marcus_holmes

I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1. Literally the entire population of UK teens listened to that one station for ~20 years (though individuals would listen to different shows - John Peel's famous indie/punk/whatever show in the evenings was very different to the daytime mainstream stuff).

In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tuned in to the annual top 100 tracks of the year.

That reach has not happened since with any media that I'm aware of. It was very unifying - we were all aware of the same songs, even if we didn't like the same songs. I can sing along to Duran Duran even though I was very scathing of them at the time, in part because I was force-fed Duran Duran every day on the radio.

Good question. Can you ask an LLM to repeat the entire contents of a novel, word-for-word, and read that instead of the original book? I haven't tried it, but I would guess it would not be able to do this.

Can you ask it questions about the book and expect it to get them right? Yeah, probably. Same as if I read the book and you asked me questions about it. The LLM would probably answer those questions better than I could, and about every single book in its training data, but still same-same.

I don't think this is plaguarism.

What a bizarre comment to make.

The recent Stratechery piece talks about some of this, most relatably "commercialise your competitors" [0].

By releasing their models, they effectively sabotage the entire US AI industry, and given that that is underpinning a sizeable % of US GDP at the moment, therefore sabotage the US economy.

That may not be their intention. The USA is also their biggest customer, after all. But it does show that there are other strategies that might occur to China that don't reflect the knee-jerk reflex to restriction and control that Anglosphere governments have around tech.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977128

Agree, all those consumer ChatGPT accounts will be gone

Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. This has manufacturing economics, not software economics; the idea that they are "free" is an economic category error as it relates to their actual use

I notice that the article, and this discussion, hasn't mentioned or considered local models.

We can already run a low-spec model on a laptop. Because there is demand for this, it will improve and we will get better laptops and better local models. We will also see models being run on dedicated local hardware and called from the laptop.

If I can download a reasonably capable model to my own hardware and run it without paying anyone for either the model or the inference tokens (effectively making models and intelligence actually free once the hardware is bought) how are the Frontier AI Labs going to make any money at all, let alone enough to support their vast valuations?

Let's say China gets there first, why would the CCP let it be released publicly? That is an insanely valuable advantage in everything from war fighting to economics and more.

Because China is based in a completely different set of values than the USA. They look at the world differently, and have a different understanding of it.

Your assumption that your attitude is pure human nature is deeply grounded in your culture, which (assuming you are from the USA) is deeply grounded in personal competition rather than co-operation. All that rugged individualism. Other cultures are less based around that, and don't see the world as a zero-sum competition for survival.

I'm no expert in Chinese culture, but there are folks from China on this topic who could probably answer this from their perspective.

Here's to all those crypto bros who traded out of their crypto positions at a loss to trade into the AI bubble.

But isn't that the nature of bubbles? They go up for a long time, and then they come down very fast.

So the day after the bubble bursts you'd see exactly this: a very recent very sharp drop, preceded by 12 months of solid gains.

Definitely Diogenes, 100%

Came here to say this and I'm not even American. It's definitely Twain.

Though other American countries (even just North American countries) might have different opinions, so maybe he's just the USA's Homer.

The point is not to say that "these two things are equivalent", or even "these two things are equally harmful".

The point is that older folks view new technologies as harmful, for a few reasons:

1. Any change is harmful as we get older. We grew up in one version of our society, and if society changes we view those changes as harmful because we become less comfortable in our own society.

2. Douglas Adams' quote [0]:

    Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

    Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

    Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

It's the same mechanism at work for novels as for phones - the resistance to new technology looks exactly the same. We now look back at that resistance to novels as strange because we grew up with novels and consider them a normal (even outdated) part of our society. Future generations will look back at our resistance to phones as strange because to them phones will be a normal (even outdated) part of their society.

[0] the whole essay is talking about the same thing: https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

edit: formatting. So much formatting

In the past, people had to go by brand name as an assurance of quality. We have other means now.

Yeah, brand reputation doesn't work as a guide to quality any more.

But I don't think we have any other means of reliably identifying quality yet.

This is like a reverse-dupe situation. The people who actually made the boots (NPS, a co-op in the UK) never owned the brand [0]. Then in 2013, the brand was acquired by a PE company [1] who did what PE companies do and got cheap, nasty, versions of the boot made in East Asia.

