RigelKentaurus

>I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable.

I think in the near future, people will start filtering out movies that have a non-trivial share created by AI. (It remains to be seen what "non-trivial" means in this context.) I think a movie 100% generated by AI won't succeed. The story, the emotional impact, etc. all may be good, but people won't give it a chance.

Very useful, thank you for building it and sharing it.

Both sides should take a deep breath and stay away from predictions.

The most glaring gap in this "analysis" is that it's too early to tell. I don't understand how people can be certain in both extreme viewpoints.

Congratulations on shipping! Not sure what the process is for US-based public libraries to buy new books, but you should look into it. Where I live (Cupertino, California), the new books section gets read (a lot!)

Heartfelt and poignant. Thank you for sharing.

The handwringing tone of the article is off-putting.

Ed is confused between whether AI is useful, and whether the current level of funding and valuations are sustainable. The following statements can both be true:

1. AI is already quite useful and will continue to be so. This is true even if AGI doesn’t happen.

2. The funding and valuations of many AI companies are too far ahead of their skis, and will probably roll back. Some may fail entirely.

About the “where’s the productivity in AI?” question: I think it’s entirely possible that the primary benefit of AI will not be top-line growth but reduced costs (through reduced human labor). Companies will need to reduce prices to prevent losing market share to existing or new competitors, meaning that GDP may not increase, but costs will.

That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?

Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.

We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?

My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.

I can't empathize with this mindset at all. I'm in the polar opposite camp. I don't want a list of search articles; just a direct answer to the information I was looking for. I see the problems pointed out by OP but they are being solved away.

Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.

It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking. Organic customer churn and attrition means that you're just a few years away from irrelevance. If DBX wants to stay a stable tech company, it should figure out a way to go private.

They had a terrific product that worked well in ~2013, but they haven't innovated since then (TBH, not sure what "innovation" means in the file-sync space.) Although Y-o-Y revenue is mostly flat, I'm a little surprised that they still brought in $630M the last quarter, and that they still have 2,000 employees. Looking at what Dropbox does, I would have guesstimated they were a 250-person company.

All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.

On our last couple of Japan trips, we would walk into 7/11s for an inexpensive coffee, an egg or fruit sandwich, and also do some treasure-hunting for co-branded items with Muji/Uniqlo or others. It became a short and meaningful part of our routine. We loved the convenient locations and fantastic service at all their stores. Well done, Suzuki-san!

I'm tired of people who, when they don't like an article, comment that it was "obviously written by AI" instead of arguing its merits.

As for your points, global wealth is not a fixed pie, so it's not "impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires". Re:"1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable" - it is difficult but not impossible. Currently, the company ranked at the bottom of the Fortune 500 (No. 500) is Vulcan Materials, with a revenue of ~$8 billion. I can imagine a company combining domain expertise with amazing AI/engineers to achieve superlative product-market fit and hit this revenue number.

The same is true in India. I live in the US, and when I visit relatives in India, they are nonplussed that I can afford a fancier car but choose to drive a Toyota. Clothes, watches, my phone brand - everything is under constant analysis and people feel free to comment on everything. I am used to it now but it gets tiring.

A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")

If every single image on their blog was generated by Images 2.0 (I've no reason to believe that's not the case), then wow, I'm seriously impressed. The fidelity to text, the photorealism, the ability to show the same character in a variety of situations (e.g. the manga art) -- it's all great!

Why can't it replace Figma? Seems like Figma is a thin UI layer on top of Claude Design.

I think the distribution of intelligence is extremely unfair in nature, leading to extremely unequal outcomes in society. I volunteer with an organization that gets ex-cons back on their feet and reintegrate into society by treating them for addiction, teaching basic finance skills, etc. I have found that for the majority of people in this program, their IQ is quite low compared with the average person, and it shows up in the form of extreme short-term thinking, not understanding interest rates, etc. It left me quite dejected, TBH. Not sure whether there is a solution.

IMHO, the majority of companies have run out of high-value ideas to achieve growth. Having nowhere else to turn, executive leadership is clutching at straws and mandating RTO and similar "initiatives". These leaders think it's a productivity problem, while lack of strategy is the real culprit.

For the U.S. economy, productivity is defined as (output measured in $)/(input measured in $). Typically, new technologies (computers, internet, AI) reduce input costs, and due to competition in the market, companies are required to reduce their prices, thereby having an overall deflationary effect on the economy. It's entirely possible that AI will have a small or no effect on productivity as measured above, but society will benefit by getting access to inexpensive products and services powered by inexpensive AI. Individual companies won't use AI to improve their productivity but will need to use AI just to stay competitive.

As far as I know, the "single particle" referred to here is not a "classical particle" like a ball. It's a "quantum object" that, depending on how you look at it, behaves like a wave or an object. Definitely spooky!

Cool tool! I often play odd time signatures, e.g. I'm trying to program the drums for Rondo ala turk by Dave Brubeck (repeating 2-2-2-3 pattern). Can you tell me how I can do that?

Man, this was hard to read. Irrespective of what actually happened, this found-guilty-by-popular-opinion mentality is a corrosive evil, and it's been worsened by social media. Hard to believe that this community just ignored "innocent until proven guilty" so casually.

I used to naively believe that people are generally good. I still believe that but with a major qualifier. There are some truly toxic people out there who are seriously mentally fucked up and don't hesitate to screw with others' lives. They seem normal and nice at first, but if you look closely enough, you see the trail they have left behind.

While my fear of crowds may not be as strong as yours, I see your point of view. In most situations, it doesn't take a lot for a crowd to become a mob.

To me, his solo stuff from the 80s and mid 90s sounds so much more musical and awesome than his work with Black Sabbath. The Ultimate Sin (1986) and No Rest for the Wicked (1988) are just incredible. I must have listened to at least one of his songs every day between 1985-1991.

Goodbye, Ozzy. Your music was a big part of my high school and college life.

I'm not a techie, so perhaps someone can help me understand this: AFAIK, no theoretical computer scientist predicted emergence in AI models. Doesn't that suggest that the field of theoretical computer science (or theoretical AI, if you will) is suspect? It's like Lord Kelvin saying that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible a decade before the Wright brothers' first flight.

About the Robotaxi: I really, really wanted to impressed by what they will demo. However, I thought it was more marketing, with the product being "just two years away" as always. The demo was in a controlled environment so I doubt its real-life capability. I guess I will believe it when I see it on roads. Disappointed.

He was one of the few industrialists who gave capitalism a good name. He was never one to do ostentatious displays of wealth or buy islands. He used his vast wealth and influence in the best possible way.

RIP.