majestik

Ok, I didn’t want to take the bait but this one’s just too much.

“He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens.”

Classic Apple. No more just beating the “security and privacy” drum, now its “tokens are expensive!”

<neanderthal voice/> Cloud scary. Cloud expensive. Mac good. Buy Mac!

“He also singled out what he calls ‘transparent AI’ on iPhone and iPad, referring to features scattered throughout the operating system and third-party apps that work quietly without announcing themselves as AI.”

<neanderthal voice/> Apple use AI, Apple just not say it. Apple smart, not lagging behind industry! Buy iPhone!

How about you invest in developing your own models, correctly? And provide a secure and private inference cloud service on your fancy Apple silicon? And integrate that into your platform so Siri gets smarter without you farming queries out to Google Gemini? Bill me for it in iCloud+ I’ll probably pay for those tokens.

Was that so hard?

I see this kind of “let’s make candidates work for free” proposal from time to time.

It doesn’t work for software engineers because nobody wants to do free work. Also, free work isn’t consistently, and fairly testable because project requirements can evolve or completely change over a hiring period. Not to mention IP issues.

What has worked in my experience is a synthetic take home exercise that isn’t easily LLM solvable, the same one given to all candidates with the same constraints, and offering to be available to answer their questions by email. Sometimes we can tell a lot about the candidate just from the questions they ask, or how they package the solution, without even looking at the code.

In my experience (FANG hiring) less than 10% of candidates refuse to do this exercise, so it’s worked well for us.

Is anyone here actually surprised Meta is recording and reviewing their content?

Vote with your dollars people.

I was already a Tesla owner and I reserved a Cybertruck right after I saw the original Cybertruck Unveil live stream on November 21, 2019. The infamous one where the window glass shattered.

That was when it was supposed to cost around $35,000.

Four years later when my reservation was ready to order, on December 8, 2023, the CyberTruck cost more than $100k.

Because it cost almost 3x more than what was originally advertised, I cancelled the order. I know many other people who canceled for the same reason. Keeping in mind this was after several delays, so I and many others with reservations were already frustrated with the product before it became available to order.

Google welcome to Apple 10 years ago

I can't put my finger on it but there's a weird tension between the two Dave's in this video. Almost like Rosenthal is trying to impress or earn the praise of Scherer.

Is there a backstory between these guys / FDB?

TLDR: AirBnb is spending “hundreds of millions” to become the new Craigslist.

I read the article, and while it’s great the model can generate relevant output- so what? The article doesn’t discuss any action being taken using that output.

So what’s the big breakthrough here?

Read through the Wiz MSA [0] at section 6 which discusses “Customer Data” and among other things specifically asks Customer not to send HIPAA data (perhaps to sidestep the issue you just raised) and concludes with this:

—

Customer hereby grants to Wiz a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use Customer Data to provide the Services and perform its obligations under this Agreement.

—

Or if reading terse legal documents isn’t your thing, go ahead and just read through Wiz’s own blog post about how their scanner works, which confirms they have full, direct access to customer EBS volume snapshots in the default “full SaaS” deployment model. [1]

Your point that due diligence would have taken issue with this might not be grounded in Google’s reality.

0: https://wiz.pactsafe.io/legal#wiz-subscription-agreement

1: https://www.wiz.io/blog/the-wiz-approach-to-agentless-scanni...

This deal isn't about security, it's about data.

Google already have one of the best security teams in the industry - Project Zero [0]. They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security.

This deal is about DATA. Wiz, as a cybersecurity vendor, have full remote access to their customers cloud compute storage (EC2 EBS volumes, etc) in the name of "security scanning" - this is actually part of their unique selling point - "agent-less scanning" which is unlike traditional security tools that require an agent installed in the OS. Instead, Wiz is able to just clone your full data volume and scan it locally in their cloud accounts/VPC.

With this deal Google has bought a ton of confidential data from Wiz's customers without their explicit knowledge or approval, and they will use it to improve Google's AI models like Gemini and probably several other products.

A year ago Google struck a $60M/yr deal with Reddit to exclusively license their content [1] for the same reason, and that data is probably much smaller and less valuable than the data Wiz has access to from their customers, which include companies like Morgan Stanley, DocuSign, Slack, Plaid, and others. [2]

Sources:

0: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com

1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

2: https://www.wiz.io/customers

“No punting — we can't keep building nanny products. Our products are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds. We need capable products and [to] trust our users.”

What does Sergey mean by this?

Source?

Back online after nearly 24 hours, with no explanation.

Here’s the update from Twitter:

https://x.com/askplaystation/status/1888376843255824475?s=46

15 hour outage and counting.

No communication from Sony on the cause or expected time to recovery.

This story is now being picked up by major news outlets:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/08/playstat...

Not scheduled maintenance

The irony of clicking a link to an article about “outrage fatigue” only to find it’s not even an article but a playboy style interview that goes on for several pages. Outrageous.

From Character.ai’s blog about safety measures they’ve taken since this law suit [1]:

“Over the past six months (…) we hired a Head of Trust and Safety and a Head of Content Policy and brought on more engineering safety support team members.“

Better late than never, but not by much. It’s not like they didn’t think about investing in safety before launch, they just didn’t prioritize it, to the public’s (and their brands) detriment.

I suppose this is why more legislation is needed in the AI space, because private companies can’t be trusted to prioritize public safety. Not everyone’s Apple.

1. https://blog.character.ai/community-safety-updates/

GM cars and Cruise autopilot - two wrongs never made a right.

I hadn't heard of Amazon Bedrock Guardrails before, but after reading about it, it seems similar to Nvidia NeMo Guardrails which I have heard of: https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo/guardrails/introduction.html

The approaches seem very different though. I'm curious if anyone here has used either or both and can share feedback.

The main data point and infographic in this article seem like they might have been misinterpreted to me.

The data shows overall VC investment vs profit by year, but not all startups return value in the same year they’re funded.

Could it just be that after 2020 VC investments shifted towards startups with longer profit horizons? Could that explain why the author thinks VCs are “bleeding” cash?

PCC is a highly secure transport system for routing user queries to Siri, which then failover to ChatGPT over the public internet.

TLDR - after 6 years his stock has vested and he doesn’t want to deal with the lack of safety investment anymore.

How do you know if it’s illegal?

True, but I’m equally concerned about the other topic in the report - pedophilia / CSAM content, child grooming, etc.

There should at least be a call for law enforcement investigation.

Roblox stock is only down ~ 3% today, not sure what to make of that, other than maybe all this was already factored in to the price.

ChatGPT came out November 2022 and it took Apple 18 months to announce Siri will integrate with it.

Is that moving fast? Maybe, compared to what, Oracle?

OpenAI status page says the incident was just resolved.

After 17 hours!

https://status.openai.com/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3

Can’t seem to find anything more about Sierra other than it being an “enterprise focused” AI startup.

First tweets since 2018

Efficiency = fire half the SREs ?

Nice one Urs.

One of the only things Google has going for it is reliability of major services. Probably not the thing you want to risk.

Maybe instead you can kill Google WiFi, Google Fi, Google Pay, and countless other cost centers. There’s probably also a lot of front end designers you should fire.