It's a tale of two AIs for Google. Cloud doubled revenue and tripled profit, probably based off serving models. So good for Cloud.
Search increased revenue and profit which is good. Means that LLMs are not yet stealing revenue. But also bad because the massive spend on infrastructure doesn't look like it's going to come back as increased revenue.
Think they're going to be like Oracle. Databases were a valuable thing when they were new but became free with postgres. Like Oracle Anthropic et al will move up the value chain.
Should be obvious why any correspondence related to something over an 8 year span is expensive. To fulfill that you have to read or at least glance at every single email.
You have to request specific keyword searches and go from there.
At least in Atlanta it seems like a lot of production bounced to even cheaper locales as tax subsidies became a bit less generous. We're at like half our 2022 peak dollar wise.
I paid $48 for $0.97 worth of gas last month. About $40 to the public gas company for the hookup, $5.95 in a service fee to the private supplier and the balance tax.
That was what struck me about the article. No doubt withdrawal is real but baseline for the author seems to be symptomatic anxiety. The focus on withdrawal as the single overwhelming cause is typical of the people I know with anxiety. They seem to be always searching for the one magic trick that will make them better. Which of course never does.
There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins. Maybe it's easier now but power has always been very concentrated. Think the impact the internet has is that we all know about it now.
I don't know how much stock should be put in these numbers. Here in Atlanta there was widespread cheating organized by teachers and principals to game the results.
With NCLB test scores became very important. With Every Child Succeeds they became less so. The difference could simply be how much incentive is there to game the scores.
Yes, but 7-8 companies have shown they can build that goose. LLMs are going to end up like databases or operating systems. It's very hard to compete with free.
The value is the user data that collects overtime and using that to become sticky for customers
Think of it more in terms of market cap. Google is worth 4.3 trillion dollars. They're spending on AI to protect that and others are spending on AI in the hopes of becoming that. The golden goose is serving ads and the fight is over who gets to do that.
Eh, I don't think today is really all that different from the last 100 years. We as software engineers may feel different as it's (maybe) our turn in the barrel.
Most and maybe close to all Drs get paid or a bonus on RVUs (relative value units). A system that seems indistinguishable from a salesman's commission to me.
Maybe I'm just cynical but this seems suspiciously like snake oil. Seems impossible to exclude the placebo effect and the improvements are self reported (more or less).
A lot of SAAS is easy to duplicate but not a lot of it is. The barrier is market/mind share. Something like Slack is easy enough to duplicate that many companies did. But everyone still uses Slack because that's what everyone is familiar with.
Yes! When ever I read comments like this it always makes me think the poster has led a much more charmed life than I have. Every institution we have that makes major decisions is an impenetrable mass of bureaucracy that takes forever. Give me the quick automated decision every time
Only in the most literal sense. In a far more accurate sense what we are talking about is land where people want to live and that does grow, more or less, with population growth. It's only a handful of cities with geography that makes desirable land fixed.
Okay, but in other cases it's not like that. They bring spouses, siblings, and parents who can turn bring their own spouses, siblings, and parents. That is severely curtailed these days by country restrictions so I agree that it's not 14 but it's higher than 1.
That's not that far out of line. Spouse, children, two sets of parents and two sets of siblings. You're right that it's probably not 14 on average but 5-10 easily
It's an interesting philosophic question. LLMs tend to be overly verbose and defensive in coding. It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human. But if a human is not writing the code how much does that matter?
I agree that they have gotten shockingly good. It's been a long time since I've seen them do something that is objectively wrong. Once we get closer to the "too cheap to meter" cost level things will change radically again.