Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.
18,061 karma · joined June 2, 2013
In this case - the concept of using automated computing devices to manipulate numbers that represent ideas at arbitrary levels of abstraction was, by 1930, nearly an entire century old. Talkie's myopic viewpoint does not represent the most farsighted viewpoint, merely the average. So if, in 1930, you had read the writings of Ada Lovelace, gotten very excited, and wanted to figure out how to pitch it to investors - Talkie might have been very useful.
I do not love that it is a heavy electron app that takes many seconds to launch on my mid-spec machine and burns 20% of an entire CPU core the entire time it is running.
Why can't we have a simple command line tool that works?
No it hasn't.
No it hasn't, this is climate change denialist nonsense. In fact no less a figure than ExxonMobil correctly predicted the trajectory of global CO2 levels and corresponding increase in warming as far back as the 1970s and their predictions remain accurate today.
Is there a threshold? Can we define a principle that covers the entire range?
It seems clear that in the ideal scenario, people's freedoms should not be curtailed merely because there exist other people who would do unproductive things with that freedom. And on the other hand it seems clear that "freedom" to engage or not engage with deliberately targeted highly addictive things is not meaningful, and "individual responsibility" as an organizing principle of society only takes you so far.
It's kinda like saying a car with a 6L engine will always outperform a car with a 2L engine. There are so many different engineering tradeoffs, so many different things to optimize for, so many different metrics for "performance", that while it's broadly true, it doesn't mean you'll always prefer the 6L car. Maybe you care about running costs! Maybe you'd rather own a smaller car than rent a bigger one. Maybe the 2L car is just better engineered. Maybe you work in food delivery in a dense city and what you actually need is a 50cc moped, because agility and latency are more important than performance at the margins.
And if you're the only game in town, and you only sell 6L behemoths, and some upstart comes along and starts selling nippy little 2L utility vehicles (or worse - giving them away!) you should absolutely be worried about your lunch. Note that this literally happened to the US car industry when Japanese imports started becoming popular in the 80s...
But yes this is a non-sequitor. The original question was "What competitive advantage does OpenAI/Anthropic has when companies like Qwen/Minimax/etc are open sourcing models that shows similar (yet below than OpenAI/Anthropic) benchmark results?"
Even if you don't trust Chinese companies, and you want a hosted model, you can always pay a third party to host a Chinese open weight model. And it'll be a lot cheaper than OpenAI.
>What if you need to reduce number of layers
Delete some.
> and/or width of hidden layers?
Randomly drop x% of parameters. No doubt there are better methods that entail distillation but this works.
> would the process of "layers to add" selection be considered training?
Er, no?
> What if you still have to obtain the best result possible for given coefficient/tokenization budget?
We don't know how to get "the best result possible", or even how to define such a thing. We only know how to throw compute at an existing network to get a "better" network, with diminishing returns. Re-using existing weights lowers the amount of compute you need to get to level X.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322887
You say the largest niche is software production. Okay, let's talk about that. If the jury is still out then the jury is asleep. When ChatGPT first came out - the GPT3 days, years ago, before "vibe code" was even a term - an artist friend of mine who never wrote a line of code in his life straight-up vibe coded 3d visuals to accompany a performance of the band he was in. In Processing, which he'd never heard of until ChatGPT suggested it to him. Do you realize what this means? Normies can use computers now. Actually use, not just consume. You can describe what you want and the computer will do it - will even ask you for clarification if your specification is too ambiguous. Hell, it will even educate you about the subject matter, meeting you at exactly your level, in your favorite writing style.
If you are still thinking in terms of whether vibe coded software is "copyrightable" or whether LLMs are useful for "selling software", you are a blacksmith scoffing that cars are pointless because they don't need horseshoes. Your entire framework is obsolete.
Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI. They can converse in natural language, recall any common fact off the top of their heads, do research online and synthesize new information, translate between different human languages (and explain the nuances involved), translate a vague hand wavey description into working source code (and explain how it works), find security vulnerabilities, and draw SVGs of pelicans on bicycles. All in one singularly mind-blowing piece of tech.
The age of computers that just do what you tell them to, in plain language, is upon us! My God, just look at the front page! Are we on the same HN?
Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
>it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones
Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
It really depends on your perspective.
In the real world, everything runs on physics, so short of invoking quantum indeterminacy, everything is deterministic - especially software, including things like /dev/random and programs with nasty race conditions. That makes the term useless.
The way we use "determinism" in practice depends contextually on how abstracted our view of the system is, how precise our description of our "inputs" can be, and whether a chunked model can predict the output. Many systems, while technically a fixed input/output mapping, exhibit an extreme and chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions. If the relevant features of those initial conditions are also difficult to measure, or cannot be described at our preferred level of abstraction, then actually predicting ("determining") the output is rendered impractical and we call it "non-deterministic". Coin tosses, race conditions, /dev/random - all fit this description.
And arguably so do LLMs. At the "token" level of abstraction, LLMs are indeed deterministic - given context C, you will always get token T. But at the "semantic" level they are chaotic, unstable - a single token changed in the input, perhaps even as minor as an extra space after a period, can entirely change the course of the output. You understand this, of course. You call it "prompt instability" and compare it to human performance. But no one would call humans deterministic either!
That is what people mean when they say LLMs are not deterministic. They are not misusing the word. It just depends on your perspective.
Nevertheless, worth looking at the Vulkan builds. They work on all GPUs!
It starts out buttery smooth but over time its performance slows to a crawl. Changing window geometry seems to do some sort of garbage collection and it speeds back up. I just hit F11 twice real quick.
The optimal strategy is to try and make the trip parabolically with a single large burn at liftoff.
Gravity physics is of course symmetrical on ascent and descent, so the optimum time to start your deceleration burn is approximately when your downward velocity is equal to whatever your upward velocity was when you stopped burning.
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
With no natural predators to thin the herd… it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most… and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.