They've got a lot more components to their system...and the tooling isn't all software. As for software, IIUC, they're using a different multi-processing library. Making the weights compatible doesn't make the entire system compatible.

IIUC, the Chinese strategy is to come up with a cheaper collection of tools, including models, that are incompatible with the standard US tooling, and convince other countries to use their version instead. The US government seems to be actively pushing to make that strategy work. (E.g. abruptly cutting off access to models with no warning or explanation.)

Most FOSS software starts small, and easy to learn, and if it's going to grow, it grows with a community of developers that understand the software. This? Unless it's pretty small and compact, that's unlikely. And those who are going to develop using it probably need a company behind them. (Plausibly one with a good legal staff.)

To be fair, BOTH voices felt off. Both the phone voice and the actress voice. But the actress voice sounded faker than the phone.

I don't think of that a "misogynistic", but definitely a stereotype..and a rather unrealistic one. But, I suppose, if you think "being a sexual tease" is a bad thing, you could think that.

IIUC, Meta sells compute to Anthropic. That's not "not finding a use".

Maybe. But the first company with a working vaccine against COVID said they didn't sign up with that because the paperwork would have slowed them down.

Yes, but it was the Democrats that pushed expansion of copyright law. However the Republicans are more supportive of expansive monopolies. Hard to pick a good side there.

The article I read said (approx)"This mimics part of one of the main theories of human consciousness". It might have been the one put out by Anthropic, as I occasionally read things they put out.

You've always got to remember that things tend to get oversimplified by secondary and tertiary sources. (OTOH, that source looks like "Anthropic posting on Twitter", so perhaps it was Anthropic itself doing the oversimplifying...for that audience.)

Sorry, but as an artifact of the plurality wins voting system, only two parties are viable. And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans really want to control business. It's true they are bribed by different groups, but they both depend on bribes to campaign for office.

Do you understand that experiment well enough to be sure what it says? To me (reading, admittedly, one particular explanation) it sounded as if they were able to construct a special area where the magnetic field was *extremely* low. This wouldn't seem to have any implications for the general volume of the solar system.

OTOH, I will freely admit that this is well out of my area of expertise. It's been multiple decades since I took undergraduate physics, and nearly as long since I've even touched calculus.

Well, OK, sort of, but that's not propulsion. And it wouldn't stop neutral radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.). But it still *might* be worthwhile.

I was thinking of the cargo-robots as delivering supplies for the manned mission.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "plenty of magnetic field to push against", but there literally *is* magnetic field everywhere. The intensity and direction varies a lot depending on solar weather, to position of Jupiter, solar weather, etc., and magnetic field strength, IIRC, drops off as the 4th power of distance, so a lot of places it's going to be REALLY weak, but it *will* be present.

It wouldn't be for manned missions...except possibly for cargo robots that plan to take a really long time.

OTOH, the sun also has a magnetic field, so this should work (to an extent!!) throughout the solar system. Which doesn't mean it would ever be practical for that no matter how developed. But for station-keeping in Earth orbit it might be more than sufficient.

Actually, there should always be SOME amount of thrust available. It should be more powerful than a solar sail of equivalent size, and much more directional. But don't expect any large amount of thrust. (OTOH, the solar sail would be a LOT cheaper and more reliable. And "equivalent size" is doing a lot of work there.)