> I don't think many consumers (outside of hardcore games) could tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 10 years ago to the graphics from a game of today
My half blind aunt could probably tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 2016 and 2026 if you put them side by side.
Were video game graphics "good enough" for a while now? I’d say yes, with the exception of vr. But to say there has been no noticeable improvement over the last 10 years is silly.
GTA 6 is coming out soon. I’d invite you to actually compare the visuals of gta 6 vs the original gta 5 from 2014 that was released for ps4 (rather than the 2022 enhanced version for consoles or 2015 version for pc which shouldn’t be compared to non-pc gta 6, since 6 for pc will also get a significant facelift).
Benchmarks look really promising. Suspiciously good, even. I guess we’ll see soon enough.
My question to previewers: how are the guardrails for random joe that wasn’t personally blessed by the ai pope to access the non-nerfed model? Fable is a nightmare in this regard, but I’m not sure whether 5.6 also gets a critical side-eye from the gubmint when you ask it to fix bugs in your code (you filthy hacker, you).
> when it was really just Google falling behind the same way it did with Tensorflow, Angular and GCP
Not sure I agree. Angular fell behind in popularity but was (is? unsure atm) still eminently usable. I gave gemini a test drive recently and it was horrendous, as in "picking dirt cheap Chinese model over gemini any day" bad, and with overzealous guardrails to boot. 3.1 pro feels a year behind and is extremely lazy. 3.5 flash feels like a model you’d run on your 128gb macbook, not something that was released a month ago and which costs a fair bit when used through api.
In any case: as of right now I think that we went from a three horse race to anthropic / openai as premium choices vs whatever is the Chinese fotm for a fraction of the cost. 3.5 pro better be a miracle if google wants to hang out with the big boys, otherwise their only strategy is hoping that both US labs go broke and they remain the last man standing.
While I have no experience with it personally (no interest in image gen) my aunt was raving about current chatgpt image model for "restoring" / working with old photos - sharpening, changing some small details like ill-fitting background. It takes her a bunch of prompting but eventually she gets things just right. In comparison, current gemini output (supposedly) tends to be subtly off, details aren’t quite right, proportions are subtly changed etc.
This is purely about generating images with people in them, I don’t think she’s doing any logic puzzles with gotchas and specific alignments of differently colored blocks and whatnot
Because the market pays less for DDR4 than for HBM (or DDR5), and since HBM is heavily modified, vertically stacked DRAM, it competes for the same raw inputs and fab space than DDR4 used.
If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.
> sunlight causes most of the heat issues; cloudy days are unlikely to be extremely hot
> solar panels convert sunlight to electricity
> AC converts electricity to cooler air indoors
Ah, if only there was a way to solve those three problems at once. Alas...
As to the "resistance" to AC: is this an actual thing or just something the media made up? It seems that for the most part anyone who wants AC can just buy it, barring exceptions like historical buildings. If people want to cook themselves alive I’m not really seeing the issue, as they only harm themselves (unlike, say, with vaccines where herd immunity is important).
When the highest offices of the land are packed to the gills with liars and grifters and anyone with a brain can observe there’s no downside to such behavior, "just be honest" rings rather hollow
This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:
- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?
- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time
- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs
- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)
- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience
- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits
So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.
Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.
Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?
I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.
I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.
The funniest thing about this post is not the fact that some people took it as anything but satire, but that it’s likely very close to what the true believers at Antrophic actually think.
Ah, those wacky terrorists and their non-aligned models, trained on copyrighted data to boot. Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!
I subscribed (with some distaste) to the $20 tier to check out fable. I got two refusals in a row on innocuous tasks, then ran out of quota halfway through the third one.
After saying for weeks of how Mythos is in a league all of its own you’d think it was a bit more than the usual iterative few % on the benchmarks (and even more guardrails as a bonus).
Why learn to read and write when everyone carries a computer capable of TTS? Why learn anything when your pocket computer has access to AI doing the thinking much better than the average highschooler and has 100x the knowledge?
I’m not meeting with friends to work on our speeches, I’m meeting friends to do friends stuff. Go join toastmasters if you want to do work stuff as a fun pasttime.
Amusing that just when the big three AI providers from US raise prices significantly, even for the mini models, you’ve got a Chinese model slashing their already-cheap offer by 75%. Not to mention you can run this model on your own hardware, although admittedly even the flash stretches the meaning of local for individual people.
Semi-related: has the rate of published exploits picked up as if late, or is it simply the fact that there’s hype around ai as security tool (offense or defense) so it’s simply in the news more often?
Feels like there’s something new every other day - linux, windows, mobile, various commonplace tools used by everybody, the list goes on
A local Answer Machine is the dream, especially when the internet is decaying and generally on its last legs, but the hardware requirements seem like a huge mountain to climb. Things are progressing tremendously - deepseek v4 flash is very good for what it is - but even that goes beyond any reasonable local setup, which imo is 128 GB ram + 16 GB vram. 4 ram slots on a consumer board craters ram speed, 256 gb macs are too expensive, and even then the inference is ungodly slow.
On the other hand… v4 flash model is actual magic compared to what was available 2 years ago. If the rate of improvement stays as is, we’ll get a similar performance in a ~120B model in a year, which is viable (if expensive) for everyman hardware. Possibly you’ll be able to run its equivalent on a ~$1200 laptop by 2028, which for me-in-2020 would sound straight out of a scifi movie. A good harness that lets the model fetch data from other sources like a local wikipedia copy from kiwix could do a lot for factual knowledge, too; there’s only so much you can encode in the model itself, but even a cheapish (pre-curent prices) 2TB drive can hold an immense amount of LLM-accessible data.
Big caveat: I don’t see local models for programming or generally demanding agentic tasks being worth it anytime soon. You likely want bleeding edge models for it, and speed is far more important. Chat at 20tok/s is fine; working on even a small codebase at 20tok/s, especially on a noticeably weaker model, is just a waste of time. Maybe it’s a PEBKAC but I have no idea how people make any meaningful use out of qwen 3.6.
Is it possible to dual-boot on android? It sounds defeatist but I no longer believe it’s possible to change course - the increasingly authoritarian governments, google and most moneyed interests are all on the same side, so it’s just a matter of when.
Being on the palantir-approved google ranch for the few Apps You Need + graphene (or some other alt OS) for everything else would be quite inconvenient, but still better than carrying two phones, which nobody wants to do.
My half blind aunt could probably tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 2016 and 2026 if you put them side by side.
Were video game graphics "good enough" for a while now? I’d say yes, with the exception of vr. But to say there has been no noticeable improvement over the last 10 years is silly.
GTA 6 is coming out soon. I’d invite you to actually compare the visuals of gta 6 vs the original gta 5 from 2014 that was released for ps4 (rather than the 2022 enhanced version for consoles or 2015 version for pc which shouldn’t be compared to non-pc gta 6, since 6 for pc will also get a significant facelift).