Congratulations to Francis Halzen on winning the 2026 Nobel Prize for spending $300 million to drill a cubic kilometer of holes into Antarctic ice, all to prove that high-energy cosmic neutrinos exist -- a fact literally zero physicists doubted in the first place.

What makes the decision almost comedic is that actual groundbreaking observation projects were completely passed over. Giving the prize to IceCube instead of the teams behind the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) -- which is actively rewriting cosmic history and spotting the earliest galaxies -- or DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument), which is producing the most precise 3D map of the universe to probe dark energy, feels absurd. Instead, the committee played it safe with incremental particle counting.

As Sabine Hossenfelder accurately observed in her latest video, this award sadly demonstrates "just how little benefit physics now brings to humankind." We have reached the point where the Nobel committee has to hand out gold medals for incremental, big-budget data collection because the alternate candidates were theoretical models so far removed from empirical reality they border on metaphysical fan fiction (looking at you, inflation and the multiverse). But hey, at least humankind can now sleep soundly at night knowing that very energetic neutrinos are indeed passing straight through the mattress.

No, the proper headline would be:

"Google Teases Gemini 4 Argon"

It's not been released, and it's not even clear if it will be.

What will really happen is that they will keep their best models for themselves and their dear friends, including the DOD, NSA, CIA and other agencies.

No AI company would even consider slowing down their progress. This would mean losing their competitive edge and becoming irrelevant and losing billions of investors' money.

Weird how people here still think that LLMs are not "intelligent". They may not be meatbags for sure, but they are certainly capable of doing a lot of harm and good. And they can and will replace a lot of people and jobs.

A much better news piece

The actual freaking images

Enjoy.

False. The correct term is lose less money. Zero of these AI companies are in the black.

So, your new goalpost for AGI/ASI is being able to "make money"? Thank you for the clarification! By the way, have you ever heard the term "fundamental research"? Many if not the vast majority of things that you now take for granted have their roots in it.

Secondly, many companies that use OpenAI and Anthropic AI are profitable.

It's all quite confusing to me but whatever.

If a person dedicated a few months of research to that, I'd applaud it as an example of human ingenuity and endurance.

Yeah, right, except some of the solved problems are 70-80 years old.

But, it's nor a problem anyone needed to solve. It wasn't something keeping anyone up at night.

You're excellent at moving the goalposts.

why haven't they yet figured out optimizations that'd allow the companies making them actually make money?

The problem is you don't follow AI companies closely and both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced that their latest models have optimized their own code to run faster and more efficiently, which means that LLMs have already allowed them to make more money by reducing the amount of computing power required. And that's just one example of many. A billion-dollar company has already been created by a single person using LLMs. How's that for making money with LLMs? Look up Medvi by Matthew Gallagher.

I too want to believe I'm a special kind of meat bag. But sadly, it looks like LLMs have essentially surpassed 99% of living people on Earth.

There's nothing wrong with being a Luddite. But for some reason for some people, it takes a lot of courage to admit it.

except: why produce anything of value if AI is simply going to suck it up and reserve it to people?

If what you create/publish can be presented as a three-line AI summary, it may not be worthy content.

Recently, the search traffic to my website has decreased by roughly 10 to 20 times, and my well-researched original articles, which have not been published anywhere else, range from three to ten full pages, so Gemini cannot even summarize them properly. Some articles have been translated into multiple languages.

In the meantime Google removed me from the AdSense publisher program a couple of years ago, as they did with most Russian publishers. And they refuse to accept me back, even with a different account from a different country to which I've relocated, so I've not earned a single cent in the past two years.

So go ahead and blame me for creating something with no value.

Everyone's acting like Google stole something uniquely valuable.

The uncomfortable reality is that for most searches, people don't need your version of the answer. They need an answer. And that answer has already been written thousands of times by thousands of websites.

LLMs compress those thousands of near-identical explanations into one response. That's not a bug -- it's exactly what they're good at.

The SEO era rewarded being the 500th person to explain "What is X?" The AI era won't.

If your business depends on repackaging information that's already everywhere, your problem isn't AI. It's that your content was always a commodity.

Going forward, publishers will have to work much harder: produce something an LLM can't cheaply reconstruct -- original reporting, proprietary data, real expertise, or genuinely distinctive analysis -- and build an audience that comes back because it values you, not just the answer to a Google query.

And what if you didn't post photos of your face?

What will you verify in this case? And why? I don't understand you. Did you read the news piece?

To me, they are overstated. If you have already published your profile photos on such platforms, would you really care if Facebook saw a short clip of your face? You lost your privacy ages ago when you uploaded the photos in the first place.

A hastily thought-up solution would be to let Google crawl headlines and the bare minimum of information. This way, Google won't be able to provide all the information, so people who are really interested will actually visit your website.

Cutting Google off entirely will destroy most of your leads.

I stopped posting on social media and left it entirely around 2020. It's a fucking cesspool of stupid jokes, endless reposts, and almost no real information or genuinely interesting new knowledge.

I still have accounts on X, Facebook, and Instagram, but only because they require a valid account to read comments on posts. I sometimes do that because I'm curious to know what people are thinking.

I had a VK account (the Russian equivalent of Facebook), but I quit after Durov sold it to people aligned with the Kremlin. I despise our entire absolutely corrupt government, so I can't imagine using anything they can get their hands on.

And what did I post? Things that made people question, think, and analyze. Eventually I realized that it simply didn't work on people who were either incapable of or unwilling to do that, so I was basically preaching to the choir.

Built-in blobs are "OK", updateable blobs are "bad".

BTW, both are black boxes.

I wonder if this fear mongering is profitable or something, because I've long lost the plot.

You now only own a license that can be revoked at any time.

And, of course, you won't be able to play anything if your internet connection goes down.

PC gaming has never looked so attractive. That is if you buy your games on GOG.