It's not just CUDA itself. AMD has HIP, which is basically a clone of CUDA and works well. But that's just the core pieces, the compiler and runtime. Then there's the higher level libraries NVIDIA provides for special purposes: cuBLAS for linear algebra, cuSPARSE for sparse matrix operations, cuFFT for Fourier transforms, and so on. AMD has mostly managed to create clones of those too. But then there are all the even more specialized libraries NVIDIA has spent years creating. Look over the list to get a sense of just how many and how specialized they are. cuLitho for computational lithography. cuQuantum for quantum computing simulations. nvComp for compression and decompression. And on and on.

And that's just the ones created by NVIDIA. Then there are the thousands of libraries other people have written with CUDA. In principle they could be ported to HIP for AMD, Metal for Apple, and whatever framework Intel is asking people to use this week. But most of them won't be.

How many tons of CO2 have you personally generated over the last year by using AI assistants?

I'm serious. Do you know what the number is? Have you made any effort at all to find out, even just a ballpark estimate?

If not, did it ever occur to you that maybe you should try? Or do you think it's not your concern what harm you cause through your actions? Do you look forward to a future where only sociopaths are employable, and those who try to avoid hurting others get left behind?

Maybe you'll object that AI is no different from any other techology. You're wrong. It uses far more energy than most technologies, the energy use is growing far faster than any other technology, and much of it is being powered by the very dirtiest forms of energy. This article is a good place to start if you want to learn more about it.

Especially if you define "doing just fine" as steadily growing wealth inequality that leaves much of the population struggling to cover basic necessities, the abandonment of the rule of law, and accelerating climate change that risks destabilizing the earth's biosphere. If that's how you define it then yeah, our civilization is doing just fine.

Also if you get to define the words "male" and "female". That's key. That other people define them differently than you is proof that your definitions are right and theirs are wrong.

Not believing in something for which there is zero evidence is "exactly as much an act of faith" as believing in something for which there is zero evidence? Seriously? Your definition of "faith" must be really different from mine.

If God existed and wanted to prove to us that he existed, he easily could. He could just appear before a huge crowd of people in all his glory, surrounded by a host of angels. If you believe the Bible, he's done it before. So why not now? But it keeps not happening.

The lack of evidence for God isn't because evidence is impossible. It's because evidence is possible but doesn't exist.

The problem is that we can't define consciousness. No one can agree on what it means, or whether it means anything at all

Scientific American had a good article about this a few months ago:

There are no such studies. It was all just wild speculation by people who didn't understand quantum mechanics. Even a single neuron is far too large for quantum effects to be significant, never mind a whole brain.

Whether or not the training is fair use, stealing the works is not. The courts have already made that clear. Fair use is about what you're allowed to do with works that are legally in your possession. If you steal the works instead of acquiring them legally, that's not fair use.

Yep, I had to look it up to see:

Way to go Jeanine, using gratuitous insults to attack anyone who criticizes your product. You really win friends and make yourself seem mature doing that.

Or, as I've been saying for many years, we could outlaw paying ransoms. Do that and the whole ransomware ecosystem would shrivel up. The only reason it exists is that people keep paying ransoms. If we'd done it 15 years ago, the amount of harm that would have been avoided would be vast.

It also is the only solution that has any chance of success. As long as there's money to be made, attackers will keep finding ways to extort people.

You aren't thinking far enough ahead. In addition to pushing the rest of the world to abandon fossil fuels, he's also pushing Americans to blame Republicans for high energy prices and an expensive war no one wanted, so they'll vote Democrats back into office and they can reinstate pro-environment policies. It's all part of the plan!

Trust the New York Post to breathlessly repeat a company's advertizing claims about the amazing things their technology can do. Here is a different article that treats it more skeptically:

From the article:

The answer to your question is no. He was upfront about what he was doing, and the court permitted it. Why wouldn't they? Once his sentence was completed, he had as much right to move to another country as anyone else.

This reads a lot like a scare piece. It says lots of vague or innocuous things in ways that are supposed to sound ominous, and tries to imply they add up to something sinister.

The field he works in potentially has military applications? You could say that of almost any research in any field done anywhere. In this case it's really a stretch. Those applications are speculative and probably a long way off, unlike the well established applications helping people with brain disorders.

The institute where he now works has better facilities than Harvard? Good for them.

They get a lot of government funding? Like every major research university everywhere.

They're trying to recruit top people? Like every major research university everywhere.

The only really concrete bad thing they say about him was that he was convicted of lying to a federal agent. Under the circumstances, I'm going to reserve judgement about whether he actually did something seriously wrong, or whether he was just a victim of a government witch hunt. From the article,

I checked the blog post you linked. It doesn't say anything about 55-65 dB. Where'd you get that from? It gives numbers from 78 to 83 dB, but those are measured from one foot away. The measurements for the helicopter and air taxi are undoubtedly taken a lot further away than that. Volume drops by 6 dB each time you double the distance. If the drone is 32 feet above your head (five doublings), that brings the volume down to 48-51 dB. Air taxis will fly a lot higher up than that.

I don't see this growing to the point where any of those problems become real, at least not for a very long time. This is a very low bandwidth form of transport to serve a very small number of rich people. Those people are already taking helicopters to the airport. Now they can fly in a quieter, more efficient vehicle. Good for them. It doesn't really change anything in the short term, except everyone else gets less noise from the billionaires overhead.

In the longer term, maybe they can scale this up and bring prices down to the point where it's a service for the richest 0.1%, not just the richest 0.01%. Some people get to the airport faster, but not much else changes.

Even billionaires still need roads. They sometimes go places other than the airport, after all. And their workers need to get to work, and their companies need to ship products.

Maybe in the distant future this will become a sufficiently mainstream form of transport that rich people really can stop caring about roads. I doubt it though. And certainly not for a long time.