> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
The people behind these funds are playing Monopoly IRL, and this in particular makes me very angry.
The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.
I think if local models catch up with current SOTA then that might not happen. Either way, I'm don't think the long-term for OAI, Anthropic etc. really holds up.
Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).
Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.
These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).
I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.
I had the UK Age verification popup today. It verified immediately based on the age of my Apple account, I didn't have to take any further action. I am much younger than the OP, and probably than their Apple account. I am surprised that this didn't happen for them.
This is an interesting development. I would predict some of the biggest losers in the AI boom will be Indian (and similar) outsourcing companies. Companies like Wipro and Infosys have thrived off richer countries' businesses wanting grunt work done cheap, not caring necessarily about quality, as long as it meets some baseline functionality. LLMs are very good at this.
In addition, support volume must be taking a hit from AI agents too. When pricing stabilises, will Indian outsourcing still be competitive? Maybe. Maybe less so. If I were working for Infosys right now I'd be a more than a little worried.
Perhaps Anthropic anticipates a glut of engineers in the near future.