edmundsauto

I think so too. The “I get elected if I am pro Trump” factor seems to have flipped in spots to where he is a negative. Seems obvious when a wannabe king dies there is a power struggle that can rip the party apart. That might be the only hope for America to salvage a decent future, if like 1/3 of republicans started thinking about what’s best for their constituents and voters instead of how to funnel the most money to their pockets. There will still be a lot of grifters trying to hold on to squeeze out a few dollars but maybe a couple of the party grow some principles.

Isn’t capitalism basically where the capital owners decide the allocation? This isn’t central in the governmental sense where the capital allocation is decided by force, it’s the capital owners being willing to pay a higher price and therefore their use case is more valuable?

Not advocating the position.

Isn’t this just capitalism in practice?

The entire republican party is built on the image of Donald trump who loves AI so much that he tried to rename it to his liking. The reps who owe their power and grift to him may not like it personally but they have to support it which amounts to effectively the same thing as liking it.

Democrats aren’t a unified block, and they have some bright stars coming into their own this year. Their future looks bright, if people vote their interests the signal is getting through and change is possible.

And because republicans are a unified block whose entire platform is to serve you for dinner. Their whole existence is dedicated to reversing any change.

I’m sure with Chrome, Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.

Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.

I am projecting but I think these companies are looking at their output (“intelligence”) as electricity. There’s never too much electricity, really - it just goes into lower margin uses.

For intelligence, I bet if inference got 90% more efficient they would just increase the “thinking” by 90%.

Because for salaried knowledge work, the premise is that your impact or output and not the hours worked is the basis for your compensation.

Suppose someone (pre AI) wrote 100k lines in 50 hrs/week of bad code but someone else wrote 10k good lines working 40 hours. In theory the former person would not be the high performer.

I agree many places don’t work that way, but also many do - so it’s maybe a hard discussion to have broadly and not scoped to the individuals limited experience.

I encourage you to challenge your priors, here. It’s one of the few cross the lines issues, maybe the only other one was making previously free parking require payment.

The trumpworld corruption and cult behavior and elevation of absolute nincompoops notwithstanding. Data center hatred could be what helps heal America after that amazing little blood clot grows up.

We underestimate how much can change in 10 years, is all I can say. Maybe it’s fantasy land, I guess I am just currently living in a fantasy land because that’s my primary use case and it’s pretty effective now.

That could change but it could also get better. Meta announced today that shopping is the top use case for Muse, for items over $200 (more than anticipated). There is a ton of money for retailers who can make their numbers just by being a great agent experience. This honestly could become the primary UX to buy things online, just because current margins require user hostile behavior doesn’t mean they always will.

Have some optimism, it helps activate and create a better future rather than ceding it to the megacorps.

In-Q-Tel and Sony put $527k combined into Keyhole, a mapping startup that google acquired in 2004 (1 year after the original investment). In Nov 2005, Sony and IQT sold google for about $2.2M, by then google had IPOd for $1.6 billion.

I wasn’t familiar with the details but that’s not a very convincing connection to derive anything from. Is there more evidence to the story? Seems like a small amount of money and they briefly crossed organizational paths for about a year, over 20 years ago.

… but you can’t force them to learn. Explicit instruction that isn’t backed by modeled behavior isn’t going to be very effective, IMO.

These companies have goosed their profits via slippage and friction for customer support because they built the systems. Humans don’t have the time nor energy to fight Byzantine systems. Personal agents help me buy what I want without the upsells, cancel when I want without forgetting. They are a balancing power in the future but upsetting the corporate owned control. Therefore they will try to ban them.

I don’t agree with this view towards two options. Humans are complex and reducing it to this narrative eliminates so many possible narratives where she could be incredibly self aware in one compartment and also completely delusional in another. Multiplied by 50 different dimensions.