summerlight

Joined 13 years ago

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Comment · 19 days ago
It's actually the inverse, they made Opus 5.5 available internally for all engineers, presumably for benchmarking against Gemini 4.
Comment · 1 month ago
Some of their smart devices are using it. They've been focusing on GoogleOS (merging Android + ChromeOS) for a while but when that's done I guess they may adopt some of Fuschia's work. But I doubt if there will ever be scaled efforts to replace the entire Kernel stacks, even with the frontier models it is going to be very hard.
Comment · 1 month ago
I had access to this over few weeks, and in my impression this was the first Gemini model that I can offload complex tasks that I don't want to do myself because I have to do lots of domain specific researches, which is irrelevant to my daily works. Not 100% reliable, but its outcome is usually better than mine and the cost to verify the outcome is significantly cheaper than doing the task by myself.

The performance ceiling from the pre-training seems fairly high and they demonstrated impressive post-training improvements from Flash 3.6 -> Flash 3.8. If they can reproduce that in this model then this can be a good model for the next year. But the question is whether they can keep this up over coming years; they missed one pretraining cycle due to internal misallocation and it costed them several months of frontier competitions, and I still don't know if they addressed this structural problem.

Comment · 2 months ago
This is a valid take but at this moment, AI is not trying to solve this fundamental dynamic. But it can still accelerate the process by aggressive exploration of the solution space which cannot be done even with an army of human researchers. Many ideas can be relatively quickly verified (and discarded if needed) by proper simulation even before real world experimentation, but we don't have enough capacity to process all potential ideas. If you can build a good model for simulation and establish a robust methodologies, we can use some ideas which never had a chance before.
Comment · 2 months ago
It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".
Comment · 3 months ago
I would be more careful before assuming 5 years depreciation schedule. Currently price tags are attached to computing power, not the production cost. Computing is not getting meaningfully cheaper with newer GPUs but it only allows better scaling, which makes older hardware more relevant for many use cases. This is why A100 is still selling like hotcakes. I don't think this trend will change soon.
Comment · 3 months ago
Apple can enjoy because it controls a significant fraction of consumer computing platform so they can simply collect tax from everyone else. This is not true for the rest of big tech. Only Google has Android but it cannot sit and enjoy because they still don't control hardware and AI is an existential problem for their search business.
Comment · 3 months ago
There is a pretty simple yet disappointing reason. CSAM is much easier to investigate and prosecute. You got evidence, you prosecute. Almost guaranteed conviction. You can even enforce big tech to implement proactive monitoring systems.

Compared to this, CSA is much harder. Every case is different. You have to do due diligence. And it is extremely hard to proactively detect them. Careful criminals will destroy all evidence. The number of case itself is smaller. And there is a good chance to lose in the court and for prosecutors this is a clearly risky move. Good ol' criminal investigation is expensive. There is a structural reason not to prioritize them.

The whole incentive structure is broken. The only thing to fix this is external pressure, but even it does not work these days. Exposing CSA is a rare event but media needs constant, sensitive headlines so they tend to treat CSA and CSAM like the same thing. Hence external pressures do not work, and even worse those work in a wrong way. This creates a bad feedback loop.

Comment · 3 months ago
Looks like 3.6 Flash is the first model with their newest pretraining run (cutoff date is 2026/03), long after 2.5 series.
Comment · 4 months ago
The title is kinda misleading. The actual wording is not specific about humanoid robots but "physical AI" which encompasses every machinery that can be potentially integrated with AI, especially focused on mass manufacturing for the Korean case. Basically this project is about all physical infrastructures to automate high tech manufacturing industry.
Comment · 4 months ago
Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".
Comment · 4 months ago
My personal rule of thumb: I am usually okay with agents driving e2e implementations if this won't make life noticeably worse when it does not work. Some analytical code? Perfectly fine. Hobby projects? Fine, though I prefer doing a fun part myself. Refactoring production code generating 10x more revenue than my salary? You'd better be at least understanding what it does.
Comment · 5 months ago
> 99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection,

Unfortunately, it is not you define whether it deserves. It's a court, ultimately SCOTUS.

Comment · 5 months ago
This is one of the reason why that law will surely be challenged and very likely invalidated by SCOTUS. Trade secret protection is a very fundamental part and if this is forced to be broken by legally compelled speech, then it needs to have very creative interpretations over judicial precedents.
Comment · 5 months ago
Many developers with good will actually tried that and gave up due to lots of problems. This is not just bad ROI but also a legal minefield. Engineers usually cannot argue against this kind of risks. Enforcing this will unlikely work in higher courts. Though something like open sourcing protocols for server reimplementation may have some chances.

While I see problems in the law but the spirit is reasonable. We need to push toward this direction. At least there should be difficult economical trade-off for publishers when they decide to shut down the game. Nowadays, some random executive just takes look into some excel, see some games have declining revenue and decides to "simplify the business" without much thoughts. This has to stop.

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