alecco

HN search shows 21 comments in the past month from simonw+pelican: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

You can choose to look the other way but 3 comments out of 21, where 2 were kind of the same one on the same day, and 27 days ago... But you say "repeatedly crosses into harassment" as if I'm a troll chasing him around.

I was caring about the quality of this site with my 18 year old account... Unbelievable.

But as you bless him, I give up. It's your site. Quite a bummer after I defended you many times over the years, though. I remember in the beginning your interventions were not generally welcome.

Edit:

His comment is now 12th in this thread and there are comments saying his pelican SVG test is pointless. At least there's some sanity with other users. Or are they harassing him, too?

Sadly his other comment on Hy3 thread is still the top comment. And of course it also has a link to his site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848950

And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.

And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.

Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.

I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.

You could argue the BSL is anti-business. But IMHO even that one is only a reaction to abuse. Database companies investing millions in research, development, and maintenance for some trillion dollar corporation to take it and make billions off it without giving back a single penny.

It also prefer to give my money to the pro-social companies giving away their open models (they cost many millions) instead of opportunists who don't give much back.

And EU leadership completely destroyed Europe's future by betting on depending on US and Chinese models. https://pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

This 2023 thread about this issue is prescient: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11sboh1/d_... (just add Anthropic to OpenAI)

Science The Graduate-School Dropout Toppling China’s Academic Stars Shamed by a blogger, Chinese universities wage blitzkrieg against academic fraud

SINGAPORE—Compared with the glacial pace of American universities, the Chinese decision was practically a summary execution.

On May 12, video blogger Geng Hongwei alleged that Shanghai University scientists faked data in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The university announced a probe the same day. A month later, it said it confirmed misconduct, fired a postdoctoral researcher and ousted the dean of the university’s Institute of Translational Medicine.

A flurry of such cases involving top Chinese researchers and prestigious scientific journals has made Geng a celebrity in China and perhaps the nation’s most powerful person in medical science. With a single five-minute video, the 33-year-old graduate-school dropout can stop an academic star’s career in its tracks.

Mods can change the link to the full interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A3sGymV6kY

There was a submission earlier but it didn't get any upvotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755074. I wouldn't mind if this thread is merged into that one... as long as the discussion stays in the front page. Many times conversations got suppressed due to "dupe" merged into older submissions!

Edit: aaaand... it's gone. Congrats.

Today big pockets and big datacenters are the differentiatior and it looks like even DeepSeek can't keep up.

The only chance if enough people and small companies join forces into a Rebellion of sorts. But I don't see this happening... yet.

Eh... I'd say DeepSeek and maybe one more of the small labs. Chinese Big Tech is even worse than US Big Tech.

https://x.com/zephyr_z9/status/2072298455314436380

More and more I suspect Z.ai just has deeper pockets and access to the Claude traces while DeepSeek is punching way above their class.

The hardware is already available for renting at reasonable prices. We need community funding. I wish people pooled a fraction of the money they burn on local GPU rigs on funding training/testing/etc.

A big problem is like in open source: it's way too atomized. Just one competitive ground-up community LLM would require tens of millions $. But who gets to pick?

IMHO the only chance is highly specialized and smaller LLMs instead. And this is still millions to train.

And remember LLMs are competitive for only a handful months.

And I think https://allenai.org/ has something like this, too.

Also beware local models tend to be slow. Also, the main optimization trick for LLM inference is running large batches (concurrent users) and you won't take advantage of this (batch=1).

IMHO using Macs for LLMs is a fad. An expensive fad.

> “We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”

> The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.

Via https://x.com/RolfeWinkler/status/2070129216214163575

EU allies join US pact to break reliance on Chinese AI supply chains

Jacob Helberg, architect of Pax Silica, tells the FT the American-led group will boost innovation

---

European AI people not too happy about it:

https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2069574934972797089

> It's over, Europe has officially given up on its digital sovereignty: they just signed up to Pax Silica, the US initiative to lock other countries in its AI stack.

> In case you think I'm exaggerating, Jacob Helberg, the US Under-Secretary of State who architected Pax Silica, LITERALLY says so in the article: he himself explicitly positions Pax Silica as designed to counter "digital sovereignty" - a concept he opposes because it would mean countries building their own tech stacks.

> The cage door was wide open and clearly labeled. They walked in anyway.

> After Zhipu’s release, Elon Musk wrote on X that he expects China to match the abilities of the current frontier by early next year. It “won’t take that long”, Tang Jie, Zhipu’s cofounder, shot back.