Quaaludes are maybe a better analogy since the original, strong ones are mostly gone and the pills being manufactured today are significantly weaker. And their effect on Wall Street's decision making is pretty comparable to AI's
I think the target application is writing the same algorithm in multiple places with a guarantee that the logic will be based on a single source of truth. Not unlike Protocol Buffers work to standardize data layout across platforms.
It still feels overcomplicated compared to the standard solution of writing a library in a compiled language you like, exposing a C ABI compatible interface, and hooking it up to any language that can work with that (i.e. any language).
Is there a good reason not to use WebGL to render the scene and compute the character mapping? Even if you're dead set on outputting text to a `<pre>` you could write the ascii values out to a framebuffer and copy from that for a pretty significant speedup.
To be fair, a lot of that revenue is from subscriptions that aren't necessarily fully utilized. OpenAI said in March [0] that they have 50 million subscribers. Assuming they're all on the $8/month plan, that's $4.8 billion a year, likely at a pretty low COR.
> all those things aren't magical tasks that can only occur inside a human skull, they are a product of information processing
I agree but it's useful to remember that 1. brains and especially the human brain are enormous and 2. individual tokens carry significantly more meaning than individual tiny muscle twitches so even extremely primitive "cognition" can look like it's doing more work than it actually is.
This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI".
I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever horrific thing Grok is doing this week, etc.
There's no branch in that code either way. The comparison operator outputs a value (which is arithmetic, not a branch), and that value is added unconditionally.
Elsevier is shitty to people doing stuff that (imo) should be allowed. Meta is making money doing the same thing and not getting the same shittiness from Elsevier.
Elsevier at least works within the (admittedly broken) system, Meta does not.
At least on x86, multiple additions and multiplications can be done with a single `lea` instruction so it's preferable to XOR. Though I have no idea about other architectures, compiler implementations, any interpreters...