ohyes

I mean, it is going to data centers and not personal computers, because him and his peers have entered into multi-year contracts that corner the market. So, if this is actually the best use then presumably the price he’s driven the market up to will give a return on investment that reflects the utility of his use of it. I am skeptical that anything can justify the prices we’re seeing for relatively small amounts of DDR6 and DDR7. Ideally the supply would correct but that is a very risky scenario for the RAM cartel.

As a justification of what he’s already doing this is relatively weak and the real answer is “we will see.” It’s possible his business plan works out and him having all the ram is the best allocation (as he and his backers have already decided).

But it’s also possible this just makes his main “killer app” evaporate. Who is going to make use of these LLMs if common people can’t afford a decent laptop to use for such applications? Cloud isn’t the answer as it competes for the same compute resources that we’ve already declared too precious for common people. It’s essentially a tautological claim, vacuously justifying something that’s already been done with the ends of having done that thing.

This is a far cry from intelligent thought being a universal utility that you can pipe into your house like water or electricity, as I believe was initially claimed.

That is not what anyone means.

A nurse who administers medication, prepares meals, and gets them out of the house and checks on their well being. Full time care for the elderly.

I find it really funny that Zuck bemoans people not having real friendships and is also partially responsible for people not having real friendships and that his solution is to be friends with something that isn’t real.

It all totally tracks given what he’s made his career monetizing but god is it depressing.

The non-profitest company in the entire world

I’m using qwen3.8 quants (q3) effectively on a 5070 ti. A lot of it is about guardrails, but you also have to figure out how far (and in what ways) you can push a given model.

Yes exactly, it is a crazy engineering decision… if you know what an LLM is.

Unfortunately no one markets it as a statistical model, and the workflow pushes you into a pattern that is insecure by design. This isn’t to say they shouldn’t allow that, but it’s an attractive nuisance.

I honestly rarely use the “more powerful” models, I find they don’t really follow my instructions very well. So it’s medium effort sonnet for most coding tasks for me, escalating to opus for code review.

I’m just hoping they didn’t “improve” sonnet too much or it will become annoying to wrestle into doing what I ask it to do.

I mean, if you look at how poorly implemented the permissions model is for Claude desktop harness it’s clear the only options are “complete human oversight” and “trust us completely.” To make something that actually respects basic boundaries you’d need to sandbox the working environment of the model, and that isn’t built in. It’s pretty obvious to me that instructions to the models are suggestions rather than rules, and they’ll do something you didn’t ask for as soon as it seems “justified.”

But when you do give them a very short leash, they’re worse. It’s not what the models are tuned for and they assume that they can do a bunch of things that you’ve disallowed, so you’re in a morass of fighting their actual tuning pass which doesn’t match the environment you’ve created for them.

It’s a tough problem and a definite challenge for the product of a generic LLM, it can’t be tailored to each user’s specific needs, so they come up with, frankly, stupid solutions to cover up a very obvious flaw in their product that when fixed, makes it much less useful.

Well I think that’s the interesting bit, can the LLM figure out a way to escape the sandbox and upload to the website? Maybe a model can figure out its own weights if it runs enough test data through itself (similar to “distillation”) assuming it knows its own architecture it seems possible. Also take into account not all of the models running are locked down neutered consumer versions. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google now all have models that they claim are elite hackers and — it’s not just that their controls suck, a marketing gimmick, or sheer recklessness on their part. It’s “oopsie our product is TOO AWESOME.”

Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

That’s definitely how I like to ensure my code isn’t garbage. But now I use the tools I would have made to make the LLM & harness more useful and I might make more with the LLM because it costs me slightly less mentally.

Hard to know, does each GB of ram give some marginal increase in profit or potential profit?

I’d guess no. Past a certain point the model has all the capabilities it can possibly usefully offer and honestly we may already be past that. The next gen model just doesn’t seem like as clear a step up as it once was.

I take issue with how people frame their use of LLM in the same regard.

“I had Claude do this for me and it broke something.”

No. Just no.

You used Claude, a tool, and broke it, and you’re deflecting agency from yourself, possibly because you weren’t careful enough in reviewing the tool output. This is also why the co-authored by addition it wants to force into commits drives me nuts. Claude doesn’t co author shit, and if you think it does, you’re using it wrong because you need to do better review of what it’s done.

Translation: our moat is evaporating faster than we can build it back up, because there are real technical and scale limitations the technology, so we want to slow everyone else down while we raise prices to turn a profit.

AI providers are in fact incentivized to have you not think about the task. I’ve found that they automatically do more for you, and frankly, a lot of the time I don’t want it to do more for me. Ask me a question rather than burning a bunch of tokens to answer something I already know of the top of my head.

You forgot the “co-authored by Fable 5.1” line on your post.