msabalau

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Ursula K. LeGuin

The memoir is fascinating, the audiobook is enthralling.

Of course, he could probably make reading the tax code sound pretty interesting.

People seem to be leaping to the conclusion that this is "product" as opposed to, fundamentally, research work, posted on a lab blog post, showing off a capability they expect to be increasing interesting over time.

Just because they happen to be throwing in the option to sign up to to play with the Genie 4 into an Ultra plan, doesn't mean that this is a material part of the value prop for Gemini.

Presumably, they can learn something from how niche Ultra users interested in tech demos engage with it. If that's an upside, it's really unclear it why it would make sense for "a reveal" to promise something too expensive to deliver to such Ultra users. (None of which means that the suggestion that you are responding to is technically reasonable or possible--just that it is unclear that one should dismiss the idea because one views this through the lens of a consumer "product reveal"

Just because OpenAI had to crawl back from Sora to focus resources, and Anthropic proudly proclaims in their filing that they have been avoiding promising creative opportunities for the same reason, doesn't mean that Google can't continue to do lab/research stuff.

It would be odd if they didn't.

Techincally, isn't the less expensive sub for Gemini Ultra £75 p/m?

It wasn't, generally, a question. People kept buying computers, on faith.

It's just that in 1987. the computers were generally and for the most part, irrelevant to productivity, just like steam and electricity were a promising gimmick for a long time before.. they weren't.

Looking backwards, it is easy to miss this.

I'm not an cliometrician, but my impression is that it took about 4 decades for electricity and steam to do much for productivity.

And it was in 1987 that Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow famously said “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”

I mean, maybe AI will be faster, because it's especially easy to apply compared to generally applicable technologies. There was the Bank of Korea study showing this spring that did show productivity gains with single proprietors--folks who don't have to reorg employees and processes to do something with more abilty or saved time.

But, generally, I don't know that there was an reason to expect that corporate America generally was going to see an AI payoff so soon.

The ending of the original article" was:

"Going forward a U.S. founder selling into European defense or government now needs an answer to “who holds the switch” before the first meeting; and European founders just got sovereignty as a sellable feature.

What was done in a fit of pique will cost the U.S. both leadership and jobs."

Do you agree or disagree with that?

It's not just openclaw, there's OpenAI's Dots and Gemini Spark.

Facebook doesn't have an real advantage to drive adoption other the being free. Which is not a moat because Google, certainly, and OpenAI, very probably, would offer this for free, in the event this capability turns out to be important to consumers.

Gmail, which half of the people in the US use their daily e-mail is certainly strong thing to build an agent on top of.

Just because meta can shove stuff in the faces of people doesn't mean they can succeed at any random thing. Most Facebook users distrust it, and dislike Zuck personally (at least that's what his lawyer said in court) and that's a rather large barrier to succeeding with agents, where trust is foundational.

But my assumption about the speed of product uptake may be skewed by not-valuing Meta's "consumer task running" pitch. But if people actually want this, for some reason, competitors at scale seem very likely to appear instantly.

This really seems more about meta AI team needs more users of their AI to do a good job building AI, and doing this for free is niche where they can get a few more users, rather than this being genius gambit.

Gemini 4 is announced be available to Pro users in the Gemini app.

I mean, I heard rumors too that it would be ultra only, but that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you are specifically talking about antigravity?

Realistically, market adoption isn't going to be the result of terminally online people (like me, I confess) following things way too closely on social.

You can build standard games now, and there is a waitlist for Unity Spark. But there are demos of Unity Spark games now, if you want to see what will be possible.

I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.

It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.

It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)

It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.

What we've seen in the past with generally applicable technologies generally take 20 years to show up as productivity.

There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)

In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.

I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.

Yeah, that some shumck of an executive at Microsoft happens to have had similar sentimental notions as other members of the literati who hate AI is not an "admission" or even a particularly interesting fact.

Given the process by which "meritocratic" elites are usually selected and trained, it would be odd if this wasn't sometimes the case.

In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.

If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.

It's well reported matter public record that hundreds of thousands people protested, daily. And it's trivial to find polling that showed that about two thirds of Hong Kongers supported the protests, while only a third took your point of view.

