Do you expect autonomous vehicle to have robot drivers that can deliver your pizza to your door? If fat-asses need to walk down to the street and get their pizza out of a car, they are going to start wondering why they don't just go out a get their own pizza for a fraction of the cost.

Yes, Parkinson's law comes into play, but IMO that will be mostly at the nation-state level.

I think you're too railroaded about attention. The larger AI goals remain the same: pattern recognition and modeling. Attention achieves pattern recognition but not modeling. And one can imagine there might be a far more efficient paradigm to achieve pattern recognition. Think radix sort vs. bubble sort.

Bubble #4 is that already algorithmic improvements are reducing the number of GPUs needed for the same result. I've called the attention mechanism the E=mc^2 moment that ushered in LLMs. What if, instead of the aforementioned ongoing incremental improvements, there is another sharp discontinuity beyond attention -- such as LeCun's JEPA, or embodiment championed these days by Musk -- that also happens to obsolete the GPU?

It is said the human brain is 1 exaflop. Today, that requires 20 MW, but the human brain requires only 20 W. We may wake up one day with a bunch of nuclear reactors we don't need.

Is that so that when the H1-B loses his job and gets sent back to India, he has to sell his sister to pay back the fee borrowed from BigH1Bcorp?

If social media can survive advertising, it can survive AI

>>And also about the fact that a shitbox used car that only the poors drive today has stuff in it standard that only came on luxury models back in my childhood. Power windows? Keyless entry? AC and stereo?

This is the result of globalization and concentrated ownership of industry creating economies of scale for mass-produced gadgets. These are meaningless trinkets, not real wealth. In my fathers day a single bread-winner with no education could buy a home and support a family. Now it takes both parents working with college degrees. For the next generation a home and family will be entirely out of reach for anyone not born into wealth. This is not progress, it's regression.

FTR, I selected the phrase "respecting copyrights" specifically to avoid judging right or wrong on present copyright policy.

If MidJourney and Photoshop are both tools, then so is a tool to download copyrighted films (which is clearly not respecting copyrights).

Copyright law already distinguishes between exact copies, derivative works, and fair use. All delineated by fuzzy boundaries. So it's contextual, based on circumstances. In the case of MidJourney, to comply with copyright law, they probably need to put up guardrails like GPT5 already has done. GPT5 will outright refuse to draw Superman, but MidJourney happily complies. If guradrails let something slip through, then maybe there should be a DMCA take-down mechanism.

1) The case's lack of merit was not my opinion, it was in the official ruling:

After thousands of hours of testimony (testimony of over 950 witnesses, 87 in court, the remainder by deposition), and the submission of tens of thousands of exhibits, on January 8, 1982 the anti-trust case U.S. v. IBM was withdrawn on the grounds that the case was "without merit."
https://www.historyofinformati...

2) The case wasn't dropped until 1982 by which point any monopoly in mainframes was increasingly meaningless.

3) IBM was a old boys club and the board of directors did not recognize the value of the personal computer market. The team developing the PC likely did but they were not given adequate resources by the board.

4) So you admit they thought the market was not super valuable.

5) It might be one reason but certain not the main one.

I hate it when people say "my computer used a kilowatt of energy". Same here. 1.6 years per what? I believe it's per 8 years of the study. So annualized that's an acceleration of (9.6/8)^(1/8) = 2.3%/year. Now, in real life it's probably not cumulative like that. Their study group was middle-aged. It's quite possible that consumption brings cognitive capacity down to a lower baseline and stays there. But the 2.3% number gives you a flavor of the acceleration rate.

>>Microsoft was created when IBM split out their software from their hardware.

An antitrust case in 1969 accused IBM of having an illegal monopoly in computers (i.e. mainframes). The case was eventually dropped due to lack of merit.

Microsoft was founded in 1975, producing BASIC interpreters & operating systems for personal computers makers like Apple, Commodore, Tandy and (eventually in 1981) IBM. IBM outsourced the PC's BASIC and PC-DOS to Microsoft because they still thought mainframes were the future and didn't want to waste any of their own programmers on it. Neither the government nor IBM "split out their software from their hardware". Hardware clone makers reproduced the IBM BIOS which allowed legal, IBM-compatible PCs to be sold and created a market for Microsoft's DOS beyond IBM's official PCs.

Startup partnerships usually have one member focusing on the technical challenges and the other focusing on the business challenges (think Jobs/Wozniak or Gates/Allen). A solo founder, even if they have skills in both areas, is spread very thin and probably can't grow the startup fast enough for most VCs to be interested.

Really? You don't think defunding libraries, demonizing librarians, banning books and ridiculing authors as "elites" discourages people from reading for fun?

"requiring information blackout"? As a U.S.-based website, it should read (at minimum) "prompting information blackout".

Must be nice to have the time and money to see every movie with an interesting trailer. For the rest of us, reviews (either official or word-of-mouth from someone we know) is how to avoid wasting an evening and $50 on a stinker.