I'm partial to whales and whale analogies, so it was hard to pass this one up, but we don't get to the whales right away:
The people running these companies literally talk about the danger that the things they are building might take over the world and kill every human on the planet.
This is one of those occasions where someone else endears themselves to you by saying exactly what you've been thinking. Yes! It is a little bit suspicious that all these AI company founders are constantly running around telling us in severe voices that AI is -- er, will be -- capable of slaughtering us all in our sleep soon...probably.
You don't exactly win lots of investors by shrugging and saying, "Really, it's just a statistical model of everything that's every been said on the internet."
But then, this lovely article points us towards another article describing a certain odd whale behavior: Why does a humpback whale slap its tail?
The behavior is officially called “lob-tailing.” In studies of humpback whales off the coast of Maine, lob-tailing is often coupled with another feeding technique called “bubble-net feeding.” The whale slaps its tail to scare fish away from the surface. Then it descends, blows a giant bubble to corral the fish into dense schools, and lunges up with its jaws open wide. The lob-tailing step is critical to keep prey from jumping out of the water away from the whale. Lob-tailing is particularly effective for capturing sand-lance, a type of fish whose population swelled in response to the collapse of Atlantic herring stocks.
Lob-tailing, however, isn't well understood and it seems like it may play other roles in the lives of whales.
Sure enough, evidence suggests that tail-slapping may be a form of social communication. According to studies of sperm whales, lob-tailing is a key coordinator of group and unit dynamics in whale communities. It may signal things like, “Please leave!”, “May I join?”, or “Let’s get going!”
If it is communication, though, it's more like doing a cartwheel in front of someone than it is like having a nice little chat.
Yet the idea of lob-tailing as a form of communication raises a large problem: energetically speaking, it is extremely expensive...Is lob-tailing worth it? Whales certainly have plenty of lower-cost ways to get a message across. Vocal signals produce sounds of much larger amplitude and use less energy than tail slaps. In a cost-benefit analysis, lob-tailing doesn’t add up. And yet the whale still slaps.
Enter proof of work! Perhaps lobtailing is used to say something that cannot be said without putting up a lot of spent energy. As a Stacker News user, I have to admit that this sounds very intriguing to me. What is a boost but a lobtail?
“Breaches and lob-tails make good signals precisely because they are energetically expensive and thus indicative of the importance of the message and the physical status of the signaler.”
And this is where we come back to our original article: the thrashing about that is the new release schedule of the various AI competitors does feel a little bit like an exercise in lobtailing. put out an expensive and flashy new model, not because it actually move the needle very much when it comes to innovation, but because it's an expensive way to say what you can't say any other way: we're at the front of the race, we're winning.
It’s all just a lot of lobtailing. “Pay attention! I am important! Notice me!”