Even if your optimism had some basis in reality, about 12 guys with $5 serrated pocket knives bought on aliexpress could knock out 80% of communications in under an hour. Fiber optic strands are alarmingly tiny, and wrapped in day-glo orange plastic tubing making them intentionally easy to find.
For whatever reason it's taboo to talk about how fragile infrastructure is, but if you wanted to shut something like comm links down, that's a problem for whoever installs the new judiciary. Chances are, whoever gets the job of being the new judiciary is likely to rule it as acceptable use of emergency powers.
> what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are
Seems like they are waiting for the "slope of enlightenment" on the gartner hype curve to flatten out. Given you can just lease or buy a SOTA model from leading vendors there's no advantage to training your own right now. My guess is that the LLM/AI landscape will look entirely different by 2030 and any 5 year plan won't be in the same zip code, let alone playing field. Leasing an LLM from Google with a support contract seems like a pretty smart short term play as things continue to evolve over the next 2-3 years.
This is the key. The real issue is that you don’t need superhuman intelligence in a phone AI assistant. You don’t need it most of the time in fact. Current SOTA models do a decent job of approximating college grad level human intelligence let’s say 85% of the time which is helpful and cool but clearly could be better. But the pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating AND they are getting more energy efficient and memory efficient. So if something like DeepSeek is roughly 2 years behind SOTA models from Google and others who have SOTA models then in 2030 you can expect 2028 level performance out open models. There will come a time when a model capable of college grad level intelligence 99.999% of the time will be able to run on a $300 device. If you are Apple you do not need to lead the charge on a SOTA model, you can just wait until one is available for much cheaper. Your product is the devices and services consumers buy. If you are OpenAI you have no other products. You must become THE AI to have in an industry that will in the next few years become dominated by open models that are good enough or to close up shop or come up with another product that has more of a moat.
My impression is that solar (and maybe wind?) energy have benefited from learning-by-doing [1][2] that has resulted in lower costs and/or improved performance each year. It seems reasonable to me that a similar process will apply to AI (at least in the long run). The rate of learning could be seen as a "pace" of improvement. I'm curious, do you have a reference for the deceleration of pace that you refer to?
1) the dearth of new (novel) training data. Hence the mad scramble to hoover up, buy, steal, any potentially plausible new sources.
2) diminishing returns of embiggening compute clusters for training LLMs and size of their foundation models.
(As you know) You're referring to Wright's Law aka experience learning curve.
So there's a tension.
Some concerns that we're nearing the ceiling for training.
While the cost of applications using foundation models (implementing inference engines) is decreasing.
Someone smarter than me will have to provide the slopes of the (misc) learning curves.
I don't think anyone really knows, because there's no objective standard for determining progress.
Lots of benchmarks exist where everyone agrees that higher scores are better, but there's no sense in which going from a score of 400 to 500 is the same progress as going from 600 to 700, or less, or more. They only really have directional validity.
I mean, the scores might correspond to real-world productivity rates in some specific domain, but that just begs the question -- productivity rates on a specific task are not intelligence.
Seems like the LLM landscape is still evolving, and training your own model provides no technical benefit as you can simply buy/lease one, without the overhead of additional eng staffing/datacenter build-out.
I can see a future where LLM research stalls and stagnates, at which point the ROI on building/maintaining their own commodity LLM might become tolerable. Apple has had Siri as a product/feature and they've proven for the better part of a decade that voice assistants are not something they're willing to build a proficiency in. My wife still has an apple iPhone for at least a decade now, and I've heard her use Siri perhaps twice in that time.
And if you wanted to build your own data center right now there’s only so much GPU and RAM to go around, and even all the power generation and cooling manufacturers are booked solid.
The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I will plug in a new device via HDMI.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
"I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight."
Ha! The Sharp color TV here in the kitchen is now nearly 48 years old (bought in 1978) and still functions well but with the addition of a set top box/PVR although its remote control has been repaired many times (but the TV itself has never needed maintenance).
Other flat screen TVs have no internet access or are used monitor style with separate STBs/PVRs. As I mentioned on HN some weeks ago, if the trend continues and manufacturers booby-trap sets into planned obsolescence, I'll buy only monitors and connect them via HDMI to a TV feed.
