You make a great point. But just to stay on the example of cars: besides the innovation on EVs, there’s this horrible tendency to consider cars as tablets on wheels, both in the sense that you can forget about repairing them by yourself and in the sense that they are now increasingly becoming low-margin hardware to run higher margin subscription services. If anything warrants high valuation for a car company it would arguably be the innovation on EVs, rather than the SaaS model.

I hope the idea of Car Software As a Service dies before becoming too widespread. But if it doesn’t, maybe car companies wouldn’t become “Tech” companies, just more shitty subscription vendors. And their stock should be valued as such, not for the largely unwanted “Tech innovation”.

By that measure shouldn’t Disney be considered a Tech company too? Or I guess banks and insurance companies.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but maybe the article (at least the small part I can read with no paywall) is on to something, Companies that sell access to technology or rely on technology to sell something else (he does give the example of e-commerce) should not be “Tech” companies.

The part I didn’t get to is where the author draws the line to tell what companies ARE Tech. I guess OpenAI or Google would qualify. They sell services but they are services they invented and made, with considerable researxh and investment. But what about Amazon or Netflix?

Agree. The MO is totally different: funding for bis research would be cut, he would be fired and then deported very publically.

With Grok looking more and more like the only one working for Musk with enough (digital) balls to stand up to his boss, that might be better than the alternative of “Big Balls” and the rest of the Digital Oblivous Goons of Elon

Hahaha, good point. On the other hand, “cheap” depends on the perspective. From Musk’s it’s an incredibly cheap way to get a big payoff…huge ROI!

“Hey we said ‘rapidly’, nobody said anything about it still working when we’re done”

No. If there was a pee tape, Trump himself would sell it and his voters would buy it too. This is a man who sold his own mug shot.

If Russia has something on him, it is dear old fucktons of money. Or we have to prepare to the scarier scenario where he’s not being blackmailed into doing Putin’s bidding, he really wants to be Putin.

I want to believe that commoditization of AI will happen as you describe, with AI made by devs for devs. So far what I see is “developer productivity is now up and 1 dev can do the work of 3? Good, fire 2 devs out of 3. Or you know what? Make it 5 out of 6, because the remaining ones should get used to working 60 hours/week.”

All that increased dev capacity needs to translate into new useful products. Right now the “new useful product” that all energies are poured into is… AI itself. Or even worse, shoehorning “AI-powered” features in all existing product, whether it makes sense or not (welcome, AI features in MS Notepad!). Once this masturbatory stage is over and the dust settles, I’m pretty confident that something new and useful will remain but for now the level of hype is tremendous!

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It’s not that LLMs aren’t useful as they are. The problem is that they won’t stay as they are today, because they are too expensive. There are two ways for this to go (or an eventual combination of both:

• Investors believe LLMs are going to get better and they keep pouring money into “AI” companies, allowing them to operate at a loss for longer That’s tied to the promise of an actual “intelligence” emerging out of a statistical model.

• Investments stop pouring in, the bubble bursts and companies need to make money out of LLMs in their current state. To do that, they need to massively cut costs and monetize. I believe that’s called enshttificarion.

My wife routinely makes me remove car keys or other bulkier things from my pocket because they “make me look bigger”.

I love my wife dearly I really do. But she deserved having to put things in her bra. Maybe I should start putting my car keys in the front of my underwear. As a fashion statement.

I didn’t say anything different. If the last thing you bought from Apple was their stock, Tim Cook made it what it is. As a CEO that’s his primary goal, so he is a great CEO.

A company that is now focused more on creating value for shareholders than on innovation? I’d say that’s pretty accurate.

Not FOSS but you can check Google Voice and see if the pricing for the country you need to call is convenient

the news is more that they are trying to shoehorn AI in effing Notepad to make sure even those little snippets of text can be used for training

I think that using large language models to summarize email (especially marketing), news, social media posts or any type of content that uses a lot of formulaic writing is going to generate lots of errors.

The way I understand large language models, they create chains of words statistically, based on “what combination is the most likely based on my training material”?

In marketing emails, the same boilerplate language is used to say very different things. “You have been selected” emails have similar wording to “sorry this time you have not won but…”. Same cheery “thanks for being such a wonderful sucker” tone and 99% similar verbiage except for a crucial “NOT” here and there.

well, joke’s on you. Since I rewrote her in Rust, my mom runs the 100 meters hurdles in 14 seconds

But if half of the engagement is from AI, isnt that a grift on advertisers? Why should I pay for an ad on Facebook that is going to be “seen” by AI agents? AI don’t buy products (yet?)

it is. But who said that you get to decide what’s relevant for you? Welcome and learn to trust your algorithmic overlords

He wasn’t. Mark used to be a sweet kid, but he’s been radicalised by all the shit he reads on Facebook. It’s not too late, Mark, delete your social media profiles, stay away from that poisonous hellhole!