autuni

That's not true. Foreign academics working in the US are mostly lured in by high paying job offers, after they have already established themselves as researchers.

The focus on name-recognition in the article was weird to me, but then again I am not from the US so I don't know how it is handled there. From the academic world I know, as soon as you're beyond undergrad level the university does not really matter as much anymore, because you should have published research and other contributions by the time you apply for anything at that point, which is what is being looked at. What's the quantity and quality of your (peer reviewed) published research, was it published in good journals or good conferences, etc.

I just doubt that a generalized form (in this case humanoid) will actually be better for most applications. We can build specialized robots to perform tasks, which can be optimized to perform what they need to do. If I want to deploy a robot in my factory to do some blacksmithing (I don't know why this example came to mind), I don't need it to be a robot that is built to also be suitable to be a bartender. Why not have specialized robots for the applications (which become easier to develop too)?

We have built professions to work around our own form because that's what we're stuck with. Robots can take many forms, so why make them average at all things instead of making robots perfect for one (or a few).

The problem I see there is that apart from the sci-fi aspect, what's the market for humanoid robots really?

It would also just be good PR at this point. They could easily spin it as "We could make it work like the others with only cameras, now we add back more sensors to improve even further!". Camera-only has been criticized prominently for so long too, it would undermine a lot of the negative arguments people make too. It would honestly just be an easy win for them, even if there is no real improvement at first, they can even take their time to update the software over time.

while there are a lot of people in the US who also can't afford to leave the continent, even if we assume what you say is true (it isn't), I'd still prefer having the time

And from a purely European perspective it looks like the US is trying to do the same. We just don't have the full picture of either side.

Europe did not push enough in the software market, which is where the US is definitely on top. There's tons of specialized engineering companies in Europe that manufacture equipment that can't be done anywhere else. Less public coverage because it's not consumer facing, but ASML is just one example of it (who are well known publicly of course). There are obvious factors right now (e.g. war in Ukraine) that put a strain on public spending, but that's also the case for the US, and before that covid, and honestly when's the last time this has not been the case for everyone. Though the EU currently also needs to first scramble to reduce it's dependencies (especially in energy).

The same is true for several US companies - not doable without published research funded by the EU (or other countries in Europe outside the EU). We all freely share our publicly funded research, and whoever wants to use it for commercial success can try. That's how it works.

That includes the majority of the big tech companies, and why the US tends to throw money on importing expertise for these companies (for example AI frontier labs).

that's not even remotely true, just because you haven't heard of companies doesn't mean they don't exist. Though it does make sense because tech in Europe is a lot more focused on B2B than B2C, but the latter should definitely be funded more.

which regulations and bureaucracy are you talking about specifically?

there are several nuclear plants operation in Europe, some countries also just announced to restart some of their old power plants. There are no regulations that prevent any of the countries from doing it, each country makes that decision for themselves and has their own reasons to do it or not to do it

I agree with your sentiment, though I'd argue that a camera also can't do anything that a dedicated enough painter can't also do, just with a lot more labor involved. Especially if you only look at it from the result perspective (even though that's only one part of the art, that's unfortunately the only part that counts for many people)

The unfortunate truth for art is that gen AI will stay, and they will take work from artists, just like photography did from painters. There will be a niche for it at some point, and until it finds that niche people will fight over it.

I like to make the comparison to the invention of cameras. Traditional painters still found their place in art and commercial work, and photography found a place in art and photography. But if a guy with a camera took a photo and claimed its a painting, people would have been angry about finding out too (understandably so). Takes time for new media to find their place/niche in which they differ from other media in terms of art, and in terms of commercial use. Though obviously as long as people are deceptive about the use of a tool, there will always be negative connotations, and people using AI for art must accept that just not everyone is going to like it and they can't expect the same amount of praise/admiration for doing the same thing as other media with less effort (and that's fine too).

I think this has more to do with falsely claiming that you achieved something / made something that you didn't and boast about it as if you put in the effort required to do it even though you don't.

I think AI is there to stay for corporate media. The mental image of what is art and what is just a product for a company will just have to change.

Imagine how portrait painters must have felt when cameras rolled around. Yet there is a place for painting and for photography, both in art and (at least until now) in corporate media.

As long as people lie about using a tool and claim they did it with the high effort way, this won't be able to settle into a new reality without people fighting about it.

I think there will be a place for AI in art too - just not in doing the same thing as current artists are doing (and expecting the same praise for less effort), but there will be a niche for it too.

> All this admiration and attribution from my classmates would have gone down the drain, if I just told anyone how I did it.

