More info on the cost, this time from more trustworthy sources:

The effort was vastly more expensive than OpenAI's previous math experiments. In its last milestone announcement, its Astra system spent about $2000 to make 10 breakthroughs on other mathematical problems. Here, the Navier–Stokes effort cost about 1000-fold more, in the ballpark of “millions of dollars,” said OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen.

That estimate aligns with analyses from independent researchers. “If someone were to just use OpenAI tools at retail rate, this would cost about $6 million,” says University of Michigan’s Karthik Duraisamy, who is preparing to launch a special project on how much computational resources it would take to make headway on certain science problems. But “given OpenAI already has the model and resources, it would've cost them about $1 million in inference compute”—funnily enough, the same amount as the Millennium Prize bounty.

I found something useful about the estimate, but it came from OpenAI, so who knows:

Using a new internal model, OpenAI employed groups of autonomous AI agents of various sizes to attack variants of the Euler and Navier-Stokes problems. “Nearly 100 agents worked together for approximately 50 hours to produce our Euler regularity disproof,” the company wrote in a press release. They then deployed an even bigger group of agents — 10,000 or so — to attack Navier-Stokes. After 88 hours, the agents running on the internal model had a proof of a singularity in Navier-Stokes, and after an additional 17 hours, another AI model had formalized the result. In total, the agents sent almost 5 million messages to each other. BS*** of OpenAI estimates the computational cost at several million dollars.

Is there a source relating the cost of using 10,000 AI agents in dollars? These are not commodity chatbot agents, but mathematically "reasoning" ones, and it is not clear how long these agents ran, but a rough estimate would be appreciated.

Spending allegedly millions of dollars in compute to get a one million dollar prize makes it clear that a large component is bragging rights for OpenAI, which is perhaps why the OpenAI bro Sebastian Bubeck went ballistic and mafioso when it was clear that the actual mathematician wanted to give proper credit to his collaborator who is employed by Anthropic, even if this was clearly not an Anthropic project.

I can't be the only one who computed the seventh root of 33,000 to estimate about 4.4 reports per manager if they were evenly distributed. That seems pretty vertical.

This seems like such an obvious improvement that I was curious about the one commissioner who voted against it. It turns out he, Andrew Ferguson, is expected to be nominated and confirmed to be the head of the FTC under the upcoming administration. Some info about the anticipated new head of the FTC:

* UVA undergrad and law degrees
* worked for private firms defending against anti-trust enforcement
* clerked for Clarence Thomas
* worked for Republican senators on judicial confirmations
* solicitor general for Virginia
* appointed to FTC in 2023

We will see how things change under his leadership.

Emulating those conditions should require much less research than complicated new carbon capture schemes.

Agreed. I think he should at least have shown them a credible business plan (maybe he did behind closed doors?) and taken part of the risk.
Such as Open AI paying for half of the investment, repayable in manufactured goods. Then if the grand vision collapses into fairy dust, TSMC would have gained a manufacturing plant at half the price.

Not entirely unmaintainable, I think there would still be small companies. The sort one can build in their professional lives. Some may even become big like Microsoft did (Bill Gates is still around). But I think most people would just retire once they are wealthy enough, when their children cannot inherit their stuff either way, instead of growing the business further.

Which leaves the question what to do with the non-inheritable businesses. Bundle them into a planned economy? Capitalism has its problems, but communism tends to be inefficient enough that it works even less.

Neither did I know that was possible. When I started ripping CDs, I did not even consider a DRMed format as target. Instead it was CD => FLAC or CD => MP3 if I wanted to keep file sizes small. And in my circle of acquaintances it was the same.

I guess that leaves a small minority of Windows users shafted. Bad for them, but for the rest of us it is a reminder why to avoid DRM.

Yes, this is unlikely to be challenged in court unless someone else's business model is threatened by it (and the someone has enough money for the lawsuit).

There have been expensive lawsuits about software copyrights such as Google vs. Oracle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_vs_Oracle), but here I don't yet see who would be sufficiently motivated to sue.

According to Wikipedia, Intel introduced SSE 4.2 in the Nehalem architecture, released 2008. AMD took a bit longer, but followed in 2011 with Bulldozer. Allowing some time to clear out old stocks, I guess very few computers without SSE 4.2 support was sold less than ten years ago.

If computers need to be retired because of Windows 11, it is likely not because of SSE 4.2, but because of higher memory and performance requirements.

So if someone writes "every drug dealer or illegal arms purchase" without mentioning color, the use of racist tropes pops up in your mind? Do you, perhaps, associate drug dealers with POC yourself?

Don't forget C) the Tether owners actually having enough cash reserves to pay out in US dollars if requested.
And (related) D) it is not a huge scam like with some other crypto bros.

I remember that was an important point in Linus' reasoning, maybe even the main point.

Also (my opinion) forcing a move to GPLv3 might have triggered a further fragmentation of the Open Source landscape, because existing GPLv2 licenses cannot be recalled by the original developer of the software. We would have seen a bunch of forks that remain under GPLv2.

When there are 42 AGs listed, I wondered which states didn't sign on. Here they are:

• Alaska
• Arizona
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• Ohio
• Texas
• West Virginia

That adds up to more than 50 owing to DC and some territorial AGs.