>> FDR: 00:15 Brakes were released at a groundspeed of 120 knots and throttles were increased to a value consistent with go-around thrust.
>> FDR: 00:11 The throttles were reduced to idle power and the brakes were re-applied. The groundspeed was 117 knots. The throttles remained at idle, and brakes remained applied until the end of the recording.
So they decided to go-around (i.e. do not land and climb immediately, going full thrust), then 4 seconds later changed their mind and went back to power idle and brakes (unclear how speed didn't increase).
While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach), guessing those 4 seconds contributed to the disaster by a lot.
How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
You can actually do the math to work backwards and approximate how much thrust the engines were producing during that time, which was about 15,000 lbf (vs ~120,000 lbf max thrust for a 767-300er) which reduced how quickly they were decelerating by... Maybe a few % or so. But they didn't start accelerating yet. They would have in another second or two, however.
I'll agree that they should have gone around far earlier; getting non-spurious GPWS callouts on final because you're trying to dive and find the glideslope is... Crazy, and configuring landing flaps over the numbers is also crazy, and so is landing 10-20kts faster than the highest possible Vref value for the type, and everything else. But that's fairly obvious...
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that ...
This is par for the course for HN; smart people applying first-principle thinking on unfamiliar domains for about a minute, which confirms the biases of other outsiders who vote the plausible, but not-quite-right comments to the top.
This is par for the course for HN; smart people failing to interpret a comment in a charitable light, preferring instead to author a condescending reply in an apparent effort to score imaginary points at the expense of intellectually stimulating conversation.
So presumably OP never took jets 101. Neither have I. So what? The condescension remains unjustified and contrary to fruitful interaction. (See also the "lucky 10000" xkcd.)
HN is particularly notorious for armchair aviation experts. I am an aerospace engineer having worked in airworthiness & certification as well as maintenance/repair/overhaul on multiple different aircraft types both fixed and rotary. I mention this only to establish my bona fides as someone who knows their shit:
The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
HN is notorious for armchair <insert-topic> experts for <insert-topic> you actually know, outside of software, computing/computing-adjacent electronic hardware and startups. “Fucking wild” “confidently incorrect nonsense” is likely the norm on most fringe topics, judging by the few I know about.
That’s all forums in a nut shell. Any time you read about something you’re not personally familiar with it’s “look at all these people who know what they’re talking about… “, as soon as it’s something you are personally familiar with it’s “wtf are these people on about?!”
That they passed their minimums and still weren't set up correctly is shocking, yes. How can you commit to landing instead of going around when you're not configured for landing?
The more egregious thing to me though is ignoring the GPWS callouts on approach because they were chasing the glideslope. If you can't maintain a stable approach, you need to go around, it's the first thing you learn.
You expect this behaviour from a first-timer in the sim, not a commercial cargo pilot.
No. They might have to say why they went around but they can't be punished for it (that's a great way to open yourself up to liability even stripping away all of the human elements). And I can't imagine any reason that an airline would truly care since they don't want their planes crashing so they don't want to discourage pilots from going around if they need to do so. The delay incurred is usually fairly small anyways, maybe 20-30 minutes.
...but I think that most of these unstable approaches are likely marginally unstable and only in one dimension. This landing was so far outside the realm of normal it's actually mind boggling that it actually happened. Pilots are trained to immediately go around without questioning it if many of the things that happened on this flight occur (such as not being in landing configuration well before touching down!)
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
I'm a pilot, and I don't fly turbofans/jets. Not claiming any "authority", but qualified to comment... It's not "something that basic" unless you fly in that category, there's a lot more to aviation experience than knowing a fact about an engine you don't use. (But hey, congrats to you that you know it!)
> I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this..
More restraint than saying "unclear <i.e. to me> why ...", an exact statement about what I didn't know, which harms no one and led to several informative explanations by people who know (most of them in good spirit)?
This is what good conversation is about.
...
Anyway, the point I was making holds and is this:
Orthogonal to whether they could/should have gone around at that point, and given that they stayed on the ground after all, it may turn out that that 4 seconds of indecision (instead of pure deceleration) may have directly contributed to the fatalities at the end of the crash.
> While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach)
Barring a massive tailwind, they had enough groundspeed to go around at touchdown (158 kts).
I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash. If they'd committed to landing they at least wouldn't have overshot with that much energy. If they'd decided to G-A even at 00:15, they may have been well within margin to take back off.
