Fair enough. Then we're not really discussing creativity or artistic merit, are we? We're discussing labor economics. You can't have it both ways, friend.

History suggests they'll absolutely try. Capital has been replacing expensive labor with cheaper tools since the first accountant discovered the abacus. But that's a separate argument. You've constructed a false dichotomy where AI is either worthless "prompt-generated garbage" or a tool for eliminating artists. Those are not the only two possibilities. A24 exploring a third option: AI as a collaborator and creative amplifier.

Let go of your bias for a moment. A storyboard artist who can explore fifty concepts in a day instead of five is still creating. A screenwriter who can rapidly test dialogue variations is still writing. A director who can visualize scenes before committing a budget is still directing.

The tool changes. The creative process remains. You seem to be willfully ignoring this reality in your argument. There is way more to being creative than just coming up with an original thought or vision.

I think you are missing some history here. The modern storyboard was popularized at Disney in the early 1930s when Webb Smith started pinning sketches to a board so directors could experiment with sequences before spending time and money animating them. Drawing fifty sketches was cheaper than animating fifty scenes. It was literally a labor-saving innovation that allowed creative people to iterate faster. It was such a useful hack that it became the industry standard very, very quickly.

And other technologies followed the exact same trajectory -- non-linear digital editing systems, CGI, even Photoshop. Every generation of creative tooling is greeted by predictions that creativity itself is under attack. But being creative is more than just coming up with an entertaining idea. It also includes getting it out there so that an audience can appreciate it. That is what directors do. If you want to monetize it at the same time, fine -- that is what studios are for. You have a very narrow definition of creative, if it doesn't include all the scaffolding that creatives actually need to produce a work that can be shared, for profit or otherwise.

The real question is not whether AI can contribute to the creative process. It demonstrably can. The real question is: When an AI is inserted into the process, who captures the productivity gains? That's a debate worth having. You are welcome to join, if you can stop pretending the only possible outcomes are "AI garbage" or "artist unemployment". Until then, you are missing a much more interesting and relevant discussion.

I'm a busy man. I'm also a lazy man. Could someone tell me if this is cheaper or more expensive than a desktop gaming PC with the same stats?

Additionally, the way it's phrased, as a "bet," is implicitly skeptical.

The interesting part here is not that there are suddenly "responsible AI" groups on both sides of the AI policy binary, but that that everyone with a stake in the debate around AI has discovered "guardrails" as the new magic word.

Look at ARIAM. It is not a grassroots creators' revolt. It is a coalition of incumbent content companies, publishers, and mission-aligned tech firms trying to shape the legal environment around AI. Copyright, attribution, liability, and provenance are real issues; I'm fairly certain Disney, Adobe, the New York Times, Conde Nast, Wiley, the BBC, et al. have not wandered into this debate as disinterested philosophers of human creativity. They have assets to defend, licensing markets to create, and future tollbooths to position. You can bet they are trying to figure out how to plant a cop and a tollbooth between creators who see AI as a collaborator and tool, and the vast catalogs of old media that Big Tech AI companies are already pillaging for training sets.

The Guardrails Alliance has the same problem from the political side. Calling this Super PAC "grassroots" is doing a lot of semantic cardio. A Super PAC aiming to convert the discontent of tech workers into cash donations, launched by political operatives (not tech workers!), with millions already in the barrel, is not exactly a grassroots movement. Again, that does not make its policy goals wrong. But it does mean the "ordinary workers vs Big Tech" framing deserves the same skepticism we would apply if the labels were reversed. Guardrails has not filed their first FEC report, so we don't know (yet) where that $5M in seed financing came from. I'm going to bet it wasn't from a collection of disgruntled coders and studio artists worried that they were being asked to train their LLM-based replacements. I wouldn't be surprised if this is just the AI version of every grievance PAC that apparatchiks on both sides of the political divide have been farming low-information voters with since Citizens United made that kind of grift legal. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

I think the pattern that is emerging is pretty straightforward. AI policy is not a binary anymore (if it ever was.) AI policy is a multi-sided auction. One side, Big Tech incumbents like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic, want broad freedom to scrape, train, deploy, and preempt regulation. Another side wants safety rules that may also conveniently raise barriers to entry and protect existing jobs. A third side wants copyright, licensing, and liability rules that let them safely monetize their media catalogs, old and new, and charge rent for anything they control the IP for. And in the back row of the auction house are the indie devs, open-weight model tinkerers, and local-inference gurus trying to run useful AI on hardware they actually own. At least they are not jumping on the guardrails bandwagon. Yet. :)

Everybody can say "we want guardrails around AI." Everybody can invoke democracy, safety, creators, workers, children, innovation, or national competitiveness. The question is not which faction has the prettiest noun pile. The question is who gets paid, who gets regulated out of the market, and who gets to write the definitions of what LLMs are allowed and not allowed to do.

Let's put the guardrails where they really need to be. Before buying any of the rhetoric, I want to see the donor lists, the advisers, the vendors, the affiliated nonprofits, and the model legislation. "Guardrails" can mean public safety. It can also mean a velvet rope around somebody else’s cash register, or a visit from the copyright police because your ChatGPT prompt created a token string that Disney or the BBC or NYT says belongs to them.