So the "dupe" non-branded version is actually the original, and much, much better quality than the branded official version of the product.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovair [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Martens

Not everything that happens in the world is about the USA

Boomers were born up until 1965, so the youngest boomer is 61 this year.

Please don't slur us older GenX as boomers.

Agree completely. Hence not using it myself.

And every generation thinks the tech that the next generation grows up with is harmful.

After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful.

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...

I have friends who use it and rate it.

I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.

I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).

There's a difference between legal and ethical.

What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.

Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.

We're already seeing what happens: the agents write the code instead of importing the dependency.

This is happening at the moment because of the supply chain risks of dependencies. But if all the open projects stop being maintained it'll just happen more.

I have a vaguely-relevant war story.

1998 - Huge business, re-writing some vital piece of the platform in the middle of Y2K. Contract coders are expensive but also the only available people to throw at this.

The architect had mapped out the entire system down to class/method level. They'd produced a huge list of classes and methods that needed to be built. So the company hired a bunch of contract coders to build said classes and methods, including your humble protagonist. We were each given a list of methods to write up - parameters, operation, expected output. We wrote them up, and ticked them off the list. We were not briefed on how they interacted. There were no tests that we could run. There was apparently no-one checking that what we wrote in the method actually matched the spec. This was before git, so version control was extremely rough, and also before JIRA (iirc the list was an Access database).

We all realised very quickly, like the first week, that this entire project was doomed. But we were getting paid a lot of money to do this, so we just did it. It got really boring really quickly. Every day we wrote a bunch of methods, and next day got a list of the next set of methods to write. The lists just kept coming, with no idea how long the master list was, or how the classes interacted with each other, or how the system actually worked, or anything.

I left after a month. The money was good, but the boredom was driving me insane.

I learned later from friends who stayed that the whole project was canned a couple of months later when it became obvious that this was a complete waste of money and would never work.

Whenever I see a project manager staring at JIRA instead of talking to their people or looking at the codebase, I'm reminded of this project. And your comment reminded me of that ;)

This went down a rabbit-hole, which was fascinating, so thanks for the push :)

Not sure where the 1Gb number comes from? A standard laptop now is ~16Gb of RAM, so 1000x (and 1Gb -> 16Tb would be 16000x not 1600x). We went from Kb to Mb and then Mb to Gb of memory roughly every ten years from ~1990 -> ~2010. Each of those jumps is 1000x

Talking this over with claude, though, it pointed out that the need in dealing with LLMs is bandwidth and read-only storage, since the weights aren't dynamic. So we're not necessarily looking at 1Tb of RAM, we could be looking at 256Gb of faster RAM, and multi-TB of (much cheaper) flash storage, with extensive caching built in at OS level. This is all technically do-able with current tech, so it'll be interesting to see if it happens.

Well, we did do similar stuff back then. All it takes is money ;)

The thing that we did in 1990-2000 was adopt new standards as the old ones became blocks on progress.

I had a friend working in optical computing back in the late 80's that would wax lyrical about how optical computing was vastly superior to silicon back then. But it never took over because silicon worked well enough.

If we've hit the limits of silicon then there are other options. We would need to reinvent huge chunks of our tech stack, and that is incredibly expensive, but if the demand is there, we'll do it. The demand has never been there.

And ofc the Chinese workers are a lot cheaper.

I've been trying out OpenCode recently, because of the US embargo on frontier models, and found it to be as good as Claude Code, if not better. And it read all my skills, claude.md files, etc. Now I just need to pick a model out of all the choices - currently Deepseek v4 Pro is winning, but I want to try a few more.

No, it won't. We moved about order of magnitude that from 1990 to 2000.

The thing is, it needs demand to drive it. Laptops have been roughly the same spec for the last 10 years because we don't need them to be bigger; there's no demand for a 16Tb RAM laptop because we don't have anything that could possible need that much RAM. Until LLMs came along, and we all want to run them locally, and so now there is a market for 16Tb laptops. So we'll invent the tech to make that happen.

Iran has already won the war. There is no scenario that the USA comes out of this situation in a better place than it was before the war started.