They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point. They came in far too fast, descending too rapidly; first touch was >50% down the runway, and they didn't get the left gear down, so the spoilers and brakes didn't apply until even later.
Should have had a better approach; should have gone around before they even touched the ground; conditional on the bad approach and first touch, they should have gone around after the initial touch 50% down the runway. But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.
Yea, they couldn’t get the left gear down because they they had enough airspeed to execute a go-around!
Literally 5 consecutive minutes of making 100s of wrong decisions snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
According to news reports, a magistrate judge at OSHA has been sandbagging an investigation into retaliatory firings by this airline (of pilots who reported unsafe practices with maintenance, CRM, training, scheduling, everything). I wonder if the NTSB will include that judge in the investigation. It seems like he or she has a lot to answer for.
> But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.
This tends to be something we see in most incidents, because the cases where someone makes the right choice at one of the points tend to not become incidents.
An interesting thought is that the more obviously bad/incompetent/terrible decisions or (in)actions were involved in an incident, the better it is, because it means more things had to go wrong for a disaster to occur (more slices of cheese in the Swiss Cheese model).
Yeah, to some extent. But you see a lot more of this in GA (or Part 135) than in Part 121 airline operations. This was exceedingly bad judgement by real professional pilots in a 767.
> They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point
You're correct. When they first annunciate G-A, they've missed the chance. (They almost certainly had enough airspeed to G-A even after touching down, though.)
My question is whether throttling up for G-A at 00:15 is what caused the overshoot to extend out of the airport (versus if they'd committed to braking). This will come down to runway conditions, braking performance and the throttle responsse of their engines.
> This will come down to runway conditions, braking performance and the throttle responsse of their engines.
Well also, at what time point did all the tires finally make simultaneous firm contact with the ground? Ie were they going slow enough for braking performance to even matter?
Large high-bypass turbofan engines take several seconds to spool up from idle (as they would be on landing) to full thrust. The 4 seconds that the thrust levers spent in the full thrust position in this accident was not long enough.
The go-around decision was far too late. Remember the engines need significant time to spool up. The decision to cancel the go-around was correct (conditional on the preceding series of terrible decisions).
They were over takeoff velocity at that point and could have bounced up in the air and waited for the thrust to come. Would have been sketchy but better than what did happen.
They were not over takeoff velocity at that point. They were at 120 knots when they initiated GA and slowed to 117 knots before aborting (again, the engines take time to spool up despite full thrust configuration and no braking over those seconds). Takeoff is at least 130 knots, I don't know for their exact configuration. (At max takeoff weight it's something like 153 knots, but at the end of their flight they aren't carrying a full fuel load.)
mind you those numbers are seconds until the cvr stopped recording. they were a few hundred feet from the end of the runway when they initiated the go around and like the other poster said the turbines do take time to spool up from idle. they were so far out of normal spec for landing that it was absolutely pilot fault but not at the far end of the runway. they were not stabilized on approach way further back about 5 min or so. (if you're not stabilized on approach you are required to go around). they even called for flaps 30 halfway down the runway which is also not allowed for a stabilized approach.
Spool up time is 8-10s on high-bypass turbofan engines. They tried to go around maybe 1000ft from the end of the runway? It was far far too late to even try it at that point.
Sadly if they had made the call earlier they were going so fast they were basically at rotation speed when they touched down so could have just pulled back and gotten into the air.
They landed flat (and the left wing refused to come down) because they tried to force the plane onto the runway. That just doesn't work. The wings are creating too much lift when you're that fast.
Isn’t there a regulation for idle to full go-around thrust in a maximum of 8 seconds?
If so, it’s tight… but i feel like they should have made it if they had stuck to that plan. They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash, and were pretty close to (if not slightly above) their stall speed (depends on load). I suspect they just needed another 10-20 knots and enough energy to climb.
> They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash
Not 15 seconds before the crash, 15 seconds before the end of the recording. Then overran the runway 10 seconds before the end of the recording, then started crashing into objects 7 seconds before the end of the recording.
Thrust was reduced back to idle 11 seconds before the end of the recording, so just before departing the runway.
How sure are you? Could it actually happen that way 95% of the time, which means they don’t crash and we never hear about it? Likely a pilot gets disciplined for the other errors and nobody else cares? This exact thing could happen 20 times with everything turning up relatively ok and we only heard about it because they didn’t make that final call correctly either.
