Asynchronous (you don't know when and where you will get Internet/local network connectivity) mesh (there is no gov infrastructure to be trusted) networking in presence of malicious (gov operated) and unreliable (destroyed by gov) nodes is probably among hardest problems known to computer science.
Mining in Arctic is a technical nightmare. Typical alloys become brittle in these temperatures, darkness severely limits operations and/or workplace accidents, transport requires ice-breakers, permafrost is fundamentally unstable (heat from buildings melts it, causing sinking), and you need to pay people a lot to work there.
This is unironically the plan some Norwegian politicians came up with. They were thinking about sending asylum seekers and/or difficult to eject immigrants to Svalbard.
Because almost everyone involved in AI race grew up in "winner takes it all" environments, typical for software, and they try really hard to make it reality. This means your model should do everything to just take 90% of market share, or at least 90% of specific niche.
The problem is, they can't find the moat, despite searching very hard, whatever you bake into your AI, your competitors will be able to replicate in few months. This is why OpenAI is striking deal with Disney, because copyright provides such moat.
Alice changed things such that code monkeys algorithms were not patentable (except in some narrow cases where true runtime novelty can be established.) Since the transformers paper, the potential of self authoring content was obvious to those who can afford to think about things rather than hustle all day.
Apple wants to sell AI in an aluminum box while VCs need to prop up data center agrarianism; they need people to believe their server farms are essential.
Not an Apple fanboy but in this case, am rooting for their "your hardware, your model" aspirations.
Altman, Thiel, the VC model of make the serfs tend their server fields, their control of foundation models, is a gross feeling. It comes with the most religious like sense of fealty to political hierarchy and social structure that only exists as hallucination in the dying generations. The 50+ year old crowd cannot generationally churn fast enough.
OpenAIs opsec must be amazing, I had fully expected some version of ChatGPT to be leaked on torrent sites at some point this year. How do you manage to avoid something that could be exfiltrated on a hard disk from escaping your servers in all cases, forever?
People who have had access to the raw weights of ChatGPT are worth more now (presumably millions in SBC) selling their credentials to other labs. Why bother with trying to leak ? In any case other labs catch-up to the capabilities within a few months.
The model size is probably the thing here. I suspect they took the FAANG remote workstation approach, where VScode runs on a remote machine. After all its not that great having a desktop with 8 monster GPUs under your desk. (x100)
Plus moving all that data about is expensive. Keeping things in the datacenter is means its faster and easier to secure.
Totally agree, people love to talk about how hopelessly behind Apple is in terms of AI progress when they’re in a better position to compete directly against Nvidia on hardware than anyone else.
Apple's always had great potential. They've struggled to execute on it.
But really, so has everyone else. There's two "races" for AI - creating models, and finding a consumer use case for them. Apple just isn't competing in creating models similar to the likes of OpenAI or Google. They also haven't really done much with using AI technology to deliver 'revolutionary' general purpose user-facing features using LLMs, but neither has anyone else beyond chat bots.
I'm not convinced ChatGPT as a consumer product can sustain current valuations, and everyone is still clamouring to find another way to present this tech to consumers.
I think a major part of it is the shovel selling. Nvidia is selling shovels to OpenAI. OpenAI is selling shovels to endless B2B, Consulting, Accounting, software firms buying into it...
> your competitors will be able to replicate in few months.
Will they really be able to replicate the quality while spending significantly less in compute investment? If not then the moat is still how much capital you can acquire for burning on training?
Oh, you mean specifically GPL v3 license, not any GPL license.
Yeah, broad tivoisation and patent clauses make it a problem, because making any patent litigation on unrelated grounds has potential to lose ability to ship the entire OS.
Is that true? If I make a product, and that product runs some embedded Linux system with GPLv3-licensed coreutils, are you confident that my product isn't infected by GPLv3?
Canonical is trying to position Ubuntu as a relevant player in the embedded space.
