revolvingthrow

What Apple wants out of Google is Siri that runs at 8gb ram and isn’t a horrible embarrassment that feels like a primitive markov chain. Given how good Gemma 4 is, Google can squeeze some serious performance in small models. Whether they can make bleeding edge models is irrelevant to Apple.

Tons of guardrails, lazy model, super confusing plans, expensive 3.5/3.6 flash and lite and 3.5 pro MiA?

Rough patch for google ai

Article feels a bit shallow. Obviously carriers will do their usual fuckery, anyone who ever dealt with one knows this. What many people probably wouldn’t expect is when you’re in a country where physical sim are dominant, you the dumb tourist will pay 10x for the privilege of esim since you’re prime target to rip off and what are you going to do about it, buy a new phone? Pay 1000x the price for roaming? Feels like notable omission and is fairly common.

I’m also surprised about there being not a word about smartwatches. I got a cellular apple watch with the idea I could leave my phone at home when doing sportsy stuff like swimming, assuming that a watch with esim support will indeed work with esim. In reality most don’t, Apple is particularly restrictive about it. You’ll probably need some shitty "companion / wearable plan" that most networks don’t even offer. There’s also extra regional compatibility on top of it to deal woth. In the end I never found a deal worth using.

That being said, I settled on esim for my main number and second esim or physical sim as needed when traveling. Having the sim slot free is neat. The biggest downside is "phone gets wrecked and you’re on another continent -> need to authenticate to switch esim to different device -> you need previous number to authenticate -> good luck", but I’m not sure wrecking a phone is more common than having it stolen so it’s probably a wash.

While a valid point, China also produces plenty of whitepapers going about the architecture and know how about the training and inference itself.

There’s also the fact that unless LLMs do get to AGI (which seems… doubtful, still) there comes a point where a model is good enough for what you need. Fable and gpt 5.6 are certainly pretty neat, but I’ve been happy since opus 4.6. I’d still choose a better model, obviously, but it’s not the end of the world if I was stuck with 4.6 for a while when it already lets me get the end result at acceptable quality.

It also needs to be said that the "erosion of training capability in other countries" is largely theoretical, given that Mistral hasn’t been keeping up and other countries don’t even have anything worth mentioning. You’d first need to _have_ training capability to lose it.

The few tests I ran were by no means comprehensive, but while kimi felt like the real deal qwen seems a bit of a benchmark princess.

According to artificialanalysis, cost per task is $0.94, which is almost the same as $1.04 of gpt 5.6 sol max (fable is most expensive by far, at $2.75). Things like glm 5.2 max cost roughly half that. The model certainly sounds extremely impressive for something not from openai/antrophic, but the price makes it a mediocre product.

Instruction following seems lower than I’d like, too. OTOH scores on agentic stuff seem high, which… feels a bit contradictory? I thought decent instruction following is step 1 of solid agentic workflow.

The benchmarks look nothing short of incredible. Assuming it’s not benchmaxxed to hell and back it’s just a notch below gpt 5.6, which came out what, a week ago? If the performance claims hold up the delayed Gemini 3.5 pro will likely end up not only behind fable, but also behind 5.6 and a (supposed) open weights model. Google might have to do some real soul-searching.

Not sure I understand the argument.

Obviously there are people who help themselves to others' money if given the chance no matter the circumstances. But if the circumstances change so that people DO start going hungry or homeless, which is a rather obvious side effect of AI-but-not-AGI maximalism brightly espoused by our overlords sama and amodei of the "I can’t wait to make half the knowledge workers worldwide obsolete" variety, the scale of the problem will obviously get worse, as well as the type of people you can get involved if you’re in the international scam market.

The problem described in the article is unsolvable, given that a mid-range desktop from a few years ago can easily clone a voice that's convincing enough and there are no guardrails to those. Some silly KYC laws might limit a highschool kid making deepfakes of his crush, but once a model exists it's trivial to spread it around, and for organized groups to get ahold of those. Similar will happen with images, it's just that nobody with any serious money bothered releasing image gen models that compete with gemini or chatgpt -- but it's just a question of time. A year or three, what difference does it really make?

As the cost goes down to near-zero you can scale it up almost infinitely, especially if the profits are high enough to get some smart people working on the problem, which going by the article is already the case ("INTERPOL's finding that AI-enhanced fraud is four and a half times more profitable than the traditional kind"; incidents rose by 26% last year). If AI does succeed on mutilating white collar work enough there will be a large supply of knowledge workers that might just join International Scam Co. rather than have their families go homeless. Drowning man clutching at straw and all.

