7500 direct to your destination is something only a tiny portion of the population can relate to.
So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).
What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth? You kind of have to have sociopathic tendencies (IMHO) because such wealth simply cannot exist without the impoverishment of millions of people. And for you it's kind of a golden prison.
>the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth? You kind of have to have sociopathic tendencies (IMHO) because such wealth simply cannot exist without the impoverishment of millions of people.
I don’t think there is anyway to justify that position.
If there are any billionaires out there who are too alienated by their inability to wait in line at the airport: don’t worry, you can give me the money. It’ll be a burden, but one I think I can handle.
The airport was just an example. You simply can't do normal people things.
I might not like airport lines but I'd hate to be forbidden from going through that process. I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza. Or go out dancing at night. Or to play board games. Or take a random walk or bike ride around the city. If I was rich and everyone knew it, I'd have to live in a bubble.
That's different from "comfortable rich" where you own your own home and a retirement fund and live mostly normally.
> I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza.
Well, not necessarily. Jensen Huang was famous for going to random food stalls in Taiwan and eating street food.
It might be harder and riskier, and I get what you mean, but it's not like you actually can't do those things.
Also maybe it's not necessarily a billionaire thing, but more like a fame thing. Billionaires tend to get famous just due to being rich, but I'd imagine a random person wouldn't recognize 80+% of the people on the billionaire list if they saw the billionaire chomping down a pizza in the local pizza place.
If you’re that rich but you can’t live a normal life, and you aren’t willing to restructure things to prioritize your life, you’re obviously making a choice in favour of continuing to accumulate wealth or power.
With regards the "What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth?" question, I've been thinking a lot about this recently, as the billionaires accrue more influence than ever before. And I think that's the keyword - 'influence'. After a point, wealth doesn't buy you more things, it buys you power, which is seductive. It goes far beyond making your family comfortable and doing right by your company, employees and shareholders; it becomes a means to lever the world. Yes, some of this drive is about being apart from the real world and possibly an element of personal sociopathy (corporations are famously sociopathic entities, too, which probably rubs off on the C-suite execs), but hedonistic adaptation (we're very good at getting used to things, even vast wealth) and wanting to change the world are (I imagine) very addictive. I imagine it even goes some way to assuaging the embarrassment of The Leader of the Free World calling you his AI Expert...sorry, 'SI' Expert.
And it really doesn't help that all these tech bro billionaires think Ayn Rand was a good writer with some fine ideas.
Related: the market cap of the stock market is basically a conversion factor between currency (for daily purchases) and power (being in charge of all the world's companies). When the market crashes after an election, we shouldn't think of it as "$3T of wealth wiped out", it should be "power gap between normal people and billionaires decreases" (it takes fewer normal people to buy a billionaire's position).
The last paragraph of my comment basically calls these billionaires sociopaths because you have to be to enrich yourself off the backs of making millions of people poor. How is that a defense of billionaires?
My point is that the "prize" isn't even worth it. It doesn't make you happy. Actually there's one way it seems to make them happy: by enjoying the suffering of others and having the power to influence people and even governments. But to what end?
Reading comprehension is fine. It’s your writing comprehension.
>So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).
You’re saying here that they’re “starved” of the human contact most of us take for granted (for example in standing around an airport and being squeezed into economy). This is thus a cause for heart-bleeding.
Ingvar Kamprad flew economy and drove an old Volvo. Being extremely wealthy doesn’t have to come with this kind of isolation. If Sergei Brin was flying economy, most of the plane wouldn’t realise who he was and the few who did would be like “oh look it’s Sergei Brin, weird.”
All he had to do was say no and keep his dick in his pants. Use some judgement, think about your wife and kids (oh yeah and all that national security bullshit). The man with all his money and power can't say no, that's what's absurd.
The question is how long took and if he was happy with his family.
It's easy for a professional with china backend to play with your feelings, much easier if you have normal family life or worse.
Is the woman likable it's just a matter of times. (Independent of the gender)
If this happens within a week, I would agree, if this happens within months the gender you like can makes your heart jump if you are I a very long term relationship.
> But I'm not sure how hard it would be to resist a honey trap.
The guy has enough money to have sex parties with the prettiest girls on Earth every single night until the end of his life, I'm pretty sure resisting a state-sponsored honeypot is not the hardest thing ever.
Honestly a terrible way to deflect responsibility. If you're finding your judgement impaired take a breather, the opportunity is usually not going to disappear right away.
I was just trying to be funny. One thing I was thinking about is what if Jensen had real feelings for this woman? Like imagine you are falling for someone then it just all turns out to be a scheme to get info about your job. What a terrible betrayal, how do you trust anyone after that?
I received this authoritatively from a famous divorce lawyer of my city/country that “feeling” bad usually happens only when young children are involved — or marriage is young and love was involved in the marriage (this is an arranged marriage country, so that part is different from USA). Other than that if a huge parting sum of money is involved that sense of liberation outweighs everything else. In fact if anything else, it’s an overwhelming sense of relief.
