The compute cost for DeepSeek V3 was $5.6M. Training costs for traditional US frontier labs model is about $70 to $200M+, with estimates of up to $1B+ to train the next generation models. It's expensive, but it's not even in the ballpark of "There is no viable economic model to do so." Google revenue in Q2 was $1.32 billion *per day*. $1B is trivially less than a day; $5.6M is just 6 minutes of revenue.

The cost problem is in the compute buildout and the subsidized compute to capture users.

> It remains to be seen if even using their models can be profitable,

I presume we can stipulate there exists some tasks that are cheaper to do using an LLM than doing it "by hand". As a such, using an LLM model can be profitable. To me, it is also obvious that the business of serving an LLM model can be profitable. There's large benefits to being able to get tokens quickly, and you can expect people to pay for that, even if we presume they could run the model locally with no maintenance overhead. There's even cases where using the cloud is cheaper than you can serve locally at all - I saw one guy that measured his added cost of electricity when his computer ran a specific LLM, and it was more expensive to run it locally than to buy tokens from the cheapest inference provider for the same model, presumably because they had better hardware and cheaper electricity.

I love a term a friend of mine used to use when talking about AI: "Narrowly superhuman" (before "superintelligence" got to be a thing).

AI is narrowly superhuman. It is able to do specific things that used to be defined as a "hallmark of intelligence" much better than a human. The easiest one? Summing numbers. It's both faster and more precise than a human.

AI gets more and more such areas it can do better than a human.

If we define "Superintelligent" to be "A computer system able to do absolutely everything we can somehow call intelligence better than any human", we will *never* have superintelligence. The things we define as intelligence will be in conflict; we'll land at the system being better at one at the cost of another.

I'm in favor with being careful about this development. But "prohibiting the development of superintelligence" isn't an option. It's already here.

Dividing the yearly US spend on Internet advertising by the number of people in the US that has Internet access gives $900-$970 spend per person per year, or $75-$81 per month.

Please choose the option you want:

1. I want to pay about $75 per month per member in my family into the ad auctions to not see any ads. Ie, keep the infrastructure, but let you opt to pay your share through money rather than attention.
2. I want to prohibit ads, and accept that everybody will have to pay for the sites they want access to, that there will be much fewer services, that there will be much higher transaction costs, and that the poor will have much less ability to access services. (Microtransactions won't solve this, due to the need for trust evaluation of same.)
3. I want some combination of 1 and 2, where some sides of ads are prohibited so it is possible to buy my way out of them at a lower price,. I accept that this will result in the loss of some services and lower access to others for the poor.
4. I want legislation that makes Internet ad blockers work more consistently. I accept that this just shifts the attention cost to other people, and have me getting the benefit without paying the cost.
5. I want to remove Internet ads and subsidize the sites through taxes.
6. I want to increase the requirements of Trust and Safety checks and format restrictions for ads, potentially accepting higher overhead (in what goes to content vs infrastructure) for less annoying/bad ads. I accept that doing this creates significant advantages of scale for ad networks.
7. Other, please describe, including where costs gets shifted with your proposal.

The above are my best attempt at listing possible options and their correct caveats. In most situations, I find ads annoying (who doesn't). Unfortunately, they are the main money highway of Internet content.

DISCLOSURE: I used to work for Google, where I rang infrastructure for stopping bad ads/advertisers and for removing fake clicks. I've also been interested at the use of sub-cent microtransactions to pay for content since the 1990s, though I've become disillusioned as I've learned more about the attention economics involved. Approving individual microtransactions has a higher attention cost than dealing with the ads, and bulking them per-site (through micro-subscriptions) will limit the number of sites that can have content.

OK, which particular aspect of the LLM learning do you think doesn't exist in the human brain? Backprop exists (and the other training methods the brain uses has similar effects), embeddings more or less exists and seems to be very similar to the LLM embeddings (shown by brain activation in various areas linearly matching with embeddings) - see e.g. High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models (Adrien Doerig et al, 2025), and speech/text generation by humans has similar error patterns as for LLMs.

They obviously don't learn in the EXACT same way, but there's also clearly a lot of bits that are the same, and I'm fairly sure nobody knows how much is similar yet, particularly not weighted by importance.
 

It will favour zealots in both directions, which should mostly even out assuming zealotry is roughly as common in both directions. Also, I don't know of any less zealot-based approach except forced participation - which seems worse.

Citizen conventions typically consists of randomly selected citizens. This one consists of 150 randomly selected citizens using a statistical procedure (sortition, a variant of stratified sampling) to make it represent the whole.