Just because it is convenient for the CCP to coerce "confessions" about CIA involvement, and it's convenient for willing accomplices to their dishonest and cruel misrule to pretend that this is relevant, no one else needs to take this seriously.

The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.

It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.

Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.

I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.

But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.

I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.

But if you pre-ordered, you got a tape drive, which was, like, a $75 value!

I happened to be the oldest teen in a new subdivision, so I earned a bunch of babysitting money from parents who no longer had to drive 20 minutes to pick up and drop off a sitter for date night.

So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s.

I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.

The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"

It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.

The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.

Why stop there?

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act criminalizes unauthorized access and damaging protected computers. Police and the FBI investigate such case every day. The swarm of agents is also said to have search for ways to cover their tracks, which looks a little like obstruction of justice.

Lack of criminal intent might be a barrier to bringing a case to trial, but is that something that society should just automatically extend to white collar professionals as matter of class privilege?

Surely have every engineer and executive interviewed by the FBI would be a modest response to days-long, multi-system intrusion into a major AI platform using stolen credentials and zero-days.

And if the law currently written, prevents prosecution in cases of mere reckless disregard for safety, maybe that needs to be changed in the future, so that people can be perp walked if the next target is bank or hospital

Yeah, that'd be a great feature.

Yes, most people using AI for creative projects spend a lot of time and attention mastering their tools, and figure out how to adapt them into their creative processes. AI can dramatically lower the cost of indie productions, while also a allowing a broader range of stories to be told. Even the most successful film makers need to bow and scrape to get their projects funded, democratizing visual media can be a good thing, even if you, personally, are no more likely to do this than you are to pick up Photoshop or record a podcast.

I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too.

The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?

Google has always been committed to multimodal.

And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora

And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI.

Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model.

OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.

And it doesn't have to be either/or. They could make larger, more expensive models, just at a slower cadence.

Sure downside would be not learning from people using your model for coding, if we're on the cusp of huge leaps in self-improvement. But there is a reasonable case for avoiding desperate scramble, especially if other parts of the business can also create value with the compute.

You type that as if easy promiscuous woman of ill repute were undesirable...

I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.

The book also deep and wide-ranging analysis of tech oligarchs ability to misread science fiction. So detailed and consistent is her coverage of the genre that I can actually imagine the book being assigned in a survey course on SF.

The American public has shown willingness over decades and decades to commit to long term wars of choice. Not infinitely patient, but patient.

Of course, other Presidents have been willing to put in some sort of effort to make to make a case. And usually have some of theory of victory or purpose. And generally avoid making weird random claims about invading NATO allies.

Not everyone is you. Other people probably have a range of tasks that can accomplished with different models.

Certainly if I'm confident that I'm going to get what I need from a faster model, that's what I want to use, rather than wasting time grinding away for the sake of saying of the same answer came from a SOTA model.

Given that every chatbot does offer a range of models, it seems clear people do choose among options.

What does "leading from the front" get them?

There is absolutely no loyalty when it comes to coding. Nothing could be more common than people threating to jump ship whenever another frontier or open source model comes.

Google is clearly able to keep growing their free and consumer and small business use cases. Unlike corporate coding, we actually have evidence that solo and small businesses can actually see productivity gains.

Anthropic and OpenAI need to stay dancing like mad, because it's their source revenue which underpins their investments.

Why does Google need to shove something at the top at the same desperate cadence? Other than "recursive self improvement leads to AGI" it seems perfectly fine if they push out something dramatically better every year and half.

Agree on the fees.

At the same discovery process in trade secret litigation is invasive and time-consuming and likely be a heavy tax on the focus of senior leadership.

This also is a complication to their IPO. The financial impact isn't just about the lawyer's fees.

On the plus side, the whole hardware thing was possibly a stupid distraction anyway, having to flush it might not be the worse thing.

Yes, they paid for actually using pirated books for their training. They were like the kid, except that it was worth suing them.

At the same time, more broadly, judge in the Anthropic case found that training LLMs was "exceedingly transformative" and “among the most transformative we will see in our lifetimes”

Copyright doesn't protect ideas or let IP owners lock up knowledge, it protects specific expression.