511–520 of 978 posts
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You're fixating on what's a meaningless blip in the story; the technological world was built on post-WW2 US spending that ended 40+ years ago .
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I'm pretty sure it isn't assumed. My main example has been the same since COVID, as insurance is probably the business you can compare 1-1 the most. Public health insurance in my country, in the last 20 years used 6-9% (depending on the year) of the taxes send to them as administrative overhead, meaning that for each 100 euro that you paid for health insurance, 91-95 are used to pay doctors, hospitals and medication.…
Cherry picked examples don't prove that it isn't context dependent.
Administrative costs for insurance are very easy to verify, and the facts stay consistent across countries. If i cherry picked something, it is the admin overhead for US insurers. US health care insurers are particulary effective with their average of 14% admin overhead, SwissLife, that used to be my private insurer, had a year with 30%, which make the comparison quite unfair).
The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…
I think this is all true, but that unlike with Moore's law and improved PC tooling and capabilities, we also have essentially existing biological evidence that there should be a way to create much better intelligent systems in terms of training, memory, and efficiency. With classic PC evolution we didn't even have that evidence but still could make a relatively strong inference (Moore's law). But here we basically ha…
Yep, unfortunately they all make their models retarded on purpose.
-George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb
I think AI now belongs in this dichotomy too. And we know that they are more like alarm clocks than battleships. Most of us do not need to learn the bitter lesson, we just need a little droid that turns .xlsx documents into .pdf documents for our client, an average here, editing out the ham sandwiches there. Simple little actions that take time and human-like effort but not human-like creativity and conscious thought. Things we used to have literate slaves and serfs do back in the days of triremes and guncotton.
Sure, the large battleship like LLMs will have some need, but the alarm-clock like LLMs are going to be good enough for enterprise-grade.
It's basically American VCs vs the China the state. I'm not optimistic for the US at this point, given how much China cares about it and how much talent they have. And how much they're putting into hardware and the whole ecosystem. Meanwhile we have pro basketball players with no understanding of reality being celebrities for decrying data centers because...land?
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"Stop pilfering what I rightfully stole!"
It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is. It is fair to say you stole our multi-billion dollar intellectual output in that scenario.
80% of startups using Chinese models is meaningless without knowing what proportion of spend and what proportion use American models.
The companies’ own claims are also not great evidence.
(I personally think the Chinese companies are winning and losing and the best evidence is Pareto frontier graphs from AA and Arena, which show Chinese companies winning in some segments but but definitely not a strong majority.)
Overall, with such a weak article and this hitting HN front page, what we learn from this is that a lot of people want these companies to win, which is interesting in and of itself.
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in case of chatgpt/anthropic, the LLM model simply represents the hypocrisy of their owners
You miss spelled the word stupidity. Anthropic is, in particular, bent about safety. The problem is they are concerned about yesterday's threats. The models that are out, and can be run locally, already open a pandoras box of concerns that we will never be able to put back.
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They resisted the idea because it did kill their legacy business. Kodaks peak was 16 billion in revenue in 1996. The digital camera market will be approaching that level of value inflation adjusted around 2030. 35 years to get back to status quo. Putting a bullet in a golden goose is often considered a bad idea. Everyone is happy they are dead, but if you can't understand why they might try to keep the corpse alive y…
Kodak was definitely mismanaged in many ways but you are correct in your analysis. If they had pivoted hard to digital they could have been what today? Nikon? Fujifilm? These are known brands that are bigger than Kodak is today but they are nothing compared to what Kodak was. At its peak Kodak was one of the (the?) most well known brands on the entire planet. Anywhere in the world if someone snapped a photo Kodak was…
Having the first portable-ish digital camera they could have seen the true value of Fairchild's CCD business, got a stake/bought it/replicated done whatever it took to push the frontier of digital imaging and became the Kodak (old, film-era Kodak) of electronic imaging?
There's no comparable business today because all the things they could have invested in ended up being taken up by different companies, they had the R&D culture, revenue, and distribution. I don't see why they couldn't have been category defining.