Still, the clock is ticking. I don't know of any "new" company that would use Oracle instead of e.g. Postgres or would migrate to it. That's probably why they're pretty desperate to jump onto something new before the old source of income fizzles out.
China has most probably already achieved "escape velocity" on the software side. Now if they achieve parity, to some degree at least, on the hardware side with Nvidia it is very possible they'll overtake the US.
Isn't that the case with human "experts"? If you had encounters with doctors, mechanics, etc. you'll know you can get a completely different diagnosis for the same problem which obviously means (in most cases) that the person you thought an expert is wrong.
What is needed are studies that will take a cold look at the actual results because AI seems to be required to be perfect or it is useless. It just needs to be as good as a human for most stuff, but in the long run it will be much better. At least that what extrapolating current reality shows us.
The geopolitical angle of all of this is interesting. Will countries, especially bigger players really just hope they'll get access to something so crucial from the US or China?
Probably the EU could pool together funds to create something competitive as being on the mercy of someone else isn't a pleasant place to be.
And I wouldn't get so used to the open models. Eventually, if they get good enough, the access to them will also get restricted.
Anth/OpenAI simply wanted the government to pull the ladder after them and ban models from China.
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
The Airbnb isn't just about the cost of homes but also the comfort of people living in them. Would you want to live under an Airbnb? With the constant rotation of people, parties, etc?
I know it might shock many but a lot of people (I would say most) buy a flat to live in it and making it into a pseudo-hotel lower the quality of life at the benefit of the airbnb owner.
If WW2 Japan also had nukes the US would never drop those two. That's the whole idea behind MAD. Probably the only thing that stopped an open conflict between the US and USSR was them being nuclear powers and both sides being scared that eventually push comes to shove.
One thing to remember is that the $200/month subscription is heavily subsidized. It is more to promote use, especially to corporate users that pay for the API token use.
> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
But who'll pay for those ads? Why would I pay Google if it just plops out some LLM answer with maybe my site as a source - which 90%+ of people will ignore as they don't care about it.
Yep. The thing is people (maybe because of our limited scope) just focus on the depth and not the breadth. Because this is a general purpose model - it also has PhD+ knowledge in Physics, Biology, History, etc.
I think we still don't really comprehend how much can be achieved by a single "mind" that has internalized so much knowledge from so many areas.
The availability of open models with such capabilities are based on the goodwill of the Chinese. And that might end eventually, especially that the matter is one decision of Xi and the party.
This is correct but people with too big of an ego or affected too much by Dunning-Kruger) will try to say otherwise even when presented with ample evidence. Instead of a valid response you'll get "skill issue" from people that produce segfaulting code on a regular basis.