So if technologically it's impossible to prevent and societally it's impossible to prevent (like the attorney that got pwned same as the grandma), I'm not sure if there exists an answer that isn't worse than the thing it's supposed to prevent. I suppose we'll soon be in a situation where nothing we don't directly perceive in real life is provably true. That journalism and media in general seem to be in a deep crisis of trustworthiness means that you won't even get the benefit of the chain-of-trust as a proxy for whether something is or isn't real.

Ignoring everything happening outside of your immediate surroundings is a choice, and probably even good for people's mental health, but my gut feeling is that it does make humanity as a whole dumber and disempowered. What does corruption matter if nobody cares, or even hears about it? It was AI generated by $current_enemy anyway; nothing to see here, citizen.

Proton is already good enough that you don’t need SteamOS. I’m not that much of a gamer so my numbers are hardly representative, but about 90% of video games I tried ran with zero issues through Heroic Launcher and GE-Proton. The ability to install SteamOS on your own hardware is nice, but largely irrelevant. It was Valve’s previous work on Proton which was important.

The bigger fear is of course Valve itself. They have many, many levers they could turn to squeeze their audience. This is of course a terrible long-term decision—Valve being a good steward is why PC gamers largely don’t even bother to learn what other online storefronts offer—but long-term planning is irrelevant if you’re a CEO who’s looking for a new yacht and to lateral away after 3 years of record profits.

@edit: admittedly there is something to be said about the "I don’t _want_ a PC experience, I just want to play the games on my couch" crowd. Being able to set up SteamOS on your own hardware _is_ nice, I just don’t think it’s relevant to any post-Gaben enshittification.

Given the nightmarish nimby gridlock I’m less and less convinced it’s a good thing. I’d rather have people mad about windmills being eyesores than be perpetually chained to oil and gas for energy, as an example. I’m also not a fan of endless roadblocks to all manner of construction, even for such simple things as housing.

Yes, having a data center that raises your utilities costs by 300% jammed down your throat because the local mayor got blatantly bribed shouldn’t be a thing, especially when it’s powered by mobile gas turbines that stink up the entire area (note: I’m not against data centers on principle, but there are many ways for ultra-wealthy interests to leave people hosed). But things like faintly visible mini-sats don’t seem like a big deal, subjectively, unless you work at an observatory.

I don't think many consumers (outside of hardcore games) could tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 10 years ago to the graphics from a game of today

My half blind aunt could probably tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 2016 and 2026 if you put them side by side.

Were video game graphics "good enough" for a while now? I’d say yes, with the exception of vr. But to say there has been no noticeable improvement over the last 10 years is silly.

GTA 6 is coming out soon. I’d invite you to actually compare the visuals of gta 6 vs the original gta 5 from 2014 that was released for ps4 (rather than the 2022 enhanced version for consoles or 2015 version for pc which shouldn’t be compared to non-pc gta 6, since 6 for pc will also get a significant facelift).

Benchmarks look really promising. Suspiciously good, even. I guess we’ll see soon enough.

My question to previewers: how are the guardrails for random joe that wasn’t personally blessed by the ai pope to access the non-nerfed model? Fable is a nightmare in this regard, but I’m not sure whether 5.6 also gets a critical side-eye from the gubmint when you ask it to fix bugs in your code (you filthy hacker, you).

when it was really just Google falling behind the same way it did with Tensorflow, Angular and GCP

Not sure I agree. Angular fell behind in popularity but was (is? unsure atm) still eminently usable. I gave gemini a test drive recently and it was horrendous, as in "picking dirt cheap Chinese model over gemini any day" bad, and with overzealous guardrails to boot. 3.1 pro feels a year behind and is extremely lazy. 3.5 flash feels like a model you’d run on your 128gb macbook, not something that was released a month ago and which costs a fair bit when used through api.

In any case: as of right now I think that we went from a three horse race to anthropic / openai as premium choices vs whatever is the Chinese fotm for a fraction of the cost. 3.5 pro better be a miracle if google wants to hang out with the big boys, otherwise their only strategy is hoping that both US labs go broke and they remain the last man standing.

While I have no experience with it personally (no interest in image gen) my aunt was raving about current chatgpt image model for "restoring" / working with old photos - sharpening, changing some small details like ill-fitting background. It takes her a bunch of prompting but eventually she gets things just right. In comparison, current gemini output (supposedly) tends to be subtly off, details aren’t quite right, proportions are subtly changed etc.

