The F35 program is essential! When the USA will finally conquer free healthcare?
1,297 karma · joined November 30, 2016
These week announcements are effectively Google doing a rug pull to its customers. Now simple changes cannot be done anymore within antigravity without it to consume its full quota.
Personally I downgraded my Google One subscription. I cannot justify paying Pro anymore, and thankfully I'm not AI dependent enough to pay Ultra.
Yesterday I went to a bookstore: saw an interesting book cover then I thought "ah, looks like AI"... all excitement went away. There won't be a "new complexity frontier" for artists that used to draw book covers. Or writers, actors, writers, etc.
AI is currently not enabling any use case which previously was "too hard". It is just reducing the value of stuff by increasing the offer and making people delulu about what they can achieve without proper knowledge.
Making good stuff requires paying attention to a lot of details. Even "simple" stuff can become incredible complex once you actually learn about how it must be done. Most of what we humans do is working on that space, not chasing projects Manhattans.
What do we get if population is disconnected of the true complexity of creating stuff? Perceived value decreases and if everything is perceived equally bad people will stop caring about quality. That is why fascism likes uneducated people.
So, that is about the AI contribution to "value" itself.
Now, is it true that AI will allow us to create more complex stuff that is not practical now? I would strongly disagree. The reason is Kolmogorov complexity: it is not possible to find the shortest program that describes a task. Describing it with natural language will not magically give us permission to avoid having to describe that complexity. What is the point of switching from C to English, if I still have to specify every little detail in a much ambiguous and verbose language? Programming languages are not the challenge, they are the solution to the problem of having to specify complex tasks in a reproducible way.
Now gathering everything together: that is why I think that generative AI makes things worthless: value reduction, complexity perception reduction (which reduces value), a population ignorant of the complexity will choose subpar options because "they are all the same garbage" and we will not get any superior engineering capability anyway.
The difference is that now it is worthless: there is no learning, no person caring about the result, nothing aspirational for the public to look towards... we used to enjoy those challenges, used to be proud of solving complex problems... now? Yeah, whatever, execute execute commit push, let another LLM "review" and call it a day.
S3 is simple for the users, not the operators. For replicating something like S3 you need to manage a lot of parts and take a lot of decisions. The design space is huge:
Replication: RAID, distributed copies, distributed erasure codes...
Coordination: centralized, centralized with backup, decentralized, logic in client...
How to handle huge files: nope, client concats them, a coordinator node concats them...
How will be the network: local networking, wan, a mix. Slow or fast?
Nature of storage: 24/7 or sporadically connected.
How to handle network partitions, pick CAP sides...
Just for instance: network topology. In your own DC you may say each connection has the same cost. In AWS you may want connections to stay in the same AZ, use certain IPs for certain source-destination to leverage cheaper prices and so on...
The zip first suggestion seems that would be really inconvenient for around 95.8% of the world population.
Here all databases with personal information must be registered there and data must be secure.
In particular, put attention to this:
""" What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return. Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded. """
Some people may want translation, mostly people that only speak a single language. But for most bilingual people, being forced a translation (a lower quality one), is a worse experience. I'm surprised that no one at Google has pushed back this anti-user behavior. It is like no one at Google knows more than one language.
The worst part is when traveling. Google ignores the browser settings, so it throws me Japanese or German website, even if my browser settings clearly says English then Spanish.
However, now I prefer to write directly in English and consider whatever grammar/ortographic error I have as part of my writing style. I hate having to rewrite the LLM output to add myself again into the text.
In a probability distribution model, the model is always forced to output a probability for a set of tokens, even if all the states are non sense. In an energy based model, the model can infer that a states makes no sense at all and can backtrack by itself.
Notice that diffusion models, DINO and other successful models are energy based models, or end up being good proxies of the data density (density is a proxy of entropy ~ information).
Finally, all probability models can be thought as energy based, but not all EBM output probabilities distributions.
So, his argument is not against transformers or the architectures themselves, but more about the learned geometry.
Do not offer me calls to action, I hate them.