The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.
I will never understand this mindset. What exactly do you think primary scientific research is if not collecting data on questions to which you do not know the answer? How are you supposed to get data to said questions without observing the actual events? I suppose you’re sanguine with the idea of letting future generations of children be born with potentially preventable genetic disorders based on your squeamishness?
I’ve found ds4 on my mbp to be very useful, bought before ram prices became insane. It’s not writing entire applications on it’s own, it has resolved annoying networking issues on my tailnet that I had neither the time nor inclination to figure out on my own and I often find myself reaching for it for simple but annoyingly research intensive tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to. Is it opus? No, but is it useful? absolutely and I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m getting value out of a subscription or the api cost of using it.
Sure, but it’s equally likely that we hit a point where scaling becomes economically unviable because we can’t come up with enough algorithmic improvements to break free of the tyranny of log linear scaling. (I’m not sure how many 2x in token cost people would be willing to pay)
The fact that I can take it with me? That I don’t need internet to still have access to deepseek? The fact that electricity is expensive and an mbp uses ~10% of the power that an equivalent vram set up would using gpu’s. Also, in order to get the same vram I would need to spend a similar amount, but wouldn’t also have a machine that was useful for other workloads that need a huge amount of ram.
One presumes that in order to compete they must also be innovating, if the only innovation they had was how much money they could set on fire then OpenAi / Google would have walked all over Anthropic by now.
It’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.
I’m not sure how you construe “country implements desperate measures during time of existential crisis” with technology only working for a small cabal? If anything this shows that this particular technology is more egalitarian than its predecessors, since it’s cheap and being used effectively by a smaller country defending itself against the territorial ambitions of its imperialist neighbor.
Laying the blame for the transparent financial manipulation we are observing at the feet of regular people (who are putting their savings into their pension funds, a system that we incentivize because of its pro social outcomes) and saying they should just opt out because they should know better, is at best callous, most people should not have to think about that issue at all.
Some of the exams in Berkeley were brutal, but they never felt like trick questions, they did on occasion require a level of mastery of the material which was extreme, but it never felt like someone was just trying to make the questions obtuse for the sake of it.
No one consented to training llms, as the op clearly implies, if they had been asked they would have declined to do so. As would all of the many copyright holders who are in the process of suing the model companies.
Well, you are learning something, just the thing you’re learning has an even shorter usable lifespan than programming languages, namely you’re learning what works to get useful responses from ai agents. Whether or not that has value to you is a different matter, but it’s worth bearing in mind something is being learned, even if it’s not engineering or programming.