It's not just democracy, but also huge population growth and population clustering. People moving from the country to the city as jobs increasingly moved into the city.
Today's frontier models are strong enough to be useful even if no further progress is made. The knowledge cutoff is a bit inconvenient, but with web search and in context learning, it can pick up new library versions or programming languages just fine.
Sure, but if the companies start competing on price they become commodities and their valuations collapse, leading to knock-on effects everywhere (eg all the circular financing also collapses). I'm not saying this is a bad thing.
I agree that by what we are seeing so far, there is no magic secret sauce on the horizon. The tech is not super hard to understand and develop, such that hiring a few capable ex-employees of the big labs can help you build a new one. Any big step in capabilities has been quickly matched by the other labs so far, including agentic AI but also image and video generation.
Also, "circular financing" is a meme. A private company cannot create money, there is no circularity. NVIDIA may buy services from OpenAI and also sell them GPUs. If a lumberjack buys eggs from his neighbor and also sells him wood to improve his chicken coop, that's not circular financing, just business happening in both directions.
It's more like the lumberjack is lending money to the farmer so the farmer can buy his wood. (NVIDIA doesn't consume tokens). If the tokens (eggs) suddenly become much unprofitable then the AI labs aren't going to need as many GPUs (lumber for hen houses) and the borrowed money won't be paid back. Or perhaps more accurately, has even less chance of being paid back than it does now, which is not a high chance.
A little bit like electricity plants. Countries will nationalise for sovereignty reasons, as China already does probably. And that’s not bad for people given current trajectory.
That was not my point. I agree with you that producers of these models should be able to extract value from their models, I'm just surprised that everyone expects free models. There's a real cost in producing those.
> I'm just surprised that everyone expects free models. There's a real cost in producing those.
There's a lot of free stuff incurring "real costs" in its production, one more or less doesn't make a shred of difference.
> I agree with you that producers of these models should be able to extract value from their models.
Nobody is stopping them from extracting value but they fail despite being placed in a very advantageous position vis-a-vis others, which tells me, they should call it quits or go open like everybody sane.
Open is the way to go, nothing else works in the field of AI, that's the bitter lesson closed labs are yet to learn.
And yet we can and we should still make distinctions when we talk about those subjects
Estimates for the death toll of US and British strategic bombing, for instance, range from 300,000 to 600,000 in Europe and around 330,000 in Japan (including the atomic bombings)
Now compare that with 12–17 million civilians killed deliberately by Nazi Germany and the around 6 millions killed deliberately by imperial Japan
We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized. And on average that means it’s not better than what a qualified professional can produce, but it’s good enough, and good value for money. Just like IKEA furniture is not better than anything that a skilled carpenter can create, but most of us settle on industrialized furniture because we don’t have the budget for better, or we prefer to spend it elsewhere. Similarly, most companies don’t need bespoke posters nor software.
> We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized.
What do you mean by "just accept"? Should professional graphic designers give up their profession? Should they stop advocating for legal protections of their work?
Yes, why would government suddenly start protecting workers when we never cared in the past? Our society only cares about money, cheaper and faster. We’ve automated so many jobs, including the carpenters, but soon also all drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and thousands of other jobs. And realistically, most customers don’t see the difference between average and high quality from a skilled professional. They just want cheap.
And what are graphic designers going to protect? AI is not allowed to make designs? Or the style of a specific designer is not to be copied by anybody else, AI or human? Many graphic designers produce work in the same style, are you going to prohibit that as well?
I thought it was a fine informative readme, starts with the problem, outlines the core of the solutions, and some limitations. Everything I want to know in the first few paragraphs. No need to spend human time to improve it.
An llm response here would be more respectful than a downvote without a comment.
And it’s quite disrespectful to dismiss a project that may have taken a lot of time and thought, even with agents, to build, and just dismiss it because the readme was created by an agent.
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