Just keeping it up to date with competitors is much cheaper, by copying better ones like Qwen did with Claude. Also a bunch of research is trickling into open source / arxiv so catching up should continue becoming cheaper at least as a fraction of training from scratch
maybe you can preselect good ideas, build up guidelines describing most common pitfalls, extrapolate from ideas you already vetted etc and run on autopilot on a safe-ish subset
Nvidia's parakeet dropped recently with better performance and 0.6B params, so the rate of progress here looks good, probably next year (or mby the year after) they'll be running no probs
Not really answering your question, but:
One completely imo unnecessary category of sloppy software is electron apps.
It's totally ridiculous how little resources are put into alternatives like tauri given how most dekstop apps run on electron, and we know how bad it is.
I'm not disagreeing per se, but in my experience my tests are so disposable they're never worth investing that much engineering effort in past getting them to pass
The author makes an argument that at least looks like people choose YT over Nebula because YT is free. I, for example, already pay for Nebula, so I can watch it for free, but I still go to YT.
IMO it might be just a product problem. I opened nebula and:
* The same video had a better title on YT that was actually less clickbaity and more informative - assumedly because of YT algorithm for optimization
* Nebula auto set quality to 480p compared to 1080p in YT - if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd assume it's just worse quality.
* The loading times when you seek to part that's not loaded yet are 10x longer
* I missed comments
The recommendation algorithm is weaker too, I can't tell to what extent this is due to YouTube having simply more data and to what extent it's weaker engineering.