Yeah sure, you can trust is with backdoors to encrypted communications but only for the good guys because they know how to take good care of such important mechanisms.

All of them really. What's typically open source is
1) the code used for training, but never the dataset for initial LLM and never the RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) data used to make a text vomiting LLM into a useful question answering maching.
2) the resulting weights - these are totally uninterpretable.

So it's never fully replicable; even if you had the infra and were willing to burn electricity you don't have a way of going to 2) yourself.

AFAIK that's not just the Chinese but also open-source / weights Llama and Mistral.

This sounds dismissive, but I wouldn't read it as such.

"China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything."

This has always been true, you can for example read the history of improving iron / steel production during the Industrial Revolution. Either you had existing outfit and capital to try things. Or you raised capital and set-up an outfit to try things. If you had something viable, you made money, if not, the world (and hopefully you) moved on.

And in the end VCs work more-or-less on the same principle (which is why at some point someone was trying to do Uber for xyz).

This is a PR "thought leadership" BS article by Benjamin Riley, Cognitive Resonance, who "provides direct consulting support to organizations to improve understanding of how generative AI works."

This doesn't mean they're wrong but it's probably nothing terribly original (there is a reason why it's not on openreview.net as a submission into one of the relevant AI conferences).

What I don't get is this: let's say they believe that to get to "genuinely useful AI" (generating value in business, automating science) they need 1024x the compute they have now; which I think is ballpark with their spending.

But Moore's law says that number of transistors doubles every 2 years, so if we believe we can keep this going then in 4 years time they'll only need 256x the data centres and in 8 years it's only going to be 64.

So all the chips they put in will be next to worthless in 8 years and they'll only need a fraction of the other infrastructure. So all this massive spend is to be first because? Because whoever is first will be able to use their "genuinely useful AI" to out-innovate everyone to singularity?

The whole thing is a one-way bet on the empirical LLM scaling laws (https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361) scaling to something useful, which I don't buy.

The whole situation is so bad, I can't help but suspect the former Bungie employees had some incentive to make the acquisition worthless.

The ignorance of this fact seems intentional.

Funny how there's this big push for people to join some ephemeral, federated network where nothing but text is discoverable, content moderation is limited to complaints to disinterested admins, and privately-hosted servers can be added / removed with a minimal amount of effort.

It's almost as if someone realized the available tools for identifying CSAM have become more sophisticated and a new platform that's harder to monitor is now a necessity.

The EU's Mastadon instance will average 2k daily visitors who will spend less than a minute on the site. Some of those visitors will be bots. In about a year, those numbers will go down and discussion of the site will be limited to some wonks in Brussels arguing over whether it was a success.

Mastodon / Diaspora / Matrix - each of these operates with a very different set of incentives. In theory, yes, it's nice to think of social networks in some ideal form, as an expression of a public good. Jack Dorsey seems to have that vision, you may share it and good for you if you do.

But there's a reason half of Apple's revenue comes from iPhone sales, 95% of Facebook's revenue comes from ad sales, 75% of Alphabet's revenue comes from ad sales, and 50% of Amazon's revenue comes from fees they charge companies who sell through their portal.

https://www.visualcapitalist.c...

FAANG are a highly targeted system for fostering, promoting and satisfying desires. While it's possible to think about their features in a civic-minded, pro-social manner, they constitute a network and these features represent a small part of what they do. Value extraction and disruption are the chief reason they exist, which is anything but civic. They have highly sophisticated tools to keep people on platform and that is what explains the high engagement levels and participation rates.

Decentralized networking apps have no corresponding capabilities. Another metaphor would be a Roman Soldier versus a Tank. One lacks the ability to imperil the other, no matter how well-trained and fearsome it might be. And everyone can see the problem with a tank, it's mostly an expression of oppression that takes up space and occasionally blows things up.

But no one's going to replace their tanks with Roman Soldiers. They don't serve the same purpose.

Do people spend money on what is useful or on what they crave? 2 very different things.

Futile gesture, these numbers are meaningless.

Mastodon / Matrix are conceptually defective. Chronological timelines are not what drive people to social media. Network theory, especially Triadic Closure, drives people to them.

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Tria...

People have lots of reasons for hating social media, but it's nature as a emotionally manipulative and coercive medium is what attracts large audiences.

Decentralized social networks apps, by their nature, lack similar capabilities. While you might regularly visit a Mastodon instance, the likelihood of experiencing a craving to be there all day is slim.

The difference between these platforms is like heroin and aspirin. One compels attention, one relives pain. You don't always need pain relief, but you always need to feed the dragon.

Need to read the 8k to be certain, but there are a number of ways this could boomerang.

Under the Rights Plan, Musk is entitled to the same privileges as others were a third party to purchase stock beyond the ownership threshold.

One strategy would be to get someone else to purchase 15% of the stock. That would allow Musk to increase his stake at the exercise price (which it sounds like is half the regular stock price) to a larger level at a discount. Depending on whether there's a cap in the Rights Plan on what an existing shareholder is allowed to acquire, he might need a second person to go along with him. But it could be a way to get control of the company and put it on a path towards privatization.

Another option would be to short the stock. Deflationary pressure could drive other investors out and lower the cost to acquire.

In either case, the Rights Plan assumes Musk is going at this alone. I'm less and less convinced that's a safe assumption.

Please. Look up short sell against the box.

Once you possess a certain level of assets, yes, you short your long positions. It's a form of tax liability management. You do it annually, quarterly if you are truly a HNW individual.

With ~10% stake, Musk could take a put for an equal number of shares to what he owns and sell his shares for whatever he wants. He'd keep the sale price plus the value of the PUT, which could be targeted to produce a multiple of his original position. The only difference between this and a traditional box is he exits his long positions.

The other major stockholders for TWTR are Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard. They're asset management companies who get their fees regardless of performance. They account for roughly 30% of the outstanding stock and have no fiduciary responsibility to preserve the price. In all likelihood, he'd be getting stocks from one of them for the PUT.

Ironically, Morgan Stanley is one of the other large shareholders (I think they're in for 8%.) Musk is working with them on the sale, which means they are probably putting pressure on the board to accept it.

Thank you for your clarification.

Genuinely curious: what enforcement action could you see resulting from this question? And what is it's relevance?

While I'd love for you to agree with you, these are not normal times.

I like what Glen Greenwald had to say about Twitter the other day.

"It's not just standard US liberals who view online censorship as a noble instrument. Of course they do. The far greater menace: it's the key weapon of information control for real power centers."

Feels like they will try to get what they want any way they can get it. Emphasizing the word feel.

On another note:

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/f...

Note the top 5 owners of outstanding Twitter shares includes Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street. All asset management companies.

The real question to ask is if they are going to allow Twitter to be purchased by Musk and not regulated? I think that's what this actually comes down to.

Care to iterate?

AFAIK, no, there are no legally actionable items outstanding relating to Musk and the SEC. And certainly nothing scandalous.