Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

Ok, but some of us actually want to do something useful instead of just try to win the trophy of making a model run on the cheapest hardware. Unless you're generating at least ~30 tokens / second, it's not useful.

If you want to split the cost evenly, sure. But a team of 3 people working at a software company today typically pays the AI companies about $5,000-$10,000 a month, so I don't think they need to rely on the parts of the world where $400 is twice their income.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Was it a good story? If it was an engaging read then why care whether AI was used to help write it.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

I was going to say that I never thought the day would come when anti-intellectualism when come to slashdot, "news for nerds, stuff that matters." And then I noticed your slashdot id is even lower than mine, so you've been here a while.

A stark reminder that things aren't actually getting worse, the idiots have always been among us.

The simplest and most likely explanation is that the license ran out and the copyright owner wanted too much money or some other onerous condition, so google decided to wait until the next satellite pass when they'll get all the imagery.

That sounds great. However, anything that causes anatomical brain chages that persist after a month, with a single dose, would be, by me, considered unacceptably risky. I'm not saying that it's by default considered bad, both you and the paper are talking about positive changes, and that's good. I'm saying, "risky," as in, I don't know what negative effects haven't been identified and I'd need a much more complete understanding before I'd be willing to try it.

Most of the positive effects are in reported well-being, but I really want to see more cognitive tests. The tests on cognitive flexibility is a great start, but we really need a barrage of tests here: mathematical ability? Short-term *and* long-term memory? Spatial thinking? Are there *any* cognitive functions that are negatively affected here? It's important to understand this with anything that has this type of long-lasting effect.

Unanalyzed raw video. Internet noise. Those would qualify as, "a whole lot of garbage that someone could possibly, maybe analyze to make some statistical inferences about conceivably sensitive data."

There's not 10 petabytes of sensitive data in all the world. 10 petabytes is enough to store a copy of every movie and television show ever released to DVD plus every book ever written in any language on Earth.

What they captured was some sensitive data and a whole lot of garbage that someone could possibly, maybe analyze to make some statistical inferences about conceivably sensitive data.

They sabotage themselves just fine with user-hostile security implementations and bloat bloat bloat.

I'll bet. His case has less than no chance in court.