remus

Yes, this is what I was getting at.

While I agree on a moral level, I think there is a distinction to be made. Training a SOTA model takes a huge amount of resources and expertise so the people doing the training are adding a lot of value along the way. I think this is much less true for distillation (which is kind of the whole point).

ed: to clarify, I totally agree that a huge chunk of the value in LLMs is coming from the source material. My point was just that training an LLM takes more resources and expertise than distilling from an existing LLM so I don't think the equivalence between training and distilling is entirely justified.

I would only agree partially. There are counterexamples that are not illustrative, but it is fairly common that in thinking about how to construct a counterexample you gain a more thorough understanding of the original problem and at least one fundamental issue which prevents the conjecture from being true.

I don't think it is true that they necessarily want the US to struggle, I suspect it's more self interest. LLMs seem to be one of the biggest innovations of the last few decades, China probably just wants to make sure it's not being left behind and/or made hugely reliant on the US for what seems to be turning into a piece of critical infrastructure.

China has an effective strangle hold on some key sectors (solar, rare earths) and I am sure they relish this position and the leverage it gives them. You'd be careful not to give away that same leverage to a competing power if you can invest a few billion now and cover your bases.

Please don’t respond if you are speculating.

I doubt you are going to get a response from an anthropic employee, but I think it is safe to assume they have swapped to a new tokenizer because it improves the performance of their models.

Obviously there are a lot of important things you need to keep a country running, but steel is a key input a in a huge number of very important sectors (infrastructure, military, automotive etc.) so having some ability to produce your own steel seems a sensible hedge.

As a website owner, if I saw someone scraping with a realistic looking name + email address I'd definitely give them more latitude than someone trying to hide the fact they're scraping. In my experience people who are hiding the fact are much more likely to be doing something nefarious.

Its AI proposition is more or less like the Google Plus. Nobody really wants it but they know about it because google pushes it everywhere it can.

Citation needed. The gemini app has 750 million MAU, hardly a dead business.

hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.

I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.

This feels like a kid trying to do science. The will is there, but lacks experience.

It's funny, when I saw the title I was hoping the article would include some sort of blind ranking, where you could see the outputs (without knowing which model they came from) and score them on some criteria. Could have been a fun way to get a better ranking of the results.

Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.

Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.

They're very similar models though, just with different safeguards and restrictions in placae around particular use cases.

I guess the underlying issue is that there is this model that is very capable, but it's being hobbled because of a fear of abuse. It may well be justified, but for a legitimate user any restriction just makes it a worse product and after all the puffery around how good it is (and some practical experience of how good it is) it's a pretty shit experience. "Here's our best model, no you can't really use it".

When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.

I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.

I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.

I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.

Given this a test on some scans of magazines, generally pretty impressed with the results. Mags are generally pretty whacky layouts and it does a reasonable job working out what is where and pulling it together into a single coherent md file. The way it crops relevant pics and puts them into the doc is pretty nice.

Haven't compared it with any other high tech OCR estups, but it's way better than the jank that comes as standard with my scanner.

They dynamically pick the number of days to display based on viewport size. Mobile = 30 days, tablet = 60 days etc.

Appointments are made in local time. Store them in local time.

You may just be illustrating a particular use case, but it is more ambiguous in the general case. For example if you have arranged a meeting with someone in another timezone then maintaing the local timezone could lead to a misalignment for one of the participants.

They are built to know who you are: your name, your date of birth, your document number, your face. This is not age verification at all. It is forced identity tracking.

This doesn't have to be the case. https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ seems a sensible system where you can have a single identity provider (hopefully someone you trust) who can then verify things like "is this person over 18?" without givin away any excessive information to a third party. Hopefully it gains some traction.

It is typically hard to directly attribute churn though, whereas some massive EC2 instance costing you $30/day is a clear line item where cost savings can be measured easily.

I find this incredibly amusing, and at a different point in my life I'd already be gone.

How so? Bad actors buying existing extensions with large user bases then publishing a new version which does bad stuff is a pretty common pattern. It certainy seems like a reasonable concern for a corp IT department.

Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.

I think regulation would be useful here.

Or vendors just abiding by contracts they've already signed!

It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.

...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.

And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies

Tell me which company in your opinion would be in the LOUD headlines, Apple or the random 3rd party?

The world I want to live in is not the one where apple claims responsibility for every byte of my data which passes through their products.

I think web browsers are a nice comparison here. Chrome added some nice security features (e.g. safe browsing) which are broadly a good thing for reducing harm from websites, but at the same time if you go to a dodgy website and they harvest all your personal details no one blames chrome for that.

No doubt AIs are an interesting use case because of the sheer volume of personal data involved, but if I want to trust some other AI app like gemini or chatGPT with my data then why should I be restricted from doing that?

I totally agree cookie banners are awful, but you could equally lay the blame at the foot of website owners who are so keen to track your movements across the web that they'll layer this awful UX on their users. No tracking cookies => no cookie banners.

The whole point is to try and avoid ending up in situations like this, where apple were able to extort 30% of app store revenue because they dictate how people are allowed to use their devices.

I am not very sympathetic to apple here, but I think the legislation in question is more to do with competition than data privacy.

Surely that depends on the reason for the ban? Say it is banned in the EU because of concerns about secondary environmental impact, a different country with a different ecology could reasonably decide to keep using it.

Starlink has a hard limit on how much it can grow. If you are within the reach of wired Internet, you aren't going to pay more for starlink.

I think you may be underestimating a little here. Even in places with reasonable wired availability, the convenience of being able to slap a dish on top of your house and get pretty good internet ~anywhere for ~not too much is pretty valuable.

Indeed and it’s almost sad. The core of SpaceX is an amazing engineering company with real assets and a serious moat.

Completely. As if "We dominate the space launch and satellite internet markets" isn't enough, they're trying to tack on all this hypothetical stuff to inflate the valuation. Maybe some of it will come true in 50-100 years, but I'd bet a lot of it won't (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...) because telling the future is hard.

It'll be a real shame if the core, cool engineering that's happening at spaceX gets compromised by all the shenanigans going on elsewhere.