There is no question that states are betting on AI.

FDNY life is rough but it is still vastly better than Chinese factor worker life. That 18-hour shift is not constant answering calls, a lot of it is downtime. Also, they get a lot of time off in between. And retire with good benefits years and years before the Chinese worker.

I agree with that much. I am not arguing that NASA historically had a secret government rocket foundry staffed by civil servants in short-sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. Apollo, Shuttle, SLS/Artemis, Orion...all of it leaned heavily on private contractors. That is not my objection.

The distinction I am drawing is between “NASA contracts with industry to build hardware under fairly explicit procurement rules” and “a billionaire-controlled company with no orbital launch history gets folded into a public-private Mars mission whose money flow, data rights, ownership structure, and downstream commercial benefits are not very clear from the public announcement.”

COTS is actually a good comparison point, because SpaceX at least had to hit milestones in a program whose purpose was openly to develop commercial cargo transportation. That was the deal: NASA wanted commercial ISS logistics, SpaceX wanted a launch/services business, and the milestones were the meat grinder that Musk had to sausage his way through.

Here, Relativity has not yet put a rocket into orbit, Terran R still has to prove itself, and now the company is talking about a 2028 Mars orbiter, with NASA instruments riding along, while Schmidt is also interested in orbital data centers and private space observatories. Maybe this is brilliant. Maybe NASA gets a bargain. Maybe Schmidt eats most of the risk.

But that is exactly why I want the numbers and terms visible, and why I am more than a little concerned that they are using a 68 year old paragraph in the congressional act that created NASA to hide those numbers and terms, all under the watchful eye of a billionaire appointed to run NASA by a billionaire President.

If the answer is “NASA pays little, the data is public, Relativity carries the performance risk, and the public gets useful science,” great. Put that on the table. If the answer is “NASA supplies credibility, instruments, mission value, and validation while Schmidt’s company gets heritage for a future private infrastructure stack,” then that is Dr Evil wearing a NASA mission patch.

With that said, I agree with your second point completely: picking a company that has not yet reached orbit for an interplanetary transport job on a 2028 timeline is not exactly a low-pucker-factor decision.

Public-private space partnerships are not inherently bad. NASA buying commercial services can make perfect sense. COTS helped give us SpaceX, and whatever else one thinks of Musk, reusable Falcon launches were not exactly a rounding error in the history of spaceflight.

But transparency is the thin line between public-private partnership and a billionaire infrastructure layaway plan.

So now Eric Schmidt, yes, that Eric Schmidt from Google’s deliciously ironic “Don’t be evil” era, takes control of Relativity Space after it runs into funding trouble, installs himself as CEO, and suddenly Relativity gets picked for a Mars orbiter mission. NASA gets useful atmospheric science out of it, sure. Daily global Martian weather data is real science, not hand-wavy TED-talk vapor. But the interesting part is the scaffolding: Relativity supplies the spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations, while NASA supplies the instruments and the public purpose.

That is very close to the Elon Musk template. Do useful work for government customers, gain launch heritage, build factories, normalize regulatory access, wrap the whole thing in national destiny and science, then aim the resulting machine at the founder’s private cathedral. In Musk’s case, Mars colonization and DOGE-flavored state capture. In Schmidt’s case, orbital data centers and privately backed space observatories. And look who approved the deal -- Jared Issacman, Trump’s hand-picked commercial-space billionaire with deep ties to Musk and SpaceX, now sitting on top of the agency that decides which private space companies get wrapped in the flag, the science mission, and the launch manifest.

Maybe this is a good deal. Maybe NASA is getting a bargain. Maybe Schmidt is putting real private money behind real public science. But Eric...remember the don't-be-evil days at Google? If that is the case, show the numbers. Under a Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) contract, the government has explicit data rights and strict oversight. But the Space Act Agreement that this project is authorized under bypasses that transparency.

Who pays whom? Who owns what? What data is public? What infrastructure becomes commercially reusable? What happens if Relativity misses the 2028 launch window? What private projects of yours are going to benefit from NASA-paid mission experience? And why is a “reimbursable” Space Act Agreement being described in the press like NASA hired the company, while the dollar figure remains undisclosed? If the public is funding the operational heritage and validating the hardware platform, does the public own the telemetry? Or is the public merely a tenant in an infrastructure stack you are going to privatize?

This is "go ahead and be evil, if you can hide the bodies" territory. I'm not being cynical or anti-science, here. This is basic hygiene when billionaires start using science as a fig leaf for projects that also happen to build their next monopoly platform.

"and where blue collar workers get to retire on a full pension before white collar workers."

Yes, if only I could enjoy the life of a blue collar factor worker in China. Why can't I work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?!

The elites hate labor shortages. They love labor surpluses.

I would happily own some version of an electric ultralight, gyroplane, or breakfast-hop airport toy if the numbers ever worked for my wallet and my runway.

But that is exactly why the hype needs to be separated from the engineering.

