The sooner the USG figures out a standard process for approving releases the better. There are many differing opinions on how much to regulate AI, but I think we can all agree ad-hoc policy sucks.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
I'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
The "rent" in "rent-seeking" does not refer to "rent" it refers to "economic rent."
Totally different concept. But don't take my word for it:
> "Rent-seeking" is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.[0]
> In economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production. [1]
Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad.
Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to.
Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.
Just reading your description, it sounds like there are two variables:
1. Prompt adherence: how well the models follow your stated strategy
2. Decision quality: how well models do on judgment calls that aren’t explicitly in the strategy
Candidly, since you haven’t shared the strategy, there’s no way for me to evaluate either (1) or (2). A model’s performance could be coming from the quality of your strategy, the model itself, or an interaction between the two, and I can’t disentangle that from what you’ve provided.
So as presented, the benchmark is basically useless to me for evaluating models (not because it’s pointless overall, but because I can’t tell what it’s actually measuring without seeing the strategy).
I suspect this sort of thing starts to happen when UX decision-making gets decentralized. No single god-king would allow six or more different new icons; the lack of uniformity is obviously nonsensical to anybody, but not necessarily to a disorganized collective of anybodies.
A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:
- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.
- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.
So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.
From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:
Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]
Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]
For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]
The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.
The most obvious example is the children of addicts. It’s hard to imagine a kid is better off stuck at home with druggie parents than spending the day in daycare.
Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Another day, another person not getting discounted cash flow.
Models trained in 2025 don’t ship until 2026/7. That means the $3bn in 2025 training costs show up as expense now, while the revenue comes later. Treating that as a straight loss is just confused.
OAI’s projected $5bn 2025 loss is mostly training spend. If you don’t separate that out with future revenues, you’re misreading the business.
And yes, inference gross margins are positive. No idea why the author pretends they aren’t.
"Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method." - John von Neumann
Public servants often do not make enough money in public service to make these kinds of ethically gray payments easy to turn down.
I don't know about Yellen's personal finances, but the chairman/woman of the Fed makes $203k/yr. I bet 50%+ of the people reading my comment make more money than that, and unless my comment is graced by a well-known CEO I sincerely doubt any of you have as important a job.
Maybe if we want to hold our public servants (generals, commissioners, congressmen, secretaries of x, etc) to higher ethical standards we should compensate them well enough that a speaking fee like this is "more money" rather than "help pay off my mortgage".