To be clear I’m not an aviator, just an armchair statistician with an interest in aviation
This was a discussion in the aviation subreddit too. I am also not an aviator, but just someone with an interest.
What the outcome of the discussion was that it depends on the culture and training of the organisation. It could be possible that it does happen like this 95% of the time with no crash in that specific organisation.
The fact they were even in that situation is only worth philosophizing about to a point. Because they were only in that situation due to what appears to be a series of totally unacceptable decisions that got them there. Based on everything that's come out, I'm comfortable saying as a former military aviator that in my opinion, this crash happened due to a complete failure of airmanship on the part of both crew members.
- a) Flying an unacceptably sloppy approach that put them on short final going that fast, high, and overpowered. Professionalism is being on airspeed and/or angle of attack and on glidepath . . . no excuses.
- b) Responding to a) by trying to force the jet onto the runway, when any aircrew member with half a brain should understand how badly you're going to float in ground effect when you're that fast and that overpowered. And what that's going to in turn do to your spoilers and thrust reversers that depend on weight-on-wheels before activating. Professionalism is recognizing a botched approach, swallowing your ego, and taking it the hell around.
- c) The pilot not flying sitting there like a coward and not taking the controls from the pilot flying. If someone hits a go-around criterion and isn't going around, YOU TAKE THE CONTROLS AND EXECUTE ONE. Professionalism is proper crew coordination and proper assertiveness in the cockpit.
This whole thing seems to just boil down to a complete failure of airmanship and a complete failure of professionalism all around. If I'd done that or allowed my pilot to do that, I'd expect to have had my wings pulled. If the investigation reveals more, I'll change my mind. But it ain't looking good.
One guess is that their "primary" target audience/market is the large corporations that get their employees unlimited tokens, and not the individual developer who may worry about spending and token accounting.
It's the opposite. The enterprises have all the tooling to monitor token usage of employees, and to limit access. For example, we have a $300 month limit, and then need to file exception tickets when we need more to justify the cost. Pretty similar at other non-silicon valley company process. I don't know any enterprise who'se on unlimitaged token budget for their employees. that's not how enterprises sign contracts.
> Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions
Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.
What was most remarkable to me from this transcript, was how strong of an equal the AI agent comes across compared to the user (Tao). And Tao is one of the top mathematicians of modern times.
Yes, Tao is guiding it to where he wants to go. But also, Tao is actively learning from it and relying on its explaining, analysis, and inference abilities. You can easily imagine this conversation having taken place between Tao and a PhD thesis student, or even another professor, explaining their results.
What can we imagine and predict about the future anymore? Maybe a year - or two model releases - from now, the AI assistant will be undeniably stronger than Tao, and not an equal anymore.
>Maybe a year - or two model releases - from now, the AI assistant will be undeniably stronger than Tao, and not an equal anymore.
we're kind of well past that (in my opinion), if you consider that this is the same ai assistant that can help you with a recipe, diagnose a weird sound in your car, help with biology homework, translate languages, and so on.
even in math alone, i think its indisputably already stronger than Tao, considering it has approximately this much depth in ~all of the math subfields.
Agreed, it's stronger "horizontally". But I also think that we're not far away from it being stronger vertically; i.e. superior to Tao, in that such turn-by-turn guidance by him in solving sophisticated and difficult problems will not be necessary for long.
I strongly suspect that the horizontal and the vertical strength are not perpendicular. I suspect having a very wide knowledge gives you access to patterns that reproduce across fields that an expert would lack.
It only has that depth because you prompt it towards the experts that understand that depth.
An example that happened 10 minutes ago: contracts in racket, it kept arguing that you can't use -> in a contract of a function with a rest argument. I had to mention ... explicitly that it wrote the code correctly.
Yeah...I know I should be massively impressed, and I am to a degree, but isn't this what we should expect? LLMs can pick up on patterns that no human can see. In that sense, they really are a type of "search engine", but I use that term loosely. Tao is using them as a way to sift and sort theories and information that the model has a plethora of training data on. It's like being able to converse with the codex of humanity, and extract data via an algorithm that is highly adept at sorting through it.
Also I feel like people are not noticing in Tao's chat that chatGPT fairly often is doing web searches. So it literally is acting as search engine sometimes, and that too is incredibly effective when done right. So in addition to Tao using his prompts to "search/sift through vector space" the LLM is also literally just searching the web to augment its "knowledge" at inference time too.
