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I grew up in a forested area. Anything more than a couple hundred feet away feels off or unreal. Deserts and mountains are surreal, like a painting.

Inkling is in the ballpark

Flock is definitely not the only provider of this kind of surveillance. What is the real reason that this is getting so much media attention?

You could have made exactly the same critique in 2021. Microsoft has been selling the same OS since the 90s and it just gets worse.

So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?

The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bread hanging drywall or driving a solid waste truck.

Bizarre in the sense of mostly performative tit for tat strikes instead of some kind of serious strategy to win and to win for good. And in the case of Iran, the strikes are telegraphed in advance in almost comedic fashion. “OK, we’re starting operation True Promise n. We’re launching missiles. We’re about to do it, guys. OK is everyone ready? For the missiles? These are the targets, but next time it could be more serious, OK?”

This does not resemble what I would imagine a fight for civilization survival to look like. I’m talking about the stakes being you win or you, your family, and every man, woman and infant you know is going to be killed or starved in concentration camps.

I think for the value of the outputs that’s still a good deal. Keeping the same price as the prior model makes sense to me. That is if the model size is about the same in the cost to serve has not substantially changed. Now I would have expected efficiency gains for inference, but there is no way to know as a customer.

At the end of the day, they have established a strong brand and if they can get away with a 95%+ gross margin on inference entirely from the status premium, then I suppose that’s good for them. Apple does the same thing, and I don’t fault them for it.

My pet theory is that none of the Chinese labs are releasing open weight models for humanitarian reasons. I believe the Chinese government has made a cynical policy decision that AI is too valuable to allow anyone in their country capture a significant amount of its value as that might allow a person or company to accumulate wealth and influence so quickly as to challenge their power. Everyone must be kept below the God state.

Yes. They’re flawed, but you don’t want a global police state administered by the PRC.

So Moonshot is next for a lawsuit or do lawyers only care about Anthropic?

Well, to be fair, by “USA“ you mean one person who is frankly more ceremonial than an actual leader. Whereas I think China is doing much more to actually irreversibly change who has the real authority in Canada. Canada is also a uniquely bad case in governance. I don’t know if any western country has had so much decline in living standard so fast. That you could put Fidel Castro‘s bastard son in charge says a lot about who holds the cards there.

If you think the number of US AI lab employees feeding information back to the homeland is zero, you’re terribly naive. There is the kind of money on the table people will absolutely lie, steal, and kill for.

There is also not strong evidence that immigration is the source of progress. We issued many more patents in the 19th century than now which was well before Hart-Cellar. The statement that immigration is even declining is not also supported by evidence.

Training data that’s still sitting in the pages of a book is not really all that useful.

So if you were to imagine the second largest economy in the world, governed by a monolithic politburo, with a long history of barely concealed programs of corporate and academic espionage, what do you think their approach would be to American technology worth trillions? Now take it a step further, this hypothetical government sees itself as the civilization representation of an ethnic group, and regularly attempts to monitor and police that group regardless of where they are in the world. Also, that ethnic group, separated from the motherland by one generation or less, makes up the majority of research labor in American labs.

Don’t you think there’s maybe a teeny, tiny chance that their approach is a little more sophisticated than just buying retail subscriptions? Maybe the trade secrets are being exfiltrated directly from the American labs?

Appealing to the Belsheviks for moral authority is, well I will just say an interesting approach. I do not have that much sympathy for Anthropic, but I do not have much sympathy for publishing companies either whose rights to a revenue stream they violated either. Are Chinese AI companies the Robin Hood in this story? Would they be so magnanimous if they had the upper hand? I don’t think so.

Microsoft is IBM. Google is Microsoft. OpenAI is Google. Apple is Apple.

Sometimes. It depends on the task. $15/Mtok is still a lot cheaper than human written code. It’s probably worth spending more for contract reviews. Tasks don’t have uniform value. If you’re using an AI for entertainment, then frontier premiums are hard to justify. For paid work, they’re a great deal if used reasonably.

“The honest headline:”

Written by Claude. Ugh. If it’s worth publishing, it’s worth proofreading, folks.

“Asshole non-technical people”

You mean the people creating actual business value in every industry where software isn’t the product? Speak not unless spoken to, Mr. cost-center!

I think one of the more sober analysis that focused on danish firms exclusively predicted the overall growth impact on GDP to be a bit less than half a percent. Now, well that doesn’t sound very large, considering nominal GDP for the world is nearly $60 trillion, that is a big deal. I don’t know if that justifies trillion dollar evaluations for the providers, but even a small improvement over a large base is meaningful.

The token quota is completely unpredictable and changes month to month. Anthropic has a real penchant for riding the fine line of useful and dark patterns that make me want to write them off forever.

The appropriate price is what the output is worth to you. Some people could pay $10,000/month, some $5 and feel like they were breaking even. There is a big jump between convenience and curiosity uses versus business critical.

OpenAI already charges enterprise users a premium purely for that title over on-demand, no-contract usage. Retail users get a good deal. People make a lot of hay about subsidies but this is a very sane approach if you want exposure to these three different types of customers.

I know it’s good for Blue Team redistricting, but I think we need to seriously reconsider the viability of moving every human on earth to 5 metro areas in the US.