"Weaponized activists" was an instrument of non-market competition for a long while now.
It's kind of a more modern, more legal take on "send some mobsters to mess them up". You find (or make) an activist group opposing a certain development - and then covertly funnel funding and support to them so that they can do as much damage as possible and stall your competition for as long as possible.
Maybe for professional communications. For cases where the grid is gone, you will quickly see how quickly you stop using electricity for luxuries such as that one.
At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router running only on solar? Very seldom.
And if it has a 12-volt input, there's a good chance that can work directly from a panel between about 9 and 15, possibly even up to 20 volts. Don't quote me on that - this isn't sound engineering advice, just an idea of something that might work. If it's a 5-volt input then it probably needs a pretty accurate 5 volts. Same for NUCs and so on (again don't quote me).
You can even use a (right-sized) lead-acid battery without a charge controller, as they're pretty resilient, unlike lithium-based batteries. This will both store power for night and stabilize the voltage. The lifetime would be a bit shorter. You can literally just parallel your solar panel, battery, and whatever you want to power, and it has a pretty good chance of working.
The price of solar panels and batteries keeps falling. You can go an Amazon today and get a setup that can power a switch/router/AP 24/7 in winter for a few hundred dollars.
Try to avoid understanding this difficulty from your own shoes, but rather from the shoes of communities very limited on what is reachable to them from a technical, financial and logistical point of view.
I know you can solve it easily. I can solve it even more easily myself.
Now see any disaster area, see any remote area. Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations. Even as things settle, it is still more practical to share files directly with each other.
When you see from that perspective then you are on the domain of realistic solutions rather than keyboard level on virtual forum.
> Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations
The point here is to have it setup before the proverbial shit hits the fan.
Resiliency preparations are a fundamentally different ballgame to disaster recovery - you have more time and resources to prepare, your supply chains aren't broken yet, etc.
The hardest part of building nukes is acquiring weapon-grade enriched uranium, because it's controlled as hell and you will get bombed if you try to make your own.
If you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on enriched uranium, paying salaries for team of engineers is the easy part.
North Korea, Pakistan, India, South Africa & likely Israel didn't get bombed due to their enrichment programs.
There is a rumor that the USSR flirted with the idea of a pre-emptive strike on Mainland China to decapitate their nuclear program after the Sino-Soviet split. This did not happen obviously.
Iran didn't get bombed, although that may just be because other forms of sabotage were available.
Syria & Iraq on the other hand, yeah those got bombed. But it's not 100% a guarantee.
Conflict of interests is a real thing to worry about. I wouldn't trust scientist working in tobacco company on cigarette harm, even if I have no evidence of wrongdoing.
But there is laundry list of features that some animal does better.
Humans on whole do everything 'ok'. Humans have a lot of features, and for each feature they aren't the 'best', but on aggregate they do them all together on average better. They are one animal that combine total features better than any single animal.
Guess my point, is when it comes to 'mind' people are still thinking humans are divinely 'exceptional'. But really, it is one more 'feature' that the human animal does best, but that does not mean other animals don't have the same feature, but scaled down.
Seems like people complaining that 'bees' aren't intelligent are just trying to keep humans propped up on a pedestal. When really, it is one more feature that is scaled.
Does it effectively keep the humans on a pedestal to consider our traits as fundamentally different?
I think it is all on a continuum, humans are animals. But putting us on that continuum makes all the animals look like absolute garbage, intelligence-wise. If we want to put humans in the game, we’re going to be absolutely dunking on, like, every animal in terms of ability to abstract and teach concepts.
Technically humans are dunking on all other animals. We're killing them all rather handily.
I'm arguing against the group that think humans aren't animals, that they are imbued with some extra metaphysical secrete sauce that we are incapable of understanding.
This group usually come out strong against any of these studies that hint at some continuum that includes humans and animals on same scale. Even if humans are on far end of the scale.
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