In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

Would ... that impart the dreaded "processed-ness"? A lab vs. a factory?

Oh no! By dismissing one example, you've devastated my ... oh wait, no you haven't.

What about the artificial vanilla flavor? Is Grandma the queen of processed-ness?

Is there some percentage of kitchens that something has to be found in, to be free of the "processed-ness" taint? Do they all have to be home kitchens? I mean, since we're being so scientific about all this ...

You ... do know that kitchens around the world have things like artificial vanilla flavor (and yes, even Karo corn syrup) in them, right?

... grams of proceed-ness per serving are the limit?

You know, since we're being scientific ...

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Maybe a Chinese takeover of the UK before full Islamicisation wouldn't be so bad?

... Wenlian is a bit of a cold fish (badum ching!).

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

I looked into bringing a Mexican car (the Ford Ka) into the US. You will be forced to bring it up to US safety standards. Strengthen the B pillar, pad the dash more, etc. The extra weight will destroy the fuel economy and the performance, as well as cost thousands to do. Not worth it.

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

No one is really suggesting"at ANY price point". No one thinks renting rooms at 10 dollars is better than nothing, but renting rooms at 100 dollars that normally rent for 200 is better than nothing. And there is nothing stopping you from renting last minute, except the possibility of not getting a room or at least the room you want. If you want to take a chance of not getting a room to save 50 dollars you go right ahead.

Generally, at least I think, forcing kids to memorize a bunch of things at a young age is better for them in the future. Even if they don't 100% understand why, once they move up to high school and have to start thinking (aka book reports, algebra, etc), they don't have to go back to using fingers or manually doing multiplications. Sometimes you get that "ah hah" moment when you realize you have all that information already in your noggin and can apply it.

Of course you also end up with kids who skip a grade or move to a different school it throws it all to wack. I got experience in that front.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

People has been buying stuff like this for century's. Yea my mom could use the same yarn and put it together in about a day, but fashion is fashion. Think of it as a way to meet people. You start off with a conversation about it and go on to other small talk. Personally, as somone who is paranoid going outside now a days without some kind of recording device on myself makes this great way to have a body cam without it seeming intrusive.

That said, $5 of yarn is enough to make one your own. Its just a scarf with some stitching. I am good enough to make scarfs so I am thinking of making something similar for presents. The question is should I go with the same colors or make it goth.