He wasn’t photographed in a romantic context as far as I know, and he just signed the upper part of a woman’s chest with tons of cameras around, clearly a marketing ploy rather than him trying to enter into a relationship with her.
I could not access the article (or I did not want to pay), hence the question.
Given the celebrity status of Jensen, it seemed unlikely that scandalous photos of him would be publicly distributed and it not already have been a huge story.
It is possible the scandalous pictures (not just him walking in front of her or sitting next to her) were already floating around, and I am not up-to-date on celebrity scandals, and the wife was already planning a divorce, as you claim.
But without those photos, it could be the wife is finding out about the affair just now.
I still have not seen the pictures you are referring to, but I’m not that interested to look for them either.
And there’s cheating on your wife and having the feds write up intelligence reports about it, the Financial Times running an article about it and having to send a public admission to every single employee at your company including your two kids who you employ there.
Did you ask yourself how his wife would not know this was happening? They were seen in public in intimate settings.
Don't kid yourself about the reason he wrote the letter. He's only writing this because of national security optics and buries it in a shit sandwich format.
I get that transactional relationships are pretty common in the elite world but they almost always still maintain a projection and image of a stable normal marriage to the outside. In fact in many cases the value of that projected image is the only thing really keeping the relationship stable.
This video of Lex Friedman and Jensen hanging out and drinking in Taiwan came out 3 weeks ago. Jensen and his wife seem pretty happy together in it. So today’s news is genuinely new news or they’d already gone over it and sorted it out. Jensen seems to do a lot of booze fuelled entertaining…
> I’m not sure if this will ruin Jensen’s life or not, but it’s a good opportunity for us all to remember that the short-term high is usually not worth it.
I think what you've just described is "post nut clarity". I'm sure he knew what he did immediately, but the gravity of the consequences might've taken a bit to catch up to him.
It does, one of my ongoing research papers is about it. But I would ask people to take a look at the established idea of Hypernetworks: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.06955v3
Modern version of the field comes from Google Brain around 2016 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.09106.
In general my personal research thesis is that current deep learning is much less malleable and neuroplastic as it should be, I got into interpretability because of this. Many focus on safety, but I prioritize it as a toolbox that allows for greater shaping of the underlying intelligence system. If we can fully understand how learning happens, where information is stored and how it is processed, unlike in biological brains, we can apply edits and transformations in digital ones. And if I can use a technique to edit weights based on some underlying reasoning about a system (with a caveat that it leads to something worthwhile), so can an agent. Hence self-improvement. There are many interesting implication to weight space research, and I very much encourage people to read about it. But it is also very easy to overstate what is currently possible, in fact I'd say better to know what is not so one can make it possible.
>current deep learning is much less malleable and neuroplastic as it should be
Why do you think this is? I am very new to this research, but to me, the biggest challenge appears to be how information seems to be stored in superposition (making it difficult to change one thing without affecting others). But biological brains appear to exhibit the same kind of superposition storage as well, and yet they are very plastic.
It argues that our understanding of neurons storing information in superposition was just a limitation of our tools and us thinking about it wrong. Instead most neurons initially specialize, and then branch out into related concepts. In addition, understanding one part of the network helps better understand other parts. And with agents we can scale this to understand non-trivial networks.
While, if true, this would more directly help with interpretability, a better understanding could also help with improving NNs in general.
Not who you asked, but biological brains come about very differently than LLM neural networks. Most notably, they come about largely through plasticity, and with evolutionary pressure towards exhibiting plasticity.
My guess would be that the structure to allow for plasticity to work is a strong limit to how well you can tune weights to fit training data. My (doubtless massively oversimplified and way behind the state-of-the art) understanding of neuro-plasticity is something like "often used pathways get stronger connections". Which, even with significant tweaks, is quite different from the gradient descent used to tune neural networks.
If strengthening of frequently used neural pathways is all our brains do, I don't see how it's seemingly capable of reordering knowledge physically from one part of the brain to another (which I believe is the case). Infrequently used pathways would simply rot away and die away over time, rather than being moved somewhere else for long-term storage to keep the high-frequency pathways more available.
This is not "self-editing". We're comparing Astra to a model with not even 1B parameters.
I'm reminded of how humanity recently finished mapping out the fruit fly connectome; this does not put us meaningfully closer to, say, doing surgery on humans to cure schizophrenia.
Well..
If such model less than 2 years ago couldn’t tell that 5.9 is greater than 5.11 and today is solving millennium problems and writing from scratch the weights of a NN that outperform classical ones, I would say that we’re much, much closer than you think…
World's most sophisticated hacker who happens to be in a jurisdiction who do not respond to provocations and operate out from behind the GFW illegally, and at the same time, never broke ranks even with the wealth and being in a remarkably well-resourced perch to defect.