You realize that the admiration and attribution wasn't real, because you didn't actually do what you claimed? I get that you wanted to feel the effect, but that doesn't mean NOT revealing that you didn't do what you were being praised for made it real.

Honestly, I think at this point in order to fix Meta Zuckerberg needs to go. People will never trust a company with him in charge, without him they could start to rebuild trust with people.

to be fair, there's also the issue of keeping multiple options alive for NASA. Going all in on one private provider comes with huge long term issues.

One issue is definitely that there is no tangible (economical) upside to anything other than low earth launches and now maybe the moon, and the scientific exploration, while technically cheaper now, is still expensive - and requires a lot of public funding, which hinges on public interest. I don't think the general public is still as enthusiastic about space exploration anymore, people are far more skeptical about the upside given all the problem we have down here that occupy their minds constantly.

The description does not read as if the person who had an LLM make this for them knows too much about robotics. That makes it really hard to trust the project, you don't get away with as many inefficiencies in design and code quality on limited hardware with real-time requirements. Which could still be fine for prototyping, but in the description it explicitly says it's meant for quick production ready systems. Sounds like a nightmare combination to me, or for whoever the trageted "prosumers" are.

I guess the point you're trying to make is that apps developed by LLMs don't need to be all that bad, but the problem here is that you can't know who does their due diligence with auditing their own code and who doesn't, and you can't expect potential users to do it either. Especially not when similar apps get published at increasingly faster rates.

LLMs also helps inexperienced engineers (or people who do not have any own software engineering skills themselves) to write horrible code in less time.

Of course you also can't trust everything human developers publish either, but the issue is amplified by LLMs.

Since I don't believe that any of the people in charge of the frontier labs have morals at all, my read of the situation where they call for a slowdown is rather a sign of the economics of the current pace not working out anymore. The progress is incremental, as much as they try to sell every iteration as huge leap forward. Training remains expensive and they can't reflect it in the pricing of every new model in a way that customers will accept, the improvements aren't big enough over the previous models.

Instead of saying they can't keep up the current pace (which would be read as a failure on their part) they're trying to spin the narrative that they're trying to be responsible, even though they could keep pushing.

I flagged an AI-generated ad for an online casino that is not legal where I live. They run weird filters over the logo, never say what they actually do in the audio and also don't mention the company name just "look at our logo and find us online", it seems like they try to dodge some auto detection. They also replied they investigated and concluded it did not break any rules.

this reads like a kid is jealous of the other kid getting the attention

seems that, like software engineering and other areas before, they also have to rediscover that one single monolithic solution that handles everything is too inflexible and not maintainable, it's just a bad approach. people don't need the models they use to generate their codebase to also be able to translate Shakespeare into gen-z slang

That stood out to me as well, of all the examples to use, getting a blind suggestion without any information other than "I want to build a fence" is ridiculous, who would ever want this?

Looking closer at products of megacorps is actually exactly the point of what the EU is doing - that's where the "gatekeeper" classification comes in. In order to allow a fair competition for smaller companies, dominant companies need to make sure they offer interfaces for other products. In this case, since so many people have iPhones, they are told to offer the possibility for other AI vendors to offer a replacement model instead of forcing the lock-in to Apple(Google)'s model on the device. That doesn't necessarily impact the privacy at all, unless a user would knowingly (or ignorantly) choose a less privacy-preserving alternative. Which while some users may make a wrong choice, should be their choice to make nonetheless.

that's a lot more German than I would have guessed

I get what you mean but I don't really think they are comparable, since one of them is art and the other is typically product development. Art factors in the person behind the art piece, software (or other products) does not. The value of art is tied to the skill, creativity and experience required to make it as good as it is (at least in most people's mind).

But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.

it's besides the point of the post but

> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.

I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").

one of the major limitations is the capability (of currently any computer system really) handling the uncertainties that occur in the real world. there is some interesting work done in the area of human-machine co-habitation that deals with safety issues (as in physical safety for both humans and the machines sharing the same space) and strategies to react to unforeseen events. handling the general messy, noisy real world (even in a semi controlled environment like a house) is still a major limitation even if the robots could technically be capable of doing a specific chore

regulation doesn't hinder innovation as long as it is equally enforced on everyone competing in the regulated market. it does hinder powerful and rich individuals from making more profit at the cost of the rights of the average population

what still is important though, is to look into who is meeting with them, lobbying them, and how they profit from what they're doing personally.

this last part may just be my own bias in observing politicians, but I rarely feel like the top politicians in the EU (or any of their member states really) push for things they themselves actually care about or believe is right "for the people".