There are some numbers in this blog post https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ (and a couple of others on the same blog) and they really don’t look like OpenAI is going to last a couple of years until profitability.
The difficult question about AGI destroying humanity is deciding whether to be afraid of that option or to cheer it on and LLM enthusiasts are certainly among the people heavily pushing me towards the ‘cheer it on’ option.
As a standalone thing, LLMs are awesome.
They really aren’t though and that is half the problem. Everyone pretends they are awesome when the results are unusable garbage 80% of the time which makes them unusable for 99% of practical applications.
The difference between AI companies and most other tech companies is that AI companies have significant expenses that scale with the number of customers.
It is really not a big change to the way we work unless you work in a language that has very low expressiveness like Java or Go and we have been able to generate the boilerplate in those automatically for decades.
The main problem is that it is really not at all useful or produces genuinely beneficial results and yet everyone keeps telling us they do but can not point to a single GitHub PR or similar source as an example for a good piece of code created by AI without heavy manual post-processing. It also completely ignores that reading and fixing other people’s (or worse, AI’s) code is orders of magnitude harder than writing the same code yourself.
Probably not going to go belly-up, in a while
Don’t be so sure about that, the numbers look incredibly bad for them in terms of money burned per actual revenue, never mind profit. They can’t even pay for the inference alone (never mind training, staff, rent,…) from the subscriptions.
In fact Daggerfall was almost nothing but quests and other content like that.
“lawmakers” seem like an inappropriate term for the kind of enemies of the general population who usually demand these kinds of measures.
They also don’t apply the same attitude to those random sources they use instead. That is really the biggest problem with their approach. Literally going “you can’t trust anyone any more” would be better than what they do.
One of the earliest times Musk appeared in the general public awareness was his Hyperloop crap and that was already designed to sabotage rail in favor of cars so he has always been like this, some people just didn’t want to notice back then.
True, but my point was that even a lot of the commercial websites that do have other products do not depend on ads, e.g. Amazon and all the other stores would still be there, every company offering a paid service would still be there, every company providing a service related to their RL goods (e.g. specs, drivers, product descriptions, lists of stores where you can buy them,…) would still be there.
Advertising does not finance a very large percentage of the useful parts of the internet. And among those advertising financed websites that are useful a lot are essentially duplicates to get a chunk of the ad revenue without doing a lot of work (e.g. almost all news websites that just republish AP, Reuters,… content).
The internet isn’t built on it. The commercial websites who do not have other products (as in all the websites related to RL goods, stores,…) are.
That last one is why, have you ever tried getting a bank account in the name of a script?
Don’t forget that they are literally being lead by a political movement named after the history denying idea that they were “great” at some point and want to get back to that (never mind the other lie that the leaders of the movement don’t actually want to get back to any particular point in history despite the name)
And, here is the important part, those rich people need that money so their high score wealth is bigger than that other rich person’s high score like wealth, not for mundane reasons like improving their quality of life or anything.
Are you somehow under the impression that just because it is “global” there are no transmitters and receivers and distance does not matter?
“Never forget” is great and all but from a German perspective it seems to not be enough. It is much more important to make sure the same or very similar things do not happen again, not by China and not by any other nation. Otherwise you end up like we did here in Germany where decades of “never forget” lead to very similar sentiments being expressed by a new major party but since things are slightly different (e.g. the “never forget” was always phrased to be about Jews, this is more about foreigners in general) people seem to allow themselves to ignore them.
This means that Israel presently relies on an external backer for its security (the US).
Makes you wonder if Israel is trying to grab as much land as possible and eliminate as many people who might have competing claims on that land as possible before the US collapses economically (and with that their giant military budget) now that Donald Trump is doing his best to make that a reality.
The Indian Turk or short IT-worker.
Name a single task you would trust an LLM on solving for you that you feel confident would be correct without checking the output. Because that is my definition of perfectly and AI falls very, very far short of that.