Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle makes sense. Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle to run for so long that it wastes products does not.
I bought the kit (~€140) because I wanted something building with my kid, rather than spending forever debugging electronic issues and figuring out which obscure parts to buy. Under the hood it's still an ESP, so you can hack it. I 3D printed the body, so my kid chose the colours.
However the software was a bit disappointing. It has weird issues that kind of ruined the fun of it. Sure you can write your own code, but I wanted something approachable for my kid.
Plus they wanted a walking robot... so I guess this will be next :D
Depends what the end goal is. They could pull a card from the EU playbook, and through regulation effectively ban the hosting and use of open source models (read: uncertified models) by US companies.
If the only choice you have is Anthropic or OpenAI, where will the money go?
The same report said 67% of regular AI users have increased job satisfaction, so that has value. Even from an entirely capitalist mindset you cannot argue that increased satisfaction = increased wellbeing = less time on sick leave = increased productivity.
I'd want to know a lot more about how they get that number before trying to extrapolate it to a general business trend. There could be a huge self-selection bias there. Perhaps people who enjoy using AI are significantly more likely to become regular AI users. In which case, what that statistic really says might only be, "People who like a thing report that they enjoy using it."
You also have to be careful about the Hawthorne Effect. It's quite common for workplace interventions to produce improved productivity measures that are illusory or fleeting because what workers are really responding to is the novelty of the change or the simple fact that they know they're being observed.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that the benefits people are seeing right now aren't real. Just that, again, it may not translate to a sustained financial benefit that would justify a meaningful contribution to a global $6T/year rate of AI spending.
I've been using it to build things that don't exist in the market (or GitHub). Either where the product just doesn't exist, or existing products do not fully meet my requirements.
For example I got a smart cat litter box and wanted to pair it to Home Assistant. There's an existing integration for the manufacturer, but it seems that although my box has the same model number, it's a different revision with completely different data point mappings - so the existing integration doesn't work. I pointed AI at it, and it figured it out, and it works.
Could I have done it? Sure, if I'd spent an entire afternoon doing it. I don't care that much about my cat litter box though.
Right and there are also quite a few industries where Europe is way ahead of the US, to name a few:
- Railways and signalling equipment
- Container shipping
- Reinsurance
- Industrial machinery
- Wind turbine technology
- Luxury goods, luxury fashion and fast fashion
- Tourism
A big difference is that in Europe most companies are not big conglomerates. Yes everyone has heard of Siemens. But then you have tonnes of companies like WALDNER, based in a small German town with revenues of €350m, they make packaging equipment that can fill 100,000 yogurt pots per hour. Oh and they are a private company.
> What a weird one to pick. Do you think the US doesn't have massive ports like Europe?
The US has ports. But they don't build civilian ships, and they don't really own ships either. The vast majority of American ocean-going shipping is floated on ships owned by Europeans and built by East Asians
Neither the US nor Europe builds ships, they are almost all built in East Asia. China, South Korea, and Japan collectively build virtually all ships.
But of course anyone can buy and operate ships. Europe still has large shipping companies, although they are losing marketshare to Asia now, whereas the US has never been a dominant player in this area.
The US does operate some massive logistics companies that are a bit higher in the stack.
That's why it's so crazy to see Europe sabotage its shipping industry by seizing Russian ships and banning so many oil transports. That is going to result in Russia seizing European ships and the asian shipping carriers taking even more market share.
The way it worked originally was it would trigger a different system prompt, and then the permissions system would prompt you (even on YOLO mode) before running any non-readonly actions.
Cursor would also write a plan document, which was useful when working on larger tasks (due to context size). I still find that part useful today.
I think the rise of Claw's, Grok Bot and Muse is a good counterpoint to this. Yes they are still niche specialized interfaces right now, but they are basically allowing non-technical people to do things that have been easily possible with scripts and cronjobs for a long time. Its basically the Ford and faster houses analogy.
When I look around me, the only time people get their phone out of their pockets is either for youtube, some social media, or calling/chatting with people. It's very rare to even see them set reminders or use the calculator. It's look like you're in some tech bubble. People outside of that don't scripts or do repetitive and formalized stuff. The people that do create apps and services to sell.
My wife is as non-technical as it gets, but she still spends hours with ChatGPT everyday. Calorie counting, parenting tips, gardening help, fact checks, looking up celebrities, road trip planning, meal planning, health related questions, all with ChatGPT. I really don't think she's the only one. It wasn't the most downloaded iPhone app of 2025 for nothing.
This is a bizarre sentence seeing as Google is a portal for most people. So replacing Google with ChatGPT is replacing all those destination sites as well.
The use cases described above aren't really multiple applications though. They're just using a search method to get the right fact or factoid. I consider that the scope of a single "app".
Most of those websites have been complements for Google Search rather than standalone services whether they like it or not, and if chat bots replace Google Search, they'll replace the entire ecosystem.
Oh, and she also uses image generation to test redecoration ideas by asking "gipitiak" to add/remove/recolor things on room photos. That's something you can't do with Google search in any way, shape or form.
Not that this matters, because Google search alone disproves the claim that people only use phones for videos and social media.
I didn't intend to argue either way, but I feel that adding "and search" to the argument made above doesn't really weaken it. The full claim is that regular users weren't really interested in using power-user apps, so they won't be interested with a chat-bot UI either.
I do personally think that we'll see regular users interested in new, different workflows than the automation ones we associate with power users, and the image generation use case you mention is a good example. Chat-bots do seem to be owning those rather than entirely new apps.
Did everyone forget about Therac-25?
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