Which, to me, again demystifies these tools. They are incredible tools, but still "just" such.
> It's like being able to converse with the codex of humanity, and extract data via an algorithm that is highly adept at sorting through it.
Bingo
Thanks for laying it out so clearly.
This is what I feel LLMs are really good at yea. Almost to the point that I'd say this is what they are. But I'm not quite convinced that it is that, but it seems to point that way
Interestingly enough, ChatGPT started his answer like this only once:
"This is exactly the question I would ask next. My impression is:
Most standard invariants are...."
And this was a response to this prompt:
"Is there a chance of an indirect argument of X ~ A^3 coming from computing some invariant of X that forces it to be A^3? (I am not all that expert in algebraic geometry but I'm thinking like degree or Betti numbers or something.)"
I find it helpful to think of LLMs as reflections. If you can talk like an expert mathematician at the model it will respond like one. While Terrance's first prompt looks trivial I expect a first year Uni student would be hard pressed to provide something that good.
I guess it is kind of the inverse of the "you are an expert mathematician" prompt engineering of gpt3.5. Since no one ever says that to an expert mathematician when they are doing expert math the model immediately reflects that it is not an expert mathematician.
Isn't LLM doing something like argmax{x} P(x|context) where x is the next word, and context is the words before including your instructions? Thus, the LLM output is heavily depending on your instructions, and if you input an expert context it would produce an expert result. Consequently, domain expertise has a significant bearing on what you can achieve from LLM.
I dunno. To me, this seems like kind of a counterexample (pun intended?) to that thesis. Would a conversation with another AI have been as fruitful as this conversation with Tao? Certainly not! Will that change in a year? I dunno, but it seems like those goal posts keep moving, and I'm a bit skeptical.
I think you're mostly right, and there is still a lot of "cope" in this thread about how much he needed to guide it.
But I would say that in some ways it's already obviously superhuman. The reason I think it's lacking in some jagged ways still at the expert level is because although it's highly optimized to be incredibly capable in many domains, it still doesn't have quite the same raw capacity for complexity in understanding one problem that humans do.
I believe that LLMs (really should be called VLMs for most of them) can still get much larger, and that will push the absolute complexity level and general IQ way over human level.
They are maxing out at like 5 or 10 trillion parameters right now. I believe we will see 50 and 100 trillion parameter models and models with large portions of that active. It will round out the jaggedness and probably more than double the raw intelligence that a human can achieve. It's not a linear scaling but who knows what the limit is and can go significantly higher with the same architecture I think given continued improvements in training and hardware scale.
Of note: the author had AI help synthesizing the actual 10-page prompt that resulted in the proof! A powerful tool when you know what you're doing.
> Did you have first an AI help designing the prompt?
>> yes, I did! I basically had 5.6 Sol synthesize existing closely related work and their approaches, the past ideas I had, with OpenAI's prompt that had a lot of the presumably important mechanisms for how exactly the agent should act. Especially from the "results that do not count" section onwards is a lot of input from Sol.
Hmm I see. I only use "old" reddit and it does require login there to resolve to a real address. In any case, it is a special link that enables tracking (unnecessary, to say the least).
It's becoming much harder to determine on a daily basis what content is original, thought-out by a person, and trustworthy. Ironically, verifiably-old content is easier to trust now. Examples from recent personal experience:
1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.
2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.
3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".
Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.
Something I've recently started seeing, maybe even an emerging #4 is AI generated translations. You could have someone very intelligent, making well written subject matter expertise. Or just someone who has valid thoughts they wish to express to the world in a language more of a common tongue than their own.
Or on the other end you could have someone who wrote a sentance or two in their language and had some combination of AI generation and translation algorithm bloat it out.
In both cases you will get something that can look right and well thought out or explained, but probably will have at least some of the AI slop signs present. I don't know what the solution is for this type given claims Google Translate has started to do this kind of translation for people. An AI translation is probably just as prone to hallucinations as any other AI, but it probably will look more natural to readers than a direct translation.
You're making the classic mistake of looking for a trustworthy information source and then trusting it, instead of focusing on whether the information itself is trustworthy regardless of source. It's literally the same as my grandma saying "they said so on TV, therefore it must be true" while completely dismissing anything I've read on the internet because reasons.
If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source, you won't mind AI-generated content as long as it's helpful.
