There are various difficulties with renting GPUs, especially if your setup is very custom.
The competitor would have to port their training systems to your specific network architecture, system design, rdma Vs ethernet vs infiniband Vs nvlink etc.
Getting it running might not be too hard, but getting it running efficiently and making good use of all those flops will require considerable human effort and wall time.
Add that to the fact most frontier labs seem to have a single huge training run - and to my knowledge nobody has figured out how to distribute that training run between data centers effectively.
The demo video shows quite how rough around the edges this is....
Doesn't quite stop fast enough when you interrupt it. Can't find info quick enough so you have to change topic and then have it give you results later, etc.
This is a move in the right direction, but there is lots of engineering still to be done!
One way unions negotiate higher pay is to make sure the pool of qualified workers is restricted. Ie. Lobby for laws that a specific qualification is required, and then set caps on the number of places to earn that qualification.
In today's world of AI it's fairly easy to make your site compatible with every version of internet explorer ever.
Just tell the AI to do it. It'll find a way. The maintenance burden for you will be minimal because the AI can keep the legacy compatibility bits in sync.
There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers.
There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason.
These people just use the sites that work. They aren't computer experts, and might not even realise why half the internet doesn't work - they just think that's the way things are.
China is changing stance on patents... Thier companies are now filing for patents at great speed, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start mass suing American companies for violations.
I could totally imagine a rapid upheaval of the patent system as soon as we see it being used against us.
These cartridges were first released in 2004, and there don't seem to have been any major design changes since then. The electrical and digital interface for printing has remained the same, as well as the mechanics. There is a new DRM system using another chip, but that is one-way - ie. It prevents an original printer from using the cartridge, but doesn't prevent use of an original cartridge by a third party printer.
Any patents are probably expired or very close to it.
The cartridge heads have a super curious digital protocol - the cartridge electronics have no power supply. There is no power rail internally either.
Instead they use the fact mosfet gates have capacitance, and can therefore store 1 'bit' of information. Through a network of hundreds of MOSFETs, the right bits can be put on all the nozzle gates as needed, and then a 'fire' pulse is sent which for around a microsecond turns on a tiny heater (or not, depending on mosfet gate state). The heater boils some ink, making a pressure wave which travels down a pipe and makes a drop of ink fly out towards the paper. That heating and cooling again can happen around 10,000 times per second per nozzle (and there are ~300 nozzles).
I suspect this decision is because the custom silicon process needed to manufacture these nozzles is cheaper if they only have n type MOSFETs - and without p type MOSFETs you can't make a typical push pull logic gate.
The nozzles themselves are quite a lot of silicon - perhaps 100mm^2, with deep etched holes, and are effectively disposable, so I assume huge efforts have been taken to reduce costs - including this curious electrical design.
The protocol also is hugely irregular, which I suspect might be to avoid any wires on the chip needing to cross eachother.