jmward01

This model is why OpenAI and Anthropic want regulatory hurdles. We need more diversity like this, not less. A diverse ecosystem is the only long term solution to complex problems that I know of and the challenges that the AI world is presenting is no different.

This model is why OpenAI and Anthropic want regulatory hurdles. We need more diversity like this, not less. A diverse ecosystem is the only long term solution to complex problems that I know of and the challenges that the AI world is presenting is no different.

Not every response has to be in opposition! I was clarifying more what I think is effective: divide and conquer, constrained communication (a requirement of divide and conquer), minimized process products, iterative development, etc, and that these general ideas are essentially all that is required, not a formal process. I was also, likely badly, trying to point out that if these basics are kept in mind the formal process artifacts and steps really aren't needed. Small, focused, iterative teams are so in sync that forcing them to speak a foreign language (a formalized process) is probably a hindrance.

As I write, I clarify my own ideas. If I'm being honest I'm probably writing this more for me to better understand what really has worked than as a response. I hope it generates a good response and makes me think and refine more and I hope it makes others do the same, but really, selfishly!, I am doing this for me I guess to help me focus on these things in the future.

So, with that I think this may be where I am really trying to go with this. Maybe we are missing the point with these things. Maybe we should hammer in these math concepts, NP growth, gradient descent (iterative development) and how to measure when teams and problems are breaking because of the math so that we can understand and address the root issue better. I have ever heard anyone explain that NP math concepts and gradient descent dominate the reasons why teams fail or succeed, but the evidence is everywhere. Push the why and how to spot it and less the prescriptive how? Maybe a more effective set of things the industry could be pushing are simpler checks: how big are your teams? How many problems are they thinking about at a time? How many levels of teams do you have compared to the size of the organization? Can each member of a team articulate that team's goal? Can they articulate what their team is currently, this minute, working on? Can the team above them articulate how the goals of the teams below them fit together to solve the problem they were given? Are teams talking when they shouldn't? (We so focus on teams not talking that we often miss that talking too much is kind of a bigger deal). That kind of thing. More management and organization and less process and product oriented.

Every team I have been on that has been effective has had a few common traits:

- Teams stay relatively small so if problems are big then they divide and conquer with teams of teams so that they can:

- Bite off problems that they can fit in their heads which allows them to:

- Meet often not to just speak out loud with nobody really listening, but instead to actually coordinate and plan concrete steps that progresses the problem. And they can make daily adjustments not just because they are a small focused team but because they also:

- avoid backlogs, feature lists and similar documentation where possible since these things give them momentum in the direction they thought they were going when these products were created and not in the state the problem is in now.

Each of these things fight, well, math. Communication is a math problem. If everyone is talking to everyone about everything then you have a non-polynomial growth problem. Designing the big problem perfectly from the start is NP. Divide and conquer doesn't give you a perfect solution, but it gives you a really good one and it gives it to you in reasonable time. Splitting the task, and the team, and minimizing the communication, and accepting the loss in finding the perfect solution that triggers, is all needed for divide and conquer. We never accept that though so it turns back into an NP problem and something ends up dropping. Time, quality, capability or, unfortunately often, the whole thing fails. Similarly, if you put things on a backlog then prioritizing that backlog is again NP and that is especially bad if there is one massive team backlog from all sources. Backlogs become dead idea bins because it isn't possible to organize them efficiently so stop wasting time on them. If your team is properly sized they know what is needed now so they can make the next small step and they can optimally design and implement that step in their piece of the bigger problem. They will get done quickly and have a good product as opposed to getting done never because of the pursuit of the perfectly coordinated and communicated solution.

If you divide and conquer properly then the communication/process you use at each team's level becomes so obvious that every formalized system out there becomes silly. Let the team do whatever works for them. They are small and nimble and learn to talk to each other so no need to slam a process at them that makes them a machine.

The bottleneck is, and has been, the whole team evolving the product. Having a clear, actionable, vision and being good at biting off the right next step and adjusting for the step after that is always the issue. Before AI teams took the wrong step size in the wrong direction or were so wrapped up in process that they couldn't take a step or so distracted by 'things' that they never even took steps. After AI the same is still true. Our process sucks in this industry. We love to make process because we love to make machines but the processes we love to make rarely help us and that is a fundamental problem that AI isn't changing.

I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.

Rebranding is the right thing and way over due. I honestly hadn't checked them out before but this has made me read through the site a bit. I am intrigued by their privacy claims. I will definitely be looking into them more if those claims hold up.

