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jononor

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Machine Learning and Software Engineer. Specialized in sensor data / IoT and audio ML. Teach digital fabrication at local makerspace.

Website: http://jonnor.com https://github.com/jonnor/

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Capability per GB and per watt has also been going up lot. This will continue in the future as well (not necessary as the same rate as last years). But enough that I think Opus 4.8 level is reachable on consumer PCs within 10 years from its release. Say at the price point of 2000 USD in 2025 dollars.

Writing a Python extension would a good way to dip your toes into Rust, and also add a useful skill to Python programming (writing performant extensions). PyO3 is the main project, and the topic has been covered in several talks at Python conferences (check Youtube).

There are no limits to what you can imagine yourself hearing... And appreciation is a extremely complex subjective feeling, one could argue most of that is way beyond audio and acoustics, and even beyond psychacoustics into plain psychology. When talking about the sensation, it is hard to differentiate between "really hear" versus "tricking oneself" - for most intents and purposes this is one and the same..

On the other hand, one can conduct blind tests that show that many phenomena cannot be reliably differentiated by a listener. Different listeners also have different levels of ability to discriminate sounds and sound quality. So when testing audio equipment using listening tests, one needs to consider the panel of listeners that one uses. Typically there are trained panels of listeners (who have received basic training and shown statistically an ok ability to discriminate) and "consumer" panels which are just random people off the street. The two groups will give very different ratings -especially for "medium" sound quality equipment.

For info on the former, see any decent book on psychoacoustics. And for the latter see for example Sensory Evaluation of Sound (Nick Zacharov et al).

You also need a shitton of data. People are saying that synthetic data is widely used, but pretty sure that is on top of the organic data. Both for pretraining and posttraining. That said, I do think we will see more open and collaborative approaches over time.

Prior to AI making a PR involved considerable effort from a human. So the default position for many open source projects was that it deserved some level of attention for the effort. Even if many projects in practice would struggle to review every PR. But with AI tools this dynamic has shifted dramatically - many PRs have basically zero effort been put into it. Additionally there are many more of them, and often way bigger also.

That OpenAI was in the wrong when they ignored everyone copyright, does not make it right to ignore their ToU. If a one wants IP and rule of law (incl contracts) to be respected, one should not violate others rights when it is convenient.

On a more risk-strategy level there is the size of their legal team, general endowment, and supplier and political connections to consider.

Everyone is free to ignore their ToU, but I can understand why a company would avoid it...

A 10'000 hour entry fee does rule out a fair bunch of people though, in practice. While there are few artificial barriers to learning to code, there still are some natural ones, like time.

I do not know which is easier. I am not sure that is even well established in research for generative text tasks whether a translation-first or native-language-first is the most sample efficient?

But for a national lab I think it is money well spent to figure out the possibilities and limitations of a native-language LLMs for languages with order of 5M-10M speakers.

These models will never compete with frontier models and do not need to - it is about hitting a good-enough, not being the best. Behind the frontier, getting to a certain performance level, is getting easier over time - both sample and compute efficiency is going up.

Furthermore one can reuse investments in data (both agreements, infrastructure and datasets), compute (GPUs, servers) and know-how (training scripts, experienced engineers).

It would require an investment, but those will pay dividends later, as it becomes easier to train LLMs on/for Norwegian. If we need to translate everything to English we might as well just drop using Norwegian altogether. Practically everyone speaks English fluently already...

As a precondition I think we have to assume that the person in question 1) wants to learn and 2) is smart enough to absorb new info and apply it and 3) reflects enough to adjust their approach when hitting bottlenecks or making mistakes 4) has a drive to create. Without these, self driven learning is not viable - and that has very little to do with AI.

For such a person, I believe AI can be very empowering for learning. Like Google, wikipedia and stack overflow, Arxiv before it - AI tools give access to a lot of information. It allows to quickly dig deep into any topic you can imagine. And yes, the quality is variable - so one needs to find ways to filter and synthesize from imperfect info. But that was also the case before. Furthermore AI tools can be used to find holes in arguments or a paper. And by coding one can use it to test out things in practice. These are also powerful (albeit imperfect) learning tools. But they will not apply themselves.

You are correct that bandwidth requirements depends a lot on the exact workload. And that in specific cases, it might be doable to have AM5 for multiple RTX6000Pro. The parent mentioned workloads that are general, and broader than inference-only. In that case I would consider spending a bit extra on the motherboard to ensure that PCIE bandwidth is not an issue.

There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.

Communication tech/tools enable more people to collaborate. It increases ability for labor that is far away from high value markets to contribute. Same goes for shipping tech wrt physical goods. On the global scale that is empowering the labor class. Any productivity tool that individual laborers can purchase also (and that still needs the worker) is probably good for labor, overall.

Qwen 3.7 Preview 2 months ago

This seems like a viable eval strategy. Presumably finding a bug requires some degree of understanding of the code, beyond just information retrieval. However it probably does not measure things like prompt adherence or ability to create code that implements a specification?