Yes. There's this society where people say some convicted felon is good and should make all decisions. They attack anyone who disagrees, belittling them and sending them death threats. So obviously, that makes them less likely to embrace being told what to do by "AI", because they'd rather be told what to do by "convict".

And being cheaper and better at it on top of that.

Indeed. Underestimating China is a really bad mistake at this time.

No. "Hard stuff" takes a lot more time than they have. And probably more skill and education as well. "Cool, flashy" stuff is all they can do.

You don't understand standing up for your principles even though it's inconvenient? I pity you.

Agreed. The industrial capacity and expertise in China today dwarfs the American equivalent. The size of the population does too (= more intellectual cream on top, because the cup is bigger). The proximity and access to emerging and established Asian markets through both land and sea is better than America's. And btw, the Chinese aren't using the ISS. They've already built their own space station.

Why ask whether china is eroding the lead; rather than whether the incumbents are maintaining it?

Maybe my faith is weak and if I were huffing the dumb money I'd understand; but it looks awfully like our boisterous little hypebeasts promised that, this time, unlike all the other times in 'AI' we could totally brute force our way to the AGI Omnissiah; briefly tried copium in the form of hoping that competitors would be intimidated by their capex(because there's basically a generation of VCs who think that failure to reach monopoly is indistinguishable from losing); and finally proceeded to speedrun commodification because it turns out that nobody actually had any plan for what would happen if this alley started looking visually impaired even after we plundered the entire internet to feed it.

I realize that it's more fun to focus on what the sinister chinese are doing than what our glorious golden boys are not doing; but let's do the latter anyway; especially since this is one area where you can't just please chinese factory slaves as an inherent price advantage. The guys mechanical-turking out 'training'/'classification' tasks will all go wherever to scrape up the cheapest labor available, then stiff them on promised payments; and (while the process is pretty porous) being not-china is definitely still the best way to get access to premium TSMC processes; and at least not-worse for most of the rest of the most interesting ones.

Either LLMs are fundamentally a technology where being the first mover is a dumb idea; or the 'leaders' are actively fucking it; because, unlike some of the cases involving rare earths mining or finding fast fashion sweatshop sites, this was theirs to lose.

I assume that there's a research OS somewhere that has discovered that this is much harder than it looks for anything nontrivial; quite possibly even worse than the problem that it is intended to cure; but looking at the increasingly elaborate constructs used when sudo is intended to be a granular delegation makes me wonder if the correct approach lies down the path of better permissions rather than ad-hoc lockdown logic.

There are some cases(eg. password-change or login tools often both reflect granularity limits in credential storage; and make reads or edits on your behalf to parts of files that you wouldn't be allowed to touch directly; but also do things like enforce complexity or age requirements that would require a really expansive view of 'permissions' to encompass) where the delegate program is handling nontrivial delegation logic on its own; but in a lot of instances it's hard to escape the impression that you are basically bodging on 'roles' that can't be or aren't normally expressed in object and device permissions by building carefully selectively broken tools.

I obviously don't blame sudo for that; its scope is letting you run a particular thing as someone else if the sudoers file allows it; but a lot of sudoers files might as well just say "there are no roles on this system between 'useless' and 'apocalyptic'"; and that feels like a permissions design problem.

Of note; probably not one to try to NT yourself out of; I'm not sure that you can build a sufficiently expressive set of permissions on classic UNIX style ones; but I've yet to see an NT-derived system that didn't boil down to 'admin-which-can-be-SYSTEM-at-a-whim'/'little people' regardless of the wacky NT ACL tricks you can get up to.

I'm curious if it's a case of the alternatives being tried and largely found to be worse; or if (along with a number of other OS design/architecture fights) the whole thing has mostly been pushed out of mainstream relevance by the degree to which you can just pretend everything inside a worker VM is basically at a homogeneous privilege level if you don't want to deal with it.

Yes, it does.

You seem to be deep in delusion. Just one example:

So, your claim is I have made up the term "model collapse"? Well, here is a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You think something I made up "on the fly to sound authoritative" has a Wikipedia page with 25 references going back to 2022?

The rest of your statement is of similar quality, i.e. simply crap.

I dare you to find a single posting by me that says LLMs are useless. Or eat your lie.

Yu know what? It looks less likely every day that this use case will really work out. LLMs continue to be as dumb and disconnected as bread and hallucinate on top of that. Training data gets more and more outdated. Scaling LLMs up or iterate things (falsely called "reasoning") seems to do very little compared to the additional effort needed. And more signs that this AI hype is again 98% hype and 2% substance. Like all other AI hypes before.

My prediction is that in 5 years we will be going into the next AI Winter and the usual morons will claim that there was no way to see that coming. Then in 15 to 20 years, we will get the next deranged AI hype. And so on, because people do not learn form history.

I disagree. First indicator is that all AI bubbles so far have popped and usually that was followed by an "AI Winter" because the promises were so grossly exaggerated. It looks to be even worse this time, if anything. Second indicator is that still nobody is making profits from customers with LLMs. And it really does not look like this is going to change anytime soon. Third indicator is that after the initial releases, not much has been accomplished. In fact there are signs of mounting desperation. At the same time, hallucinations have only be mildly reduced, training data is ageing and the legality of the whole piracy campaign that got them the training data is being examined and it does not look like they will simply get away with it.

There are some more. Your mindless cheerleading is really mindless and ignores reality.

Sure. It takes time. ASML needed quite a bit of time too. But China can for sure do it and they will be faster to get there because they know it can be done and what direction to go in.

Some would say that there is not much need for a long term and that this has been well underway and partially achieved for a while now.