Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Magic 8 Ball, am I stupid? (Score 3, Insightful) 20

They don't. They think of them as something that happens on their computer, with only them involved. They know, in the abstract, that there's a server somewhere, but the implications of that don't really sink in. The same problems applied to e-mail since forever, but everyone dismissed it as something that didn't matter since they didn't use email. Now, though, we're seeing the result of the third-party doctrine starting to hit home in ways the average person does need to care about thanks to the ubiquity of the cloud. Chatbot logs, search histories, email records, Flock cameras, Ring doorbell cameras, ALPRs, documents stored in cloud services, social media histories, messaging service histories... everything involving records stored long-term in the hands of third parties is starting to affect ordinary people in ways they can't ignore. I suspect at some point the law is going to have to change.

Comment Re:Single dumbest way? (Score 5, Informative) 153

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

Comment New coach, same game (Score 1) 96

They're still playing the "Try to get IBM to pay us to go away." game. It didn't work the first time around. This one's even more futile because this particular argument was dealt with during the original case and IBM proved that the code they contributed to Linux wasn't code belonging to Project Monterrey at all but completely different code IBM wrote themselves for a different product. But I suppose, given the people behind this, lack of pattern recognition skills is a given.

Comment Re:Heavy Lifting (Score 3, Interesting) 66

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.

Comment If Only It Were Possible... (Score 1) 133

...to make new factories.

Like imagine if it were possible to create new semiconductor factories, making chips en masse, -- you could perhaps do it in a BIIIG state with a lot of land. You could have a factory with like 100 million square feet. Wouldn't that be something?

Maybe we should have more factories.

If only there were a price incentive to do so.

Slashdot Top Deals

The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship = 1 Millihelen

Working...