This solid-state flight is pretty cool. A modified Pipistrel Taurus motor glider flying on 410 Wh/kg solid-state cells is genuinely interesting. Current electric aircraft batteries are in the rough neighborhood of 200-260 Wh/kg; 410 Wh/kg is a serious improvement. Push that toward 500 Wh/kg and you have made the battery brick much better. Sadly, it is still a brick, though, and it doesn't really fix the main problem with electric aircraft.

The number this press release is dancing around is energy density. Aviation fuel is roughly 12,000 Wh/kg. Compare that to 410 Wh/kg and you are looking at about a 29:1 raw energy-density gap. Yes, electric motors are far more efficient than piston or turbine engines, so electric clawbacks are real. Give electric a very generous 3x efficiency advantage and you are still looking at a 10:1 practical energy density gap. That is not a rounding error. That is the payload-range equation walking into the room and taking a crowbar to your electric-planes-are-better pitch deck. :)

The payload problem gets ugly fast. Take the simple case: a two-seat airplane versus a four-seat airplane flying the same short route. In a liquid fuel aircraft, adding two passengers increases weight and fuel burn, but the extra fuel needed for that same leg is comparatively small because liquid fuel is so energy-dense, and that fuel is burned off during the flight. In an electric aircraft, those two extra passengers directly displace battery mass. To get the lost range back, you add battery. But now the airplane is heavier because of the added battery, so you need still more battery to carry the battery you just added. That recursive weight penalty is where the spreadsheet turns feral. With liquid fuel, payload growth mostly means a very modest fuel-burn penalty. With batteries, payload growth attacks the core range equation because the energy store is heavy, low-density, and stays aboard all the way to landing.

This matters because commercial aviation is not a science fair lap around the pattern, which is what this test essentially was. It is payload, range, utilization, reserve fuel, alternate-airport planning, maintenance downtime, charging infrastructure, battery cycle life, insurance, certification, and load factor. The airplane has to make money on Tuesday afternoon in ugly weather with a real schedule, not just fly once for a press release while everyone claps.

This is why electric aviation makes sense only for narrowly defined, rigidly constrained missions. Trainers doing pattern work. Self-launching gliders. Short-hop recreational aircraft. Maybe small feeder routes where the aircraft, route, charger, weather limits, payload, and schedule are tightly controlled. Those are real use cases. I would love to see them mature. But multi-passenger commercial electric aviation is a different beast. Every extra passenger is payload and it launches you down the I-need-more-battery recursive rathole that also drags carrying capacity, reserve requirements, battery safety systems, and charging time down that rathole.

Solid-state batteries may expand the envelope for a narrowly defined niche market. Good. I want them to. But they do not repeal physics, and they do not repeal commercial aviation economics. And right now, energy density is going to limit the economic viability of any electric plane, even pleasure craft like this that are targeted at people with an FAA cert and some disposable income.

It does not solve the problem you think it solves. Not by an order of magnitude. The article is talking about a modified Pipistrel Taurus, a motor glider. It's a pleasure craft, not a commercial vehicle at all. It is making short demonstrator flights on solid-state batteries. That is legitimately interesting engineering. The ugly number the press release is dancing around is energy density.

The number the press-release is hiding from you is energy density compared to conventional liquid fuel. Aviation fuel is roughly 12,000 Wh/kg. These new solid-state cells are reported at 410 Wh/kg, and currently deployed batteries are about half that. Granted, electric motors are much more efficient than piston or turbine engines, so you claw some of that back. But -- you do not get all of it back, not even close, actually. You are still hauling around a battery that has a tiny fraction of the energy per pound of liquid fuel. And by tiny, I meant brutally tiny, especially for the current crop of batteries. The current crop of electric aircraft batteries are at ~200-260 Wh/kg. These new batteries plausibly move that toward 400-500 Wh/kg. That is a big deal. It is not a miracle. The battery brick got better, but it is still a brick.

Even the most efficient electric motors out there can't bridge the order of magnitude gap with their liquid fueled competitors. And unlike fuel, the battery does not get lighter during the flight. A conventional aircraft burns off fuel as it goes, so the airplane gets lighter and the range equation improves in flight. A battery airplane lands with essentially the same battery mass it took off with. That battery mass competes directly with passengers, baggage, structure, reserves, dispatch margins, and profit -- even in pleasure craft, where you can substitute usable range for dispatch margins and profit.

In a bucket, electric flight makes sense in only very narrow, very specific mission profiles -- trainers, and pleasure craft like this self-launching glider and other short-hop recreational aircraft. Basically, small, well-defined missions where the aircraft, charger availability, route, weather, and schedule are all tightly controlled. That is real. That is useful -- but in only very narrow economic markets. They do not repeal basic laws of physics and the payload-range equations.

By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!

This is the man that though it better to hide what was happening in Rotherham with the industrial scale rape of minors and now expects to be taken seriously when he gets on a soap box about something he does not understand. If a minor lies about their age the app they are using will believe they are old enough. The parents need to be more involved in what the children are doing and to know. Do not give them smart phones. Leave a desktop downstairs for supervised use etc.

You said "Open Source development." Which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small.