I think they're a bit more than that, but assume you're right... have you considered that they're less than three years old? ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. And the reasoning models that have made them massively more effective in many areas (especially software development) are barely a year old?

If you reason about what will happen in the next decade or two based on where the technology is right now, a technology that didn't even exist five years ago and is still obviously in its infancy, you're clearly missing the most important point, which is that the pace of improvement has been and continues to be incredibly rapid. You need to base your reasoning on what the models will be capable of five years from now, ten years from now. Unless we suddenly hit a wall, they'll be vastly better. How much better? No one knows, but it seems safe to expect that they'll be orders of magnitude better.

I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.

If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved them so far, but they've responded by going the wrong direction.

No, they can't. They're already seeing searches decline as people move to asking LLMs instead. The LLMs actually end up using Google, but that doesn't generate any ad revenue for Google (that's something Google may have to figure out how to put a stop to). The solution so far is the addition of "AI results" to search output... but those AI results are produced by a far inferior model because Google search gets hundreds of thousands of queries per second, and it's currently infeasible to service those queries with a full-powered model. But the output of the inferior model doesn't satisfy users, so many of them are shifting to ChatGPT or Claude (I am!). If users opt for paid subscriptions to LLMs instead of free, ad-supported search, fine, but Google needs to be in that game and to get them to use Gemini rather than the competitors. For users who won't pay for a subscription, I assume that ad-supported LLM usage will become a thing, and Google clearly wants to get there first, or at least early enough. But right now they don't actually have the capacity and LLM usage is too expensive for an ad-supported model.

So... they need 1000X capacity, and they need it at something not too far above current OPEX costs. If it requires massive CAPEX, that's less problematic as long as it can be funded from revenues (including future revenues), and in fact it's actually good for Google if massive CAPEX is required, because it helps to build their moat, protecting them from competition by other companies that don't have the same resources. But OPEX can't be 1000X, it probably can't even be 10X.

What you describe is the only solution, but it almost certainly can't happen fast enough to prevent massive climate-caused death tolls, including lots of wars produced by the need to relocate billions of people and restructure global agriculture. The enormous refugee crises and wars are, of course, going to disrupt the technology transition that your solution necessarily and correctly relies on, which will slow it down, resulting in even more emissions and more warming.

I think we very well might have to employ geoengineering to mitigate the temperature increase and keep the equatorial areas livable while we decarbonize. Maybe not. I hope not. But we should absolutely be investing in geoengineering research now so that we have the capability if we need it. I understand the concern many people have that if we know how to mitigate warming without reducing CO2, we may choose to do that as the easier course. But I think we're going to find the inevitable and unavoidable (barring geoengineering to reduce insolation) CO2-driven temperature increases to be simply unmanageable.

The only other option is to somehow create a world government capable of:

1. Forcing implementation of decarbonization much faster than is economically-preferable,
2 Funding carbon sequestration at incredible rates, probably consuming a significant portion of global GDP
3. Forcing temperate regions to peacefully accept massive influxes of refugees from equatorial regions, and
4. Coordinating global production and distribution of food, accommodating for changing productivity of farmland.

Oh, and we'd better create this powerful, far-sighted and non-corrupt world government within the next decade or so. If we can't do that, self-interested squabbling between countries is going to prevent rapid implementation of the solution even in the absence of the refugee crisis and resulting wars.

Or, we can use geoengineering to slow the temperature rise down and gain some time and breathing room to implement decarbonization and then sequestration.

Global birth rates are already crashing. Most of the developed world is already well below replacement and is increasingly dependent on immigration. On current trends the global population is already slated to start declining within 15-20 years. The decline is likely to cause serious problems within 50 years, and if at some point we don't reverse or slow the decline, within 100 years we may struggle to maintain our knowledge base (ignoring AI, which probably shouldn't be ignored).

The clarity and thoroughness of your reasoning and explanation are impressive.

The AI business is also the search business.

Yes, Google is profitable now. Tremendously so. But they're at risk of losing revenue and ceasing to be profitable as people cease using Google search and switch to asking questions of their AIs. So to retain their position as the place people go first for information, they have to stay ahead of the AI race. Well, they could also just sit back and wait to see if their competitors are overwhelmed by the query volume, but that risks losing traffic and then having to win it back. It's much better to keep it. And Google is better-positioned to win this race than its competitors both because of its existing infrastructure and expertise and because it already has the eyeballs.

In addition, you seem to be assuming that doubling serving capacity means doubling cost. Clearly Google is not planning to increase their annual operating expenses by 1000X. As the summary actually says in the third paragraph, Google is also going to have to improve efficiency to achieve the growth rate, with better models and better hardware. This is what the AI chief is challenging the employees to do; he's not challenging them to write bigger OPEX checks, that's his job.

You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

...or decoding...

You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?

I know a few. I don't know what it may or may not mean. It may be relevant that the ones I know used a community-based approach, where groups of homeschooling families worked together to create something akin to a school, with different parents teaching different subjects. This meant that while the kids socialization groups were small, they did hang out with and learn with other kids, not just their siblings.

It's more than that. Research into the possibility of a link between vaccination and autism has been done, and no correlation found. This is evidence that there is no connection and it's entirely different from a case where no research has been done. One is evidence of absence, the other is absence of evidence. The GP is equating them, but they're not remotely the same thing.

Show me all of the studies that have evaluated the correlation between FSM action and autism. There has been a lot of research on the possibility of a correlation between vaccination and autism, and no evidence of correlation has been found. There is an enormous difference between "We've looked hard and found no connection" (evidence of a negative) and "We haven't looked at all" (lack of evidence).

In addition, there's no need for the CDC to debunk a claims that are not being made, or non-harmful claims. To pick a less-ludicrous example, there's no significant population claiming that eating grapes causes autism, so there's no need for the CDC to address it. Further, if there were an anti-grape lobby touting a connection with autism, the CDC probably still wouldn't need to address it because some people avoiding grapes doesn't create significant health risks to others.

But there is a significant population claiming -- against strong scientific evidence -- that vaccines cause autism, and that claim is causing them to reject vaccines, which does create significant health risks for others. So, the CDC absolutely does need to address it, since public health is their job.

Your analogy is terrible, in every way.

When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.