My ancient Sharp TV shouts at me that these days there's something terribly wrong with domestic electronic appliances.
Right now I start chatting with a separate LLM about the issue, the best structure for maintainability and then best libraries for the job, edge and corner cases, how to handle those, and then have it spit out a prompt and a checklist. If it has a UI I'll draw something in paint and refine it before having the LLM describe it in detail and primary workflow etc. and tell it to format it for an agent to use. That will usually get me a functional system on the first try which can then be iterated on.
That's for complicated stuff. For throw-away stuff I don't need to maintain past 30 days like a script I'll just roll the dice and let it rip.
Yeah, this is a good idea. I will have a Claude chat session and a Claude Code session open side by side too.
Like a manual sub agents approach. I try not to pollute the Claude code session context with meanderings to much. Do that in the chat and bring the condensed ideas over.
He was coming off the high of being the "star" of the new Star Wars movies. He was a main character in the story but not The main character. I recall watching these on physical DVD via netflix in ~2008 and wondering why he seemed (what we now casually call) entitled; I'd been watching the series for ~3-4 episodes before it clicked with me that he was one of the actors from star wars, despite being a long time star wars fan. He was definitely entitled, the blow up was centered around KTM not being interested in what a Star Wars actor was doing and not taking him seriously. I distinctly recall seeing him cry, or almost cry on camera.
That said, ignoring that drama, the rest of the series was quite good, when they published "The long way Down" from Scotland to South Africa I jumped on that and watched it as well. Someone else pointed out they did an EV thing from Argentina to... Alaska? with Rivian, I might go look at that too.
I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.
My work uses GSuite so I’m using Meet every day. I find it mildly useful to have the functionality built into the Gmail app but at the same time I see zero loss in having it be a separate app.
Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.
Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.
Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
That's probably regional then. In my area most people using watches nowadays are usually into sports.
I must admit I don't understand the point of a smart watch when most people have their smartphone in their hand a significant amount of time a day and said smartphones screen sizes have been increasing over the year because people want to be able to doom scroll at pictures and videos and interact with whatsapp all day. I don't know how you can do that from a tiny screen on a watch.
Those like me who don't subscribe to that way of living don't want distractions and notification so they use regular watches and would see as a regression a device that needs to be charged every few days.
Some people said payments but I see peolle paying with their smartphone all the time since they have it at hands or in a pocket very close anytime having it in a watch doesn't look like a sigmificant improvement. I'd be curious to see a chart of smartwatch adoption by country.
Apple watches have the highest marketshare in a lot of the world's markets. According to this analysis[1], watchOS (Apple watches) make up around half of all smartwatches used in Europe. Global sales puts Apple around 20-30% market share, with brands like Samsung and Garmin around 8% [2]. I haven't found good US-only statistics to show what the market share is of watchOS is, but I'd imagine its probably close to 50% or more.
I do agree though, anecdotal experiences will vary depending on the kind of people you hang out with. For the people I know heavily into running and cycling, brands like Garmin are over represented. Meanwhile lots of other consumers practically don't even know these are options.
I should have a valid license for windows, my Win 8 Pro license (which I paid full price for, like $150) should have worked for Windows 10 (and then transfered to 11) but it's not working anymore for whatever reason, I probably upgraded without disabling the key somewhere or whatever. So when I use Windows I have that "activation required" nag watermark now. When microsoft finally remotely kills my unactivated windows 10 install (a week from now? 6 months?) I'm just not going back. The only reason I dual boot these days is fusion 360 CAD and there's a steam install on there so it's probably showing up as a windows install even though I haven't played games on there in probably years.
Windows will probably continue on forever simply due to inertia but this "you have to have a web login to use your private computer" b.s. is going to turn off a lot of consumers, and this will be the watershed moment where Proton/Wine finally moves from 5, to 10 or 15% of users
For whatever reason it's taboo to talk about how fragile infrastructure is, but if you wanted to shut something like comm links down, that's a problem for whoever installs the new judiciary. Chances are, whoever gets the job of being the new judiciary is likely to rule it as acceptable use of emergency powers.
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