Interesting link, thank you.

If the oil prices stay up (and the orange T seems to be doing his best to make it so) then I agree that EVs should drop in value much slower than petrol cars.

All of what you said but there is more: most people will do some reading before buying an EV. What will they probably see? A few scare stories about charging on the road (if I don't go to a supercharger or a fast charger I've never used or not recently used it's always a bit scary whether the fast charger will work - and of course mostly they do).

But mainly they'll read how much better other cars and mainly Chinese cars are.

Who wants to buy 2nd or 3rd best?

I spoke with a colleague here in the UK who recently bought a car (not an EV) because he was worried what the resale value of current generation EVs will be when the 400 mile WLTP range, 5-10min charge next generation (mostly Chinese) hits the market. And he has a point.

To be fair even I bought my EV (Model 3) second hand to shave of the steepest part of the depreciation curve.

Given that citizens of the US have elected Trump as the US president twice it is pretty clear that EU countries cannot count on the US being a 100% reliable ally in the future.

That has all sorts of consequences and will require the EU to develop all sorts of capabilities.

The question of course is: will this mean willingness to reduce benefits / increase working hours to pay for all this to develop genuine competence through significantly more effort or will it be just performative?

Your analysis is mostly correct except UK uses no coal

https://grid.iamkate.com/

But indeed, better transmission, more storage and more renewables (or nuclear) would mean that gas isn't needed more of the time and wholesale cheaper.

Looks like we're close to the peak of the bubble. The question is which: the AI bubble or the SF property bubble or both?

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.

If I lived in Eastern Washington I would have a set of winter tires. Or at least that's what I imagine. Do most folks where you live use winter tires?

I live in what King County calls "the Eastside", east from Seattle, in the suburbs. We so rarely get snow that I haven't gotten winter tires. AWD plus mud/snow rated all-season tires has been enough for me.

If you visit the West end of the state, look me up. ^_^

are tire chains allowed on your car?

They are, if they are thin. Tesla sells traction cables that fit my car's wheels... super expensive.

So I bought Auto Socks, fabric traction devices. Very thin, and affordable.

Note that where I live, a car with AWD and good tires almost never is required to use traction devices. I am supposed to have traction devices in the car when driving in winter conditions in case conditions get extreme, so I keep the Auto Socks in the car.

Last winter I drove over Stevens Pass and my car was very sure-footed.

I did get pulled over by a highway patrol officer for not having chains. The first thing he said to me was: "... your car has all-wheel drive, doesn't it. Sorry, that's on me." I was tempted to say "look, I even have traction socks, I will show you!"

I just today saw this: Meta has working AI that can tell a blind person what the glasses see!

https://x.com/matthieurouif/status/1840865632209813558?t=O6xoM109P-rC_lITLZ7E8w&s=19

The currently available Ray Ban Meta product can work with BeMyEyes. This new product will be amazing for sighted people, but the existing Ray Ban product will be about equally good for the blind.

Ray Ban Meta has cameras, microphone, speakers, and cellular Internet. It's missing a display.

https://www.bemyeyes.com/

P.S. I just read a review and the Ray Ban Meta could be a lot better as a device to help the vision-impaired. For example, the review complained that the device will only summarize text, not read it verbatim. Clearly an issue that could be fixed with software.

On the plus side, it's one of only a few options anything like it, and costs less than the others.

If they are sincere protestors, neither idiots nor paid shills, e-fuel should address their concerns. If we pull carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into jet fuel, then the jets are just putting the carbon back into the atmosphere, carbon-neutral.

The energy to do this will make it horribly expensive right now. But with wind and solar, the energy costs will drop. And if you can design the e-fuel facility to run when power is cheap and go into standby if prices go up, you can take advantage of the variable nature of renewable power.

See Tony Seba's videos about solar/wind/battery power. His models show that most days if the year there will be surplus, cheap power, but a few days per year there won't be. An e-fuel manufacturer might be a good fit for this scenario.