Dang, link didn't post.

Ah, good 'ol "Model Collapse" theory that people have been pounding on for years now, predicting an imminent collapse in model capabilities. How has that been working out for you?

Except what the US is actually facing, at least in the near term, is just the opposite, a worker shortage.

You can't pay royalties to the entire internet. That's not realistic.

What is practical are things like taxes to fund public benefits, or requirements of returning things to the commons (for example, open models).

Ironically, with the current state of affairs and AI slop everywhere.. I am finding more and more than the curated feed of personal connections I get on Facebook is much more aligned with what I want to be doing on social media. I am spending more time there again.

There was an old commenter on Slashdot that like to point out that "Mach 6 at 60,000 ft altitude is only 6% of the way to orbit". The math is just approximate, but tells you something about the (poor) viability of air-launching to orbit. See this detailed video from Everyday Astronaut.

You're the one making the claim that modern frontier models still make this mistake (they don't), so how about you go to a frontier model, reproduce what you're claiming happens, and click the "share" button and post the link here?

Don't worry, I'll wait.

Your inability to reproduce the thing that you claim happens is duly noted.

You are speaking irrelevant nonsense. LLMs are trained in words

They are not. They are trained in tokens. Tokens do not align with word boundaries, and an arbitrary word can be tokenized in many different ways.

and they think in words

They do not. They don't even think in tokens. The process is: words are split to tokens, tokens point to an embedding position (latent space) while RoPE encodes a relative position, and all reasoning is done within latent space, which is not at all verbal (concepts are directions in latent space, and math is done on concepts, not words).

Also, a note: when spec'ing a generator, you need to know how much you're planning to use it vs. batteries. If it's only going to be used rarely, you prefer low mass, low volume, low cost, and low maintenance when unused (at the cost of low efficiency and higher maintenance in use), whereas if it's going to be used a lot, you prefer high efficiency and low maintenance cost in use, even if at the cost of higher mass, volume, cost, and maintenance when unused. In the former case, you'd prefer to allocate that extra mass, volume, and money into a larger battery pack.

That's why you don't use a tiny petrol generator? Diesel generator efficiencies are roughly:

Small backup generator (1-15kW): ~20-28%
Midsize backup generator (20-200kW): ~30-35%
Large industrial generator (200-2000kW): ~35-42%

Also, ironically this company's plan of the trailer providing a boost will actually make the tractor less efficient. ICE engines use "brake specific fuel consumption" (BSFC) graphs to plot their efficiencies across different RPMs and different torques. You can see an example for a small diesel engine here. Note that they require very high torque conditions and relatively high power conditions to be efficient. You can change the balance between torque and RPM within a given power band (blue) via gearing but gearing doesn't change what power band you're in. If you're in a low power band, you're fundamentally forced into inefficiency (note also that you're not going to be driving around at 1000 RPM just over a stall all the time).

Indeed, if you were forced into a low power band, you'd actually be better off with a series hybrid powertrain, as the engine can alternate between operating in an efficient powerband and shutting down. Of course, parallel hybrids are more efficient than series (albeit with added complexity and mass).

Unfortunately, the math doesn't work that way (even ignoring that a 400kWh battery is very small). Battery packs taper the closer you get to full, they're not a constant power all the way. Unless your battery pack can take 400kW at 80%, you're not charging that quickly.

Also, while 40 mins is fine in Europe (breaks: 45 minutes every 4,5 hours of driving... though using 70% of a 400kWh pack on a loaded class 8 truck going even at a slow 80kph will only take you 2 1/2h of driving in "average" conditions, so the truck's range is fundamentally undersized), the US is 30 minutes total break in 11 hours of driving, so ~6 hours on your first leg and ~5h on your second leg with 30 minutes to fill that 5h of driving. And US speed limits are usually faster for trucks than in the EU, so higher consumption. EU really needs 600kWh and >=600kW charging, while the US needs 800-1000kWh and >MW charging.

Note that in all of this we're assuming efficient-shaped trucks (Tesla Semi or the like), not your typical EU bricks, along with a well optimized powertrain and an efficient tyre config. If not, you need to increase those packs and charge powers further.

Except that the trailer only has a single electrified axle. It has no steering capability (it doesn't even front wheels to support its weight!), no sensors to be aware of its surroundings, no compute power to make sense of the world and navigate to its destination.

It's highly likely that we'll end up with "animated death prisms", given enough time, but it's a giant leap from what this article is talking about to that. Any well-resourced engineer could stick a battery and motor onto a trailer. What you're talking about is Level 5 autonomous vehicles, which only barely exist after a few hundred billion dollars of development.

It's an awesome achievement - a really challenging problem, of depth and complexity beyond the ken of most armchair engineers, executed successfully.

That said: what they have achieved is basically the same as the DC-X from 30+ years ago! Let us sincerely hope this effort has a longer life ahead of it than that one did!

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).