This is abdicating an entire market in the hopes that your ability to manipulate it later, which has worked so far unfortunately, will hold. It is so obviously market manipulation here. Sure, prices would go up when this much server demand comes in but it is so profitable to make DDR5 that completely abandoning that market is stupid and only works if all players move in unison. It would just take one of the big three deciding to be the consumer maker to dominate the market and reap massive profits now and later when the server market cools and the other two try to come back. The fact that they are all shying away from such a ridiculously profitable sector is clear evidence of the collusion. They need jail time, again, but this time not allow those going to jail to become the CEO when they get out. They should also have fines that actually stop this behavior in the future. Fines so punitive that it actually brings into question their ability to continue as a company.

Most police aren't the enemy. Unfortunately it only takes a few that are or one that is having a bad day. Black and white distinctions 'they are all good' or 'they are all bad', are a core problem. Recognizing that we need to hold police accountable and limit their authority and actions isn't saying police are bad, it is proper and necessary oversight and is what is best for citizens and police.

I think the real, and continuing, story here is the US military and the US govt in general continuing to let ego degrade capability. I'm not going to get into a discussion about what is legal, I am personally not interested in that distinction here, the core point is that this is the US being stupid, again.

Our targeting cycle is broken. 'Find me more targets' is something that you will hear a JTF commander say. Not 'what do we need to accomplish this objective'. Or, crazy idea here, how is this objective -that I handed off to someone that I properly resourced and empowered to achieve it- progressing. I can only imagine that AI is not to blame here but also not necessarily helping either. It is yet another shiny object that is distracting from the core problem: we have lost our ability to manage the operational level of war. Everything is sucked up to a centralized decision making structure and spit out on a fake 72 hour cycle that pretends that it is responsive. Our observe, orient, decide and act loops are days, or weeks, long while an enemy can see a dust cloud on the horizon and decide to walk out and put an IED in front of a convoy in 5 minutes.

When Russia made its current play at taking over Ukraine it failed miserably. The dumbest plans executed with no ability to react to the real state on the ground were all on display. They had the capability and they had the resources but their ability to execute at the operational level was terrible and for all the same reasons we are terrible. Centralized command, no ability to package up a problem with resources and a commander and hand it off, no ability to react. Their operational level was broken fundamentally, just like ours is. The scariest thing about the Ukraine war right now is that they have learned the operational level of war. They can plan and react. They are now a force to be reckoned with because they know how to use their tools, including AI, to be effective.

We went through this same learning curve in WWII. We were terrible initially. Russia sent a huge column of resources on a major road and let it stall, we put a bunch of battleships right next to each other. But then we learned and by the end of it we could pull off d-day. Those planners then left the military and got us to the moon with slide rules. We still haven't gone back and it isn't because our technology is worse, it is because we started loosing that operational knowledge again.

The end result of the school bombing will likely be even more oversight at the highest level, more centralized decision making and review, which is exactly the wrong direction needed to fix the problem. We need to rediscover the operational level of war. We need to learn to be responsive. We need to stop trying to create a 72 hour steady state cycle that serves nobody but manual writers and embrace that war is chaotic and if you build a process that makes it feel steady state you have really built a cycle that looses wars and bombs kids.

I have even less trust in their not training on my data/credentials/everything on my computer.

I've never tried Grok and I doubt I ever will. In a world where trust in tech is at a low point, x.ai is pretty much the lowest of the group for me. I can't imagine using this for any production use-case, especially one where bias issues could cause litigation fears.

edit: My post was flagged (original above unchanged) This is exactly my point about lack of trust in x.ai. My suspicion that a bot from that platform flagged this is exceptionally high. You couldn't pay me to use this platform.

There are a multitude of arguments against this:

- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.

- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?

- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.

- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.

- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.

This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.

History shows the US has a lot of hallucinated intelligence leading to war. WMD in Iraq comes to mind. I personally don't believe US intelligence on practically anything. It is all tainted. The pressure to 'find targets' to justify a political objective is overwhelming and putting it behind a black box that refuses to show its homework to those in ops using it, and ultimately the US people to judge decisions, is a cancer that leads to epic mistakes. Everything hidden in a dark 'need to know don't question it' box is bound to end up corrupt since there are no checks on that system. We have been building systems and processes for a long time that tell us what we want to hear, not what is real and not what we need to know. AI hasn't changed this, it has just made it even harder to realize since the product seems more polished.