Maybe people turn on ban lines because they're tired of users who want to impose their own idea of "fun" and "harmless pranks" on them. You don't get to dictate how other people use SL. Either they'll want to interact with you or they won't, and just like in Real Life don't be an annoying asshole and "no means no". So when a friend and I are standing on their Mainland parcel discussing the build they want to do and some jackass kept walking around us and bumping into us, then yes, that asshole first of all gets yelled at in local chat and then gets blocked/banned from the parcel. Because they're an annoying jackass who does not get to impose their idea of "fun" on us or dictate how we should use SL. We have things we want to do in SL, we are not in SL to amuse narcissistic creeps who thinks the entire (virtual) world revolves around them.

How is it a problem? Maybe people like having their own spaces to interact privately with their friends or to work on builds, and then go to the bars/clubs when they feel like socializing and meeting new people? Like...you know...the real world? *gasp!* I have friends from around the world, so SL is a way for us to meet up "face to face" and socialize. When I'm sitting on my couch in the real world having a conversation with a friend, should I have to put up with some jerk who barges into my house and demands attention? No? Well I shouldn't have to put up with jerks in my virtual house either. Go to a club if you want to socialize with strangers and stay out of people's private parcels/houses unless you're invited. And maybe if you stop with the "harmless pranks" and use some common courtesy, people would be willing to interact with you in SL.

And what's wrong with cozy bubbles anyway? I don't recall anything in the SL TOS that said I am required to socialize with anyone. If I want to pay for a parcel and spend the entirety of my time in SL building things without talking to anyone else, I can do that. I am not required to make SL a safe space for entitled extroverts.

Also, if you're unable to find anything to do in SL, you're not putting any effort into looking. There's announcements of events whenever you open the viewer (SL Viewer and Firestorm). You can go to the destinations tab to find themed sims and events. You can search for things you're interested in to find groups/sims -- Steampunk alone has at least four large communities. It's not the responsibility of other random SL participants to entertain you, put some effort into finding areas/groups that fit what you want to do in SL, and if you can't find anything that fits you, make it yourself. Form a group and/or rent land to create what you like. SL is supposed to be user-created, after all.

What do you use for watching Netflix? We use an AppleTV and I've never seen this. I just tried it out, played an episode of Daredevil (one of their original series). The episode began playing immediately, no ads. I fast-forwarded to the end. The credits minimized to the left, and on the right it showed the info for the next Daredevil episode and a countdown timer for it to auto-play (if you consider that an ad, that is being really nitpicky). To see the credits in fullscreen, just select them and click.

It's still far cheaper than paying the cable company for 200+ channels I don't want. And if a $2/month increase means Netflix can finance more of its own shows, I'll happily pay it. Daredevil and Jessica Jones alone are well worth an extra $24/year for me.

The FAQ on the website says this:

It also links to the detailed terms and conditions, which I've not read.

From the FAQ:

Does Google own the intellectual property created during the competition?

No. Google is not requiring any IP or licenses be granted except a non-exclusive license to be used only for the purpose of testing the inverter and publicizing the prize. We want entrants to benefit themselves through the advancements they make in order to help grow an advanced power electronics ecosystem.

What? Twitter is not preventing you from "speaking freely". They just don't want you to do it in their private business. You can go set up your own social network on your own server and "speak freely" all the hate you want.

Twitter is under no obligation, legally or morally, to provide a soap box for bigots and extremists. Just as a grocery store is within its rights, legally and morally, to kick out a person who is running up and down the aisles ranting racist shit. And a newspaper is under no obligation, legally or morally, to print a paranoid call to violence in its Letters to the Editor.

Everyone loves to pick on the SJWs (ok, admittedly they sometimes make it too easy), but there are a helluva lot of people on the other side with just as much of a Special Snowflake Syndrome, who think that everyone owes them a platform (for free!) to spew whatever hateful shit they want.

It could be that he's gotten his PhDs the old-school way: Doing his research in the field and then presenting to a committee, not guided research. (I don't care enough to look it up, I just want to make sure that people that read the thread know that this option exists.)

I first encountered the vomit flavored ones in the Bertie Bott's Beans that Jelly Belly made for Harry Potter (for those unfamiliar with HP, the candy in the story contains EVERY flavor, not just good ones). So that is most likely the origin of the horrible flavors. They also had booger, earwax, and soap flavors (plus others, but I don't remember poop!). You try them once and then their only real use is to put into your desk candy bowl to keep people from stealing. :-D

We wouldn't need overburdening regulation if these dumbasses would act like adults with more than two brain cells to rub together. This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm also a (newbie) pilot. I wouldn't be opposed to having to pass a safety course and getting a license (similar to a driver's license) if it keeps (most) idiots from ruining the hobby for the rest of us. Or at least allows the same punishments that car drivers get for reckless driving, because the drone pilot can no longer use "I didn't know the rules" as an excuse.