The barrier to entry for AI (generative or otherwise) is incredibly low, and mostly consists of harvesting large quantities of training data (which China should excel at, TBH) as well as access to sufficient processing power to process that data. OpenAI doesn't have any magical insight into how a trained model will behave compared to anyone else in the field -- anyone with money could be up to speed in a month or two, tops. The algorithms themselves are well-established at this point, and the "secret sauce" is not very secret either: increase the resolution of your data and add more processing power.

I suspect the reason we don't see the field flooded with more startups (if you don't consider it saturated anyway) is because the business case is just not there. Let OpenAI and others take the risk that there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If an opportunity presents itself, it would be easy enough to start competing; at least no more difficult than starting today, but certainly cheaper to wait.

Well, congrats on making it to Feb 2024. Here's to another month.

Exactly. If you want to beat the market, you need to do it the old fashioned way: insider trading.

Yeah, the bill is basically garbage. It's unconstitutionally vague -- abstract descriptions for who it covers and how -- and ignores first amendment protections for developers.

It's also rather hyperbolic, as LLMs are is not capable of reasoning, and "more powerful" not-reasoning doesn't magically reach some tipping point of competence. It just gets faster or more efficient at doing the same crap. GPAI will require a paradigm shift -- if such a thing is even possible with even theoretical technology (as in, we have a very plausible theory about how to create this) -- at which point a bill won't stop it.

The article also quotes an Ohio farmer who complained that "You live in the country, and you want to be away from all the hustle and bustle. I kind of look at it as if they're sticking a warehouse or a factory here."

Or if they started growing all their food there...

Sorry, but unless you're strictly living on subsistence agriculture, then your income/existence is predicated upon meeting the needs of other people in other places. That's just life. If demand and profitability for wind or solar outstrips demand for new beet farms, then there will be new wind farms, current regs be damned.

Also, the time to build out is *before* demand, not after it can't meet demand, at which point it's too late. You know, unless Intel is short on this whole "integrated circuit" thing and believes it's just a fad...

Of course they're trading in currencies other than the dollar, because they're evading, or trying to evade, sanctions, not because anyone wants Yen. The Yen fell over 15% against the dollar in 2023, so if you made that "investment," you lost big. You just lost *much less* big on your otherwise-impossible oil and gas sales (Russia and Iran), and you saved a lot on those purchases (China and India, mostly).

Yes, things can change long-term, but increased Yen holdings by central banks is more of a "keep an eye on this," signal than a "sky is falling" scenario. I don't have a better crystal ball than anyone else, but I expect a regression closer to pre-Ukraine War norms when things stabilize. Either that or the whole thing will go tits up and currency will be moot.

Right, and if society can't learn from the mistakes of its members, then it's doomed to (re)experience the consequences until it does. It's not like Hans even came up with these ideas; he's just suggesting that it might benefit all of us to have them as part of a standard curriculum, and I'm in agreement there. Social Studies seems like the obvious place, since almost none of it is actually about social skills as it stands, instead teaching facts, names, and dates for rote learning. Perhaps if we focused more on interpersonal skills and conflict resolution, we could lower the levels of animus and dehumanization in our country. Maybe not, but it seems like a significant upside with minimal downside, unless memorizing the ordinal, date, and duration of Martin van Buren's administration is, in fact, something I unconsciously use every day, which is a possibility I'm certainly open to if anyone cares to explain.

Porn mostly shows what people are willing to do for money. It might provide some awareness or validation for kinks, which is fine, but I wouldn't call it education per se.

Maybe the Sears catalog will make a comeback. Mmmmm, Sears.

The sudden retreat, however, comes as a surprise.

Does it, though?

An inability to do proper risk/reward assessments and agree to minor unpleasantness now to avoid major unpleasantness in the future is a significant issue for humans.

This is a solved problem; it's called governance. The perceived risk can be raised through regulation, enforcement, and publicizing those efforts. This isn't rocket science, but unfortunately it requires either a benevolent dictator, or else the collective societal will to establish institutions with resources and resistance to corruption in order to be effective.

No, they wonâ(TM)t. Weâ(TM)ve already been through all of this with IM clients on desktops. At the end of the day, this is Appleâ(TM)s infrastructure, iMessages travel over Apple servers, and Apple have no reason or requirement to allow anyone else to use it, especially when it costs them real money. I love to cheer for the little guy, but this is not the way, and itâ(TM)s never going to work, at least not reliably enough to be viable.

Bitcoin and similar cryptos have never included "untraceability" as a feature. Quite the opposite -- with a public ledger it's very straightforward to trace transactions. Mixers obfuscate things well in theory, but only marginally in practice, especially when records can be subpoenaed. You might be able to squirrel it away into one or more "anonymous" wallets, but as soon as its used for anything, it potentially becomes traceable again. And if you have a half-billion dollars but can never spend it, then what do you really have?

I mean I think the explanation is pretty clear -- the US has a small set of carriers that move in lockstep and compete only notionally.