Even if US companies only had the US market, they'd be massive — Google gets ~50% of its revenue from the US alone, Amazon over 60% from North America, and most other Big Tech is in that same range. The US market by itself is plenty huge. And the EU provides 20-30% of US Big Tech revenue. Even losing all of that (very unlikely even under protectionist policies), US tech companies would be doing well, with 70-80% of their current revenue.
Sure, full-blown protectionism everywhere would make the world including the US poorer (less specialization, less division of labor), but it would also harm EU exports, as the US is the EU's biggest importer, and moreover it wouldn't change the factors behind the growing US-EU gap. US-EU trade policies with each other are basically the same. The difference is internal, and mostly comes down to the US just not sabotaging the private sector as much.
Hah, I have been thinking about trying to study LLM psychology, nice to see that Anthropic is taking it seriously, because the mathematical psychology tools that can be invented here are going to be stunning, I suspect.
Imagine coding up a brand new type of filter that is driven by computational psychology and validated interventions, etc
I assume you say that in jest, but back in the early '90s I was seriously considering getting a major in psychology and a minor in CS for the fairly hot Human Factors jobs.
It's still too early to tell, but it might make sense at some point. If because of symmetry and universality we decide that llms are a protected class, but we also need to configure individual neurons, that configuration must be done by a specialist.
It might simply reduce down to a big batch of sliders and filters no different than a fancy audio equalizer: Anthropic was operating on neurons in bulk using steering vectors, essentially, as I understand it.
That's what I thought standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just do not do it justice. Same thing with Starship. My brain knows it's massive, yet feels underwhelmed looking at it on video. Musk should let his ego build replica Saturn V and a Shuttle next the Starship launch pad so there will be proper perspective available
Have you been to the rocket garden at KSC? The Saturn V isn't vertical, but they've got almost everything from the Redstone and later vertical. I was in Florida in 2018 and I think they were getting ready to display a pair of SRBs. They did have Atlantis inside, too. And of course a horizontal Saturn V.
I saw that Saturn V as a child once, too. I think that the Saturn V really made me the person that I am today. Seeing something so huge, that is literally engineered down to every last tenth of a millimeter - that was profound for a young child. I could not believe how detailed that rocket was, yet so huge. There should be an engineering term for the size of a machine divided by the smallest critical engineered component of the machine. I don't think any machine would have beat that in the Saturn V's day - maybe some ocean liners?
I've never been to KSC. I've been to Houston a few times. I couldn't imagine trying to have a Saturn V permanently standing would be an easy feat with both locations susceptible to hurricanes and tornadoes. Walking the length of it is still pretty impressive.
I come from a construction family, so I'd put some of the famous sky scrapers in that category too. Especially thinking about the crazy beam walkers like that famous photo of the guys riding the I-beam up eating their lunch on the way up.
I saw the one in Houston for the first time last week. It was so cool. My favorite spacecraft as a kid, but in real life it was about 4x as big as I expected.
A few years ago Spacex did a homage to that photo, with the crew working on the Starship. One of those amazing Human For Scale photos that emphasize just how huge that rocket is.
That's a great point. And it raises the question if we consider the nanometer scale features of the processor against the size of the rocket as a whole.
I don't understand why LLMs get a free pass when all of the existing businesses have to play by the rules.
Businesses have to comply with IP, privacy, HIPAA, security and safety laws to name just a few.
NONE of these apply to the LLMs.
Of course I can now build and deploy an app to hospitals in a weekend since I can circumvent all of the difficult parts using the magic LLMs. If asked why, the response is "It's AI!"
HIPAA was introduced to support the massive expansion of the healthcare market (privacy accountability is a very minor aspect of HIPAA). In the name of profit, amidst the chaos, why not try to eschew what was once politically necessary? This move probably hurts humanity more than it benefits it, but that was the case with the healthcare market in the first place. I wonder what will become politically necessary around AI. Probably not much.
I'd like to see the sources on your claims. you make it sound like privacy and possible protection from harm where just some token throw-ins to hide a mostly for-profit certification which doesn't sound very convincing.
Most regulation is more or less suggestions to prevent widescale exploitation, to give the system a means of holding bad actors liable after the fact. They aren't deeply considerate, domain competent, principle based policies designed with the best interests of individuals, they're compromises between power brokers. Even things that might be explicitly illegal aren't enforced in practice unless there's a political advantage to expending resources on a particular issue.
They dress up the legislation in fancy names like the Patriot act and sell you on bits put in place for public consumption, but the meat and potatoes of US governance is the never ending, unstoppable expansion of power over and presence in every life.
HIPAA is as much or more about regulatory capture as preventing abuses of privacy or protecting individual rights. In practice, there's not even a standard, just a loose handful of suggestions for protecting data, and when massive breaches occur, data that should be protected under HIPAA gets released, institutions and businesses get a slap on the wrist. Depending on the party in power and the politics of the offender, they might not even get a slap on the wrist, they'll just get more contracts and less press coverage until the public forgets.
Anything touting benefits to individuals or citizens is probably being used as a Schelling point for a broader strategy.
These problems get fixed with a proper return to 1st, 4th, 5th Amendment rights, a relitigation of copyright and personal privacy and liberty, legislated as a digital bill of rights. We don't need new amendments or even really new laws, we just need proper enforcement and interpretation of existing ones. Privacy and liberty are inextricable. Anonymity and fungible identity in public communications are non-negotiable.
The whole situation is an exercise in picking the policies that do the most good and the least bad - exactly the type of gray area modern politicians love, because it means they have plenty of cover and fog of war to get away with shit.
Absolutely. And the data and code being stored all in one file makes it exceptionally nimble for the planning phase. You can generally count on any stakeholder in your org being able to handle it.
Budget planning, presumably. How much you are going to spend and on what, and what you need to charge for your products to break even or meet a profit goal.
I don't know how true it is today, but many a rollercoaster has been designed/planned in a spreadsheet. g-force and speed analysis, making sure there aren't any "blackout" points, etc. It allows you to iterate quickly and automatically appreciate the ramification of design decisions.
Pivot Tables was the last big feature completely missing, which is now available. Numbers might meet most of the spreadsheet requirements, except some scripting requirements. There is Applescript for those who are inclined that way. For my own use cases, I use LibreOffice Calc, even on macos. I started using it an year ago, just to see if it can work at all. So far, I haven't had any blockers, but my usage is probably not so complex.
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