The FBI and other federal agencies engaged in law enforcement routinely use appeals to authority and expertise they do not have and create set-piece situations that almost in every case involving more than one defendant sets up a circular firing squad situation where the most guilty is at an advantage of simply pleading guilty and cooperating first, or otherwise they'd dump it off via the AUSA down to the state level if they can, or blame China, Russia, NK, Iran, or Israel, countries that do not extradite their own citizens on request and rarely if ever do so unless it's done so on their terms. Blockchain tracing ultimately still needs the connection between the chain and off-chain ID and there's no surefire way to even ascertain with something that isn't a mere heuristic with an error rate unacceptable in criminal court and would fall apart if there's competent defense counsel, which the FBI have, in the one case where on-chain evidence was going to be used, actually went full Chewbacca and created a two year delay mid-trial and then pulled Chainanlysis' "expert" off before cross examination. The company has the balls to brag as if the courts have validated their method in whole, when in reality the court have long understood what clustering is and so that part is of course admissible evidence, but it also doesn't get you to the purported end - attribution. If one can use a strawman as a sales tactic, this would be exactly that. The attribution aspect have never been allowed to be properly examined in the criminal context. The "reactor" is merely a database, and in the small bit of direct examination the chainalysis employee claimed that every time he queried the database the correct rate was some absurd, Robert-Mugabe's-election-number figure that is higher than the DOJ's conviction rate when they were still credible and actually higher than the CCP's official conviction rate in a fake criminal justice system where due proceess doesn't exist and they give leeway because claiming to be 99% correct is absurd. Of course, they've never been tested in the same situation and still haven't, and if the industry mouthpiece is basically hiring sales and not legal, which is basically what every company in the Blockchain Association has been doing, rent-seeking to be Wall Street 2.0 on top of free merged pull requests and open source software. Tracing on chain is all well and good for shits and giggles but Department of Treasury went and sanctioned a smart contract thinking that it was an EOA address that belongs to a person as if etherscan was never checked beforehand tells you all you need to know.
They had a bad case against Tornado Cash since the ultimate demand would require the devs to somehow predict the actual identities of those that interact with their contracts - which in many cases isn't even a human. It's telling that when the 5th Circuit and the one judge in that circuit who knows anything about process and technology through sheer luck got on the panel and wrote a clear rebuke of how federal investigators failed at doing any due diligence, and for once, the feds did not attempt to do an end-run or even ask for en banc hearing of the issue, but simply made up a completely different issue to pursue (building the front end) which is not a crime. The feds can't match the IP/in house firms in renumeration and can't even match public interest or federal defenders in hiring out of tech competent law grads when it comes to having a moral high ground. They have so much resources so that they can hire contractors, but can't vet the contractors. Being able to fall back on coercion covers up a lot of incompetence. The Atomic Wallet 'hack' was almost certainly not a NK job as they have claimed, for example, and they relied on some dude on twitter's hunch (notably the first thing one learns that is never evidence if presented in court) and a post-hoc heuristic that is indistinguishable from a copycat or a third party's infrastructure to make the attribution. People with poorly thought out opinions are all over the place on Twitter, but this permission slip to "make mistakes". Also, they're part of the system of funding provided to your local police so they are better funded now than before 2020. Check their work under all circumstances, and plea bargains should not be considered as evidence of actual guilt since coercion and BS is as common as actual cases backed by properly collected evidence that builds a procedurally sound case.
Cryptocurrencies that are transparent to government tracking are also transparent to whatever criminals want to beat you up and take everything from you.
Your usual non-crypto millinare likely have less money to steal on them than average grandma. Fiat millionare likely have two credit cards and $100 in a pocket. Or useless iPhone with Apple pay. So there is zero profit in trying to rob fiat millionare or billionare and tons of downsides.
And moving any amounts of transparent crypto over $100,000 just paints huge "rob me" target on your person.
Ironically that people use it to buy drugs. If it's anonymous, it's closer to the original intention of BitCoin: the masses of CPUs then GPUs can be considered a "paperclip moment" - runaway effects are real.
You people drunk on LLM kool aid forget that some of us are old enough to remember those years.
I do.
I worked as an installer for an ISP in 1995. Yes, it did exist. I remember the excitement of small business owners for getting it. No one needed explanation that instantly sending editable files over email is a game changer for many small firms. Previously you could either fax which was not editable or you needed to courier which was expensive and while overnight was possible it was even more expensive and still much slower than just email.
So yes, it created positive value the very moment you would open Eudora or Pegasus and press Send.
It didn't require hundreds of billions of capex. It required someone to set up shop with a PC, a serial card and a couple modems.
>> You people drunk on LLM kool aid forget that some of us are old enough to remember those years. I do.
>> It didn't require hundreds of billions of capex. It required someone to set up shop with a PC, a serial card and a couple modems.
This is a bad faith comparison. Those small business owners who gained access to the internet benefited from decades of research by military and research institutions, as well as massive amounts of infrastructure spending by telcos. That spending really started to pick up near the end of 1995. Between 1996 and 2001, North America collectively spent $1 trillion on the Internet buildout.
You guys. They made a car fly. It was damn cool. I know there’s more to the story and we all need a “take” but I remember watching Speed Racer as a kid and being totally enchanted by the idea of a flying car.
Yesterday, that’s exactly what we saw and it’s ok to just enjoy the spectacle.
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