This is purely about generating images with people in them, I don’t think she’s doing any logic puzzles with gotchas and specific alignments of differently colored blocks and whatnot

Because the market pays less for DDR4 than for HBM (or DDR5), and since HBM is heavily modified, vertically stacked DRAM, it competes for the same raw inputs and fab space than DDR4 used.

If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.

sunlight causes most of the heat issues; cloudy days are unlikely to be extremely hot

solar panels convert sunlight to electricity

AC converts electricity to cooler air indoors

Ah, if only there was a way to solve those three problems at once. Alas...

As to the "resistance" to AC: is this an actual thing or just something the media made up? It seems that for the most part anyone who wants AC can just buy it, barring exceptions like historical buildings. If people want to cook themselves alive I’m not really seeing the issue, as they only harm themselves (unlike, say, with vaccines where herd immunity is important).

When the highest offices of the land are packed to the gills with liars and grifters and anyone with a brain can observe there’s no downside to such behavior, "just be honest" rings rather hollow

This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:

- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?

- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time

- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs

- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)

- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience

- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits

So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.

Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.

what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending?

Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.

If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.

Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices.

I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.

People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?

I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.

I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.

The funniest thing about this post is not the fact that some people took it as anything but satire, but that it’s likely very close to what the true believers at Antrophic actually think.

Ah, those wacky terrorists and their non-aligned models, trained on copyrighted data to boot. Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!

I subscribed (with some distaste) to the $20 tier to check out fable. I got two refusals in a row on innocuous tasks, then ran out of quota halfway through the third one.

Truly, the future is here.

After saying for weeks of how Mythos is in a league all of its own you’d think it was a bit more than the usual iterative few % on the benchmarks (and even more guardrails as a bonus).

IPO gonna IPO, I suppose.

Why learn to read and write when everyone carries a computer capable of TTS? Why learn anything when your pocket computer has access to AI doing the thinking much better than the average highschooler and has 100x the knowledge?

I’m not meeting with friends to work on our speeches, I’m meeting friends to do friends stuff. Go join toastmasters if you want to do work stuff as a fun pasttime.

Amusing that just when the big three AI providers from US raise prices significantly, even for the mini models, you’ve got a Chinese model slashing their already-cheap offer by 75%. Not to mention you can run this model on your own hardware, although admittedly even the flash stretches the meaning of local for individual people.

Semi-related: has the rate of published exploits picked up as if late, or is it simply the fact that there’s hype around ai as security tool (offense or defense) so it’s simply in the news more often?

Feels like there’s something new every other day - linux, windows, mobile, various commonplace tools used by everybody, the list goes on

A local Answer Machine is the dream, especially when the internet is decaying and generally on its last legs, but the hardware requirements seem like a huge mountain to climb. Things are progressing tremendously - deepseek v4 flash is very good for what it is - but even that goes beyond any reasonable local setup, which imo is 128 GB ram + 16 GB vram. 4 ram slots on a consumer board craters ram speed, 256 gb macs are too expensive, and even then the inference is ungodly slow.

On the other hand… v4 flash model is actual magic compared to what was available 2 years ago. If the rate of improvement stays as is, we’ll get a similar performance in a ~120B model in a year, which is viable (if expensive) for everyman hardware. Possibly you’ll be able to run its equivalent on a ~$1200 laptop by 2028, which for me-in-2020 would sound straight out of a scifi movie. A good harness that lets the model fetch data from other sources like a local wikipedia copy from kiwix could do a lot for factual knowledge, too; there’s only so much you can encode in the model itself, but even a cheapish (pre-curent prices) 2TB drive can hold an immense amount of LLM-accessible data.

Big caveat: I don’t see local models for programming or generally demanding agentic tasks being worth it anytime soon. You likely want bleeding edge models for it, and speed is far more important. Chat at 20tok/s is fine; working on even a small codebase at 20tok/s, especially on a noticeably weaker model, is just a waste of time. Maybe it’s a PEBKAC but I have no idea how people make any meaningful use out of qwen 3.6.

Is it possible to dual-boot on android? It sounds defeatist but I no longer believe it’s possible to change course - the increasingly authoritarian governments, google and most moneyed interests are all on the same side, so it’s just a matter of when.

Being on the palantir-approved google ranch for the few Apps You Need + graphene (or some other alt OS) for everything else would be quite inconvenient, but still better than carrying two phones, which nobody wants to do.