Easy for you, a technical person familiar with LLMs and WebAssembly

I'm not talking about how to develop LLM inference servers. You don't have to understand WebAssembly in order to run a WebAssembly program in your browser any more than you have to understand Javascript to run Javascript in your browser. It's *less* technological knowledge than using the Play store. And installing Ollama is no more difficult than installing any other app.

Your difficulty conceptions are simply wrong.

I don't understand your response. Was "life breathed into" the ancient Chinese robotic orchestras and singers, or the Islamic robotic orchestra and mechanical peacocks?

And re: myths, the aforementioned myths literally involved *humans* making the automatons. Ajatasatru for example, the maker of the robots to guard the artifacts of the Buddha, was also famous for using a mechanical war chariot of great complexity with whirling spiked maces, and later one with spinning scythes - not the sort of things you would describe as having "life breathed life into", and actually quite similar to Leonardo Da Vinci's chariot (in some versions he made it/them, in other versions it was a gift from the Indras). As for the robots guarding the Buddha, in one version they're literally powered by water wheels. In another version, Greco-Romans had a caste of robot makers, and to steal the technology, a young Indian man was reincarnated as a Greco-Roman, marries the daughter of a robot-maker, and sews the plans for robots into his thigh, so that when he's murdered by killbots as he tries to flee with the plans, they still make it back to India with his body. Yes, ancient Indian legends literally involved robot assassins.

And as for the robots in the Naravahandatta, they were literally made by a carpenter, and are specifically described as "lifeless wooden beings that mimic life".

Even with Hephestos, a literal god, they're very much not described as merely having life breathed into them - they're literally described as having been crafted (the Greeks were very much into machinery and described it in similar terms), and they behave as if something that were programmed (the Kourai Khryseai are perhaps the most humanlike of Hephaestus's creations, but even they aren't described like you would describe biological beings, they're described for being remarkable for how lifelike they were). Of course it wasn't for-loops and subroutines, people had no conception of such a thing, but his creations behaved in a "programmed" way, not as things with free will.

I don't know why some people are so insistent on imagining that "sci-fi" things have to be recent. They're not. There were literally space operas being written in Roman times. Not scientifically accurate, of course, but sci fi things - including automated things that mimic intelligence - simply is not new.

I'm sorry, but let me repeat: it is an apt description of what it's doing. Nobody says ".... and does so via the exact same mechanism that the human brain uses when paying attention" (which I doubt you could describe anyway, and is in reality very much still a topic of research)

That doesn't change that if you're looking at comparative advantage - most CO2 saved for a given amount of battery, for example, delivery vans are an obvious pick before the EV freight trucks.
Though even with the freight trucks, one could concentrate on local delivery routes before longer haul ones to maximize savings.

How many stories are we hearing of college regret? Cant find job in field of work.

May I ask why you call firing people morally corrupt? Illegal, according to some artificial definitions of what is supposed to be the law, which is a system designed to force behaviors, maybe. But morally corrupt? Please explain, I really do not get it, absolutely don't understand what is morally corrupt about firing people that you don't want to work with because any reasons whatsoever. If it is your business, you should be able to fire anyone, it's not about morality, it is purely, completely a monetary decision. Do you feel morally corrupt for purchasing things on sale rather than overpaying for them?

Oh, and also, the resources needed to do a finetune (to update knowledge) - or heck, even just a LoRa - are vastly less than the resources needed to train a foundation. And in any "AI-crash scenario", renting server time becomes cheap.

Installing Ollama is easy, and now there's even WebAssembly inference servers which load models straight in your browser but run on your computer. Literally just have to browse to the page and click.

RAG does not require any meaningful amount of maintenance.

What if perchance the track should bend?

The Trump administration has been broadly declaring anything related to DEI illegal and putting immense pressure against major organizations with DEI policies, when again, like 99% of policies, including those they've gone after, are like they above.

They literally had to turn down a government grant because they had a DEI policy. They're not lying about the liability risk they faced. And this is what the overwhelming majority (like 99%) of real-world DEI policies look like.

Imagine if those failed and we'd have to take the Shinkansen to our destination instead of the monorail to the airport...

I hear those things are awfully loud.

Way beyond golems - tons of old religions have notions of "craftsmen deities" making mechanical beings (like Hephestus making Talos, the Keledones, the Kourai Khryseai, etc) or self-controlled artifacts (such as Vishvakarma making an automated flying chariot, Hephaestos making self-moving tripods to serve the gods at banquets, etc), or even things that (mythological) humans created, such as the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha, or a whole city of wooden robots made by a carpenter mentioned in the Naravahanadatta. And then you have actual early human attempts at automatons, such as robotic orchestras and singers in ancient China, a robotic orchestra and mechanical peacocks in the Islamic world, etc (China also had some mythological ones in addition to actual ones, such Yan Shi's automaton, who enraged King Mu by winking at his concubines).

Humans have been thinking about robots and "thinking machines" since time immemorial.

AI isn't going to disappear just because the stock prices of these companies crash, or even if they close together. It's too late. The models already exist, inference is dirt cheap to run (and can even be run on your own computer), and vast numbers of people demonstrably find it useful (regardless of whether you, reader, do).

It's funny, when you see "The AI bubble will collapse", you get two entirely different groups of people agreeing - one thinking, "AI is going to go away!", and the other thinking "Inference costs are going to zero!". Namely, because all the investors who spent their money building datacentres are going to lose their shirts, but those datacentres will still exist - and with much less demand for YOLOing new leading-edge foundations, it'll mainly be "inference for the lowest bidder, so long as they can bid more than the power cost at that point in time". Mean power costs for an AI datacentre are like a third of the total amortized cost of a datacentre, but with datacentres in broad geographic regions, spot prices can go well under that due to local price fluctuations. And any drop in prices triggers Jevon's Paradox.

The question for investors is really the correction timing, not whether it will happen. IMHO, as weird as it sounds, it likely has to do with highly visible inflation (groceries, fuel, etc). Inflation leads to voter rage, which leads to politicians pursuing anti-inflation strategies, which dry up capital in the market, which cause capital-hungry growth fields (like AI) to starve. Once investors catch wind that their previous growth field is no longer going to be in growth mode, they bail, causing a collapse in stock prices.

It was rate hikes that caused the internet bubble to pop.

Right now, Trump seems obsessed with rate cuts to juice the stock market, but at some point, the administration's chaotic, pro-inflation policies (tariffs, hits to the ag and construction labour supply, the war on wind and solar, etc) will catch up with them.