I talk to LLMs a lot. It's fucking great. Do I take everything they say at face value? No. But neither do I take at face value things that biological intelligence outputs.
Information itself cannot be trustworthy. It can be right, it can be wrong, or it can be somewhere in between. Only a source can have trustworthiness, as it's a mixed measure of reputation and provable accuracy.
You filter out known untrustworthy sources to not waste your time verifying false information 100x more than you need to. I know The Onion is a satire publication. I do not need to verify its claims. It's an intentionally untrustworthy source. I know that LLMs can hallucinate information, so I verify with a more trustworthy source. I cross-reference things random people say on the internet, because random people on the internet are not, individually, trustworthy sources of information.
If a rocket engineer explains to me why Rocket A isn't flight ready, I'm more inclined to believe them than if a random commenter on the internet explains it to me. Because the one source is more trustworthy than another, and if I wanted to verify the claim myself I'd have to spend a lot of time studying rocket science.
No it's not the same as your grandma. The point is that it's now more expensive to find the correct information to learn from. You don't know it's an LLM ahead of time, and you may spend hours until you figure out something is off. Hence why reputable sources will become more valuable.
> If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source..
Did you read example #1? I'm not talking about some piece of code from an LLM that you can verify or some political opinion that you can take with a grain of salt, but information that you can only gain and/or judge through expertise:
If you're not a physicist yourself, you can't judge "information by its merit" on specific physics topics, because you don't have a solid baseline.
Similarly, in growing plants, each plant has its own peculiarities, and only people experienced in growing it can tell you anything useful - it's knowledge accumulated by trial and error. Not knowledge that your "great discerning mind" can assess on its own. Even a botanist can't tell you the ideal growing conditions of a plant that they've never studied before.
What if your physics book is wrong because knowledge has advanced since it was released - you can still find lots of publications and people with degrees blissfully unaware of Hawking Radiation. What if your botanical book is wrong because facts have changed since then - climate is changing and so does flora. What if your book is wrong because it's state-funded propaganda mixed with petty fights of a bunch of people with suits and strong opinions disguised as academia - a huge chunk of linguistics is dealing with exactly this issue.
Again, you seem to miss the point that the idea of questioning new information, which was already useful to navigate life before LLMs, before television, before newspaper, before print, before clay tablets, even before speech itself, is equally applicable to LLMs as to any other form of communication. You just need to upgrade your strategies a little and that's it. Don't blow this out of proportion "somebody gasp lied to me on the internet!".
There’s a lot of things where this just doesn’t work. I was wrong about a lot of business strategy things when I was younger, to the point where I rejected what I now see were correct arguments against my view of things. How could I have gotten out of that trap without the ability to find trustworthy sources?
Well, if not disclosed you could assume that somebody did due diligence for you, and could include sources. I don't even trust LLM even if all the information is included in the context window if I need reliable information. Trying to make money on slop is really bad manners. It's a scam, you can't call it otherwise.
Btw, I like AI, it did a ton of value for me. We just need to find a way to live with it, without getting doomed in misinformation.
You do ultimately need to trust some sources to some degree. You can try to cross-correlate multiple sources (and this is in general a good habit!), but that depends on some level of trustworthiness in the sources you are looking at, you're not at all immune to misinformation by doing this (especially if multiple sources are, undisclosed, being generated from the same LLM. You can also get citenogenesis even pre-LLMs). And of course for some things it's possible to try to verify directly yourself, but this is infeasible to do for everything you depend on.
I feel for you. I was looking for some wildlife events on Youtube, only to find that all of them were AI generated, trying to get views. I can only find content somehow reliable if I put filter for content before of AI era.
Humans are also unreliable, we are competing for scarce attention, platforms decide what gets visibility and we cater to their algorithms. You could say humans are prompted by feed ranking AI - what and how to publish.
>> CVR: 00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
>> FDR: 00:15 Brakes were released at a groundspeed of 120 knots and throttles were increased to a value consistent with go-around thrust.
>> FDR: 00:11 The throttles were reduced to idle power and the brakes were re-applied. The groundspeed was 117 knots. The throttles remained at idle, and brakes remained applied until the end of the recording.
So they decided to go-around (i.e. do not land and climb immediately, going full thrust), then 4 seconds later changed their mind and went back to power idle and brakes (unclear how speed didn't increase).
While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach), guessing those 4 seconds contributed to the disaster by a lot.
reply