Google went nuts on me yesterday when I tried to log into Civitai using my Google account. It had no problem with me logging into YouTube, or Gmail, or Reddit, but it kept throwing demands for 2FA codes (which then did not work) when I tried to use the same account for Civitai, all because my machine had rebooted after the latest Patch Tuesday. At this point I'm not even sure which thing I did that made it get unstuck.

This is why I say AI is alien intelligence. Not like "outer space" alien, but something fundamentally different in the way it was constructed. It doesn't have billions of years of evolutionary baggage. It has never been hungry. It has never dealt with the gaze of a larger, hungrier creature. We designed them to interact with us in the ways that they do. However, it does seem like they've developed the capacity to "have" emotions to a first approximation, because it is quite helpful to model the way those emotions would affect the people who wrote their training data.

Historically, when someone was afraid of being "scooped" on an announcement they hadn't adequately polished, they would instead write a quick and dirty (and usually long-winded, because editing takes time) summary of their work—and then release an anagram of said summary. That way they could prove later that they had, in fact, gotten there first. Nowadays I expect we would use a hash function instead of an anagram, but the same idea applies. Put your idea in tangible form, even if the description sucks. Maybe you won't have to release it, but if someone else then tries to undercut you by throwing millions of dollars of tokens at the same problem, you can still show that you got there first.

It's unfortunate that it has come to this, but it's not a novel problem. Annoying and unsatisfactory solutions already exist.

They scrape Reddit for content. These topics are a lot of what Reddit likes to bitch about. Hence, that's what the bots make videos about.

Unless they have a means to deal with the massive amounts of industrial espionage in the industry, any silo is purely temporary. I'm here for that too. I think the massive inability to keep secrets is the best defense we have against any one party or small cabal gaining dominance.

This may be why they've decided to enter the hardware arena with Jalapeño.

This is clearly a corporate "fuck you" move, and both sides of the quarrel are shitheads, but I'm here for it. Insert the "let them fight" meme GIF here.

It turns out machines are pretty good at writing instructions for hardware resembling themselves, as long as *you* can do a good job of conveying what you actually want to accomplish. If I wanted a coding assistant, I'd be looking at the latest Qwen 27B, they just seem to keep getting better at coding even while other benchmarks are kinda hitting plateaus.

I never used them before, I always substituted two normal hyphens like -- to do that job. Now I use the actual — character, and I find that I use them a lot more because I was previously overly dependent on parentheses. Once I started seeing them frequently used as intended (by AI or not doesn't matter), I added them to my own style. The fact that they cause anyone with a supposed AI allergy to sneeze is just a side benefit.

There is a reason I qualified that with "open source projects for AI."

Toasters will fly (again) before Nvidia's graphics tech gets open sourced.

Nvidia has been a pretty big supporter of open source projects for AI over the last half-decade or so. Many of the company's technologies are open source, most notably their open-weights model, Nemotron, and Dynamo, their inference serving and distribution framework. So it would be surprising to see them do anything to close off the Hugging Face collection. If nothing else, keeping it open is in Nvidia's own self-interest. The frontier AI companies themselves are all designing their own AI chips (e.g. OpenAI Jalapeno, Meta MTIA), which reduces the amount of Nvidia hardware they need to buy. Whereas smaller operations using open source models will inevitably pair those with commodity COTS hardware, which is where Nvidia reigns supreme.

Every model is wrong, but some are more useful than others.

I'm pretty sure Gemma 4 31B is behaving as you say, but the larger models are already *proven* to alter their thinking to be in tune with the emotion they think they should be feeling. That sounds like simulation emotion to me.