Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.

No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.

Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.

On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.

You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.

The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.

No, who's Meta?

Yes, sadly, they do not cure mental illness.

The stock price was inflated to start with, due to speculation. Elon was just taking advantage of the situation. "Oh, you want to buy a tiny fraction of my company at way more than it's worth? Sure. I can use an infusion of liquidity." What's bonkers is that if you sell 1% of your company for $20 billion, the talking heads then pretend the whole company is worth two trillion. Who would actually buy SpaceX for two trillion dollars if Elon wanted to sell it? But they call him a trillionaire. He's only worth the net present (discounted) value of all future earnings of his companies. Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at how much these companies make and do the math.

Depends on the studio and position. A very well paid senior programmer might make $150k-$170k in the US. But that's pretty much the top end of the scale. Salaries in the game industry are infamously low because it's so FUN. Aren't you grateful to have such a FUN job? It's FUN, be grateful that you make any money at all so you can be creative!

Designers make less, Artists make less. QA makes WAY less (which is a travesty, because we depend on them so much in the development cycle. As a programmer, I probably talk to QA as much as I talk to design).

But if you're a Canadian programmer, you might make $150k and live in a city like Vancouver which has insanely high housing costs. Maybe you have kids, or pets.

You've kind of hit the nail on the head with regards to the issue, though: many developers aren't paid particularly well, even by huge companies that make billions of dollars (and indeed, that's why the companies are so profitable).

I interviewed at Roblox, and their salary ranges STARTED far beyond where most studios ranges ENDED for my position (Senior Programmer, 20 years experience). They told me that they consider tech companies like Google to be their competition for talent, not other game studios, so their salaries are adjusted accordingly.

So yeah, very easy to believe that people are feeling the pinch after getting laid off. It's not a lucrative industry for the workers.

Truth Social I'm sure. As hard as it is to believe, there are still people who think Trump is a genius, and still want to "own the Libs".

This comment is very stupid for a lot of reasons.

1. Not every developer needs help
2. Not every developer wasn't able to find a new job
3. The intention is not to distribute money to every person that lost their job in the layoffs, it's to extend a lifeline to people who are struggling
4. The thing that would meaningfully change things is to implement strong labour laws, tax the wealth of the extremely wealthy, and make it easier to form unions. The number of roadblocks to unionizing have increased over the decades, which is one of many reasons there's been such an obvious, ongoing, inexorable transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class.

When the government is in the pocket of these huge companies and actively make laws diminishing the power of workers, it's an obvious bad-faith question to ask why people don't do something about it.

I have lots of ways to meaningfully change things, but I can't buy a politician because I'm not a billionaire, so changing things take longer. Don't worry, though, we're making some progress despite that.

You are correct. What's kind of crazy is that a lot of the training data is probably GPL code. So if LLM-generated code retains GPL copyright, that's going to provide a lot of work for lawyering companies over the next few decades. And before any lawyers start cheering, there's no guarantee that the lawyering companies will need to hire any lawyers. LLMs can do most of their work already.

Civilian infrastructure is a pretty squishy target in wartime, even without "cyber" attack vectors. If the bullets ever really start flying, expect everyone's standard of living to plummet. Look at the civilian infrastructure that's been hit in the Ukraine war, and now in the Iran war, even in neighboring countries. It's fragile and takes a long time to rebuild. We need to make it clear to our leaders that we want a large alliance network and open but fair trade agreements with other countries, because that's what has traditionally provided peace, growth, and prosperity. Countries don't generally bomb the people who buy all the shit their factories produce.

It must be the preliminary moves in a surprise strike by our mortal forever enemy, Canada. "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia." - 1984

How are these people not in prison?