"Free" shipping is now standard at all major retailers, no subscription required. The only thing Prime gets you is slightly faster "free" shipping, but only on some items. For most things I buy online, I rarely care whether it takes 2 or 5 days to come. For the rare times when I care, I can pay extra for faster shipping. It doesn't add up to anything like $140 per year.

OpenAI is a non-profit. Sort of. It's a non-profit, but it has a fully owned subsidiary that is a "capped" for-profit, with profits limited to 100 times their investments. The justification for that arrangement was that it would give them more ways to raise money, which would fund the non-profit's altruistic work to create "safe and beneficial" AI. Wikipedia explains this unusual arrangement. "The nonprofit, OpenAI, Inc., is the sole controlling shareholder of OpenAI Global LLC, which, despite being a for-profit company, retains a formal fiduciary responsibility to OpenAI, Inc.'s nonprofit charter."

What does that mean? Like a human mind in what way?

We really don't understand how the human brain works. We know how individual neurons work, and small clusters of neurons. But how do billions of neurons work together to create intelligent behavior? We have very little idea.

Until we know how the human brain works, it's hard to say how similar or dissimilar an artificial neural network is.

Altman's suggestions sound remarkably self serving. Don't tell us what to do. Don't try to stop us from doing anything. Don't try to slow us down. Just let us do whatever we want, and we'll let you come inspect our data center so we can all pretend there's some actual oversight.

And he says it will only apply to maybe five compute clusters in the world? Is he assuming technology will stop advancing? At first maybe there will only be five. A few years later there will be 50. A few years after that you'll have no idea how many there are, because any company with a decent compute budget can afford one. His suggestion only makes sense in a world where computers have stopped getting faster.

It's only perpendicular to the sun for two days each year. Unless you keep shifting the orbit every day, but then you get a satellite that literally passes over every point on Earth, so you would need to blanket the entire planet with receiving stations.

Do you have a citation for it being used before then? For what it's worth, Google Ngram Viewer shows hardly any use of the term until the late 90s, when it suddenly exploded. Earlier use of the term is largely in the context of open source intelligence, which is unrelated.

"Open source" is a synonym for "free software". It has been from the beginning and was always intended to be. Here is an article by the person who coined the term explaining how it was chosen, and that the only goal was to avoid confusion:

RMS later decided he liked his own term better, so he tried to spread confusion about it by claiming open source was based on a different philosophy from free software. It's not true. Do a point by point comparison of the official definitions of open source and free software. Every one of the essential freedoms is also part of the definition of open source.

There's so much I could say in response to this. I could point out that it would take a lot more than 1.5 C of warming before Wisconsin stops getting snow in the winter, so why do you think the presence of snow is evidence against climate change? Or I could note that the current weather at this moment in one place tells you nothing about long term climate trends, so why would you base your beliefs on it? Or I could point out that no scientists are actually predicting the end of the world from climate change, just a lot of suffering for a lot of people, and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise. Or I could even observe that a lot of people really are predicting the end of the world, and have been doing it continuously for 2000 years, but no matter how many times Jesus fails to appear, they just keep predicting it will happen Any Day Now. Your scorn would be better directed at the people who keep making wrong predictions, not the ones who keep making right predictions.

But I suspect that no amount of logic would have the least effect on you, because your beliefs aren't based on logic. Am I right?

I think the mass is more important than the resolution. I have PSVR2 with about 4K per eye. The image isn't as sharp as the real world, but it's good enough for games. The big problem is that it's just too uncomfortable to wear. I limit sessions to about half an hour. I can't see VR becoming mainstream until the headsets are light enough to put them on and forget you're wearing them.

There is no possible plane you can draw through the Earth where the orbit is always in sunlight. Try to figure one out and you'll see for yourself. Every single point on Earth spends about half its time in darkness, and LEO is close enough to the ground that it's only slightly better.

That's an understatement. There aren't nearly enough islands, you would be stuck transmitting the energy many thousands of kilometers to get it where it's needed, and batteries defeat the whole purpose of space based solar.

AI doesn't just mean LLMs and image generators. Deep neural networks trained on large datasets are everywhere. When you do a Google search, it uses AI to decide which pages to show you. Hit the translate button in your browser and it uses AI to translate the page. Log in to Youtube and it uses AI to decide what videos to recommend to you. Post a photo on Facebook and it uses AI to identify the people in it.

Deep learning is everywhere because it works so much better than the techniques that were used before. Those applications don't get a lot of public attention because they aren't as flashy as ChatGPT. It operates invisibly behind the scenes, powering a lot of what you do online. It's going to keep on doing it.

It doesn't matter. Any satellite in LEO takes under two hours to complete an orbit. Pick any point on its orbit and it passes that point at least 12 times each day. On many of those passes it will be night. There is no orbit in LEO that doesn't spend a lot of time in darkness.

You would need a ring of closely spaced ground stations circling the entire planet so it would always be visible to one of them. Many of them would have to be in the middle of the ocean.

In other words, you haven't studied machine learning and don't know how it works. If you want to learn about it, there are lots of resources online. Here is a place to start.

This is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less we know about a subject, the more we overestimate our understanding of it. You know nothing at all about machine learning, so you convince yourself there's nothing to know and a whole branch of computer science doesn't exist.

That statement is completely, totally wrong. That's really the whole point. Modern AI is not a search engine and does not have any rule sets. That describes expert systems, which were a popular approach to AI in the 1980s. The modern approach is the exact opposite: take a generic mathematical model and train it on huge amounts of data. If the model is big enough and you train on enough data, capabilities spontaneously emerge without anyone putting them there. It's much closer to how your brain works.

The amazing thing is that this works. Modern AI system are capable of complex intellectual tasks including memory, information recall, and reasoning, even though no one programmed those abilities and we don't even really understand how they work. They don't yet do those things nearly as well as a typical human*, but that's ok. We're on the right track and we know how to keep improving them.

*Slashdot readers excepted.

Absolutely, there are cases when speed really matters and code needs to be well optimized. I'm just saying it's not universal, the 1980s weren't some golden age of efficient programming. Some code was really fast. Some was slow because it didn't need to be fast. And some was slow and really should have been faster. The same as today.

Why?