While working for a telecom operator, I tested the idea of having people paying more for dedicated support. We did a market study.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
But with $1.4T announced capex for the Frontier AI labs, we're not far from the 2nd (illegal) war in Irak: $1.8T of direct military spending.
With that said, I don't know how Frontier Ai companies will ever recover this capex with a glorious $50B of revenues. Add to that that a GPU's lifetime is only a few years and you may see it as a deadend.
NB: did you know Uber destroyed $27B of value since inception? But it still exists. So Frontier AI might just do the same.
"Digital Euro"... Do people realize that maybe 90% of money is already digital, i.e. sitting as bytes and numbers on banks' computers ?
It seems to me that the actual problem that the EU is trying to solve it to find a tech managed by the ECB but that leaves space for the banks to keep existing in payment. They make a significant amount of money from Visa/Mastercard payments.
But we don't need payment terminals anymore: phones and QR-Codes are enough. We don't need Visa or Mastercard: just route payment instructions from payee's bank to payer's bank.
In Europe, we actually already have instant-payment through the SEPA network (i.e. IBAN transactions).
Military context: a government would want to review the code and compile themselves. Provide a hash of the target binary to ensure they've compiled it correctly.
SDLC: provide auditors with _proof_ that the tested binary is indeed coming from the audited code
There is this famous experiment with 9 monkeys in a room with a banana attached to the ceiling and a scale.
First day, a monkey climbs the scale, gets the banana and is happy.
Second day, they start spraying whomever gets on the scale. Monkeys hate this. They learn not to climb.
Third day, they take a monkey out and replace with another. The new monkey sees a banana up there and tries climbing the scale. He literally gets beaten out by the others, like "seems like you're new here".
Days 4-12, they've replaced one monkey per day, so that no monkey was here when it was possible to get the banana. None of them have ever been sprayed either. Still, they enforce the rule not to climb up there.
I am putting this example because in our society as well, there are many rules that are enforced without anyone questioning the "why". Yet the "why" is often more important to know than the rule itself.
Designers know this dichotomy between the "why" and the "how". Most people don't.
- ship super fast SSD (tbh they are already top notch)
- add a specific cache layer for tokens
- keep the amount of unified memory reasonable