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Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM Watson?

Scanning Tunneling Microscope, high-temperature superconductivity - 2 Nobel prize right there.

Then laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, relational databases, UPC barcodes, DES, FFT, RISC, ...

yeah, almost nothing. /s

disclaimer: I work for IBM Research and I love every second of it.


People do not have anything to do with IBM Research. As long as IBM Consulting exists, your name will be seen as tarnished and not be taken seriously by most technology workers.

Just look at this comment section as Q.E.D.


Scanning Tunneling Microscope and high-temperature superconductivity are 40 years old! Magnetic storage was invented in the 60s! Wow that's so recent. We are living in the future! /s

I won't even comment on the rest... You just proved my point.


Yes in data science there is say: “there is no free lunch”. With ChatGPT and others becoming so prevalent even at PhD level people that will work hard and avoid to use these tools will be more and more seen as magicians. I already see this in coding where people can’t code medium to hard things and their intuitions like you said is wacky. It’s not the imposter syndrome anymore it’s people not being able to get their job done without some AI involved.

What I do personally is for every subject that matters to me I take the time to first think about it. To explore ideas, concepts, etc… and answer questions that would ask to ChatGPT. Only once I get a good idea I start to ask chapgpt about it.


Thanks for sharing :)


Well maybe not. Thanks that we have Gemini now to compete with ChatGPT. Competition may avoid dark patterns. But without competition yes definitely


Competition or not, dark patterns or not - sooner or later LLMs will need to earn money for their corporations.


But they do? Paid subscriptions for Gemini, ChatGPT and Copilot are a thing.

If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.


Look up the numbers. OpenAI actually loses money on every paid subscription, and they’re burning through billions of dollars every year. Even if you convince a fraction of the users to pay for it, it’s still not a sustainable model.


Even if they were profitable, the investors would feel that it's not profitable enough. They won't stop at breaking even.


And even if it was the highest profit branch of the company, they still would see a need to do anything possible to further increase profits. That is often where enshittification sets in.

This currently is the sweet phase where growing and thus gaining attention and customers as well as locking in new established processes is dominant. Unless the technical AI development stays as fast as in the beginning, this is bound to change.


I actually wondered about this myself, so I asked Gemini with a long back and forth conversation.

The takeaway from Gemini is that subscriptions do lose money on some subscribers, but it is expected that not all subscribers use up their full quota each month. This is true even for non-AI subscriptions since the beginning of the subscription model (i.e. magazines, gamepass, etc).

The other surprising (to me, anyway) takeaway is that the AI providers have some margin on each token for PAYG users, and that VC money is not necessary for them to continue providing the service. The VC money is capital expenditure into infrastructure for training.

Make of it what you will, but it seems to me that if they stop training they don't need the investments anymore. Of course, that sacrifices future potential for profitability today, so who knows?


That’s just a general explainer of subscription models. As of right now VC money is necessary for just existing. And they can never stop training or researching. They also constantly have to buy new gpus unless there’s at some point a plateau of ‘good enough’


The race to continue training and researching, however, is drive by competition that will fall away if competitors also can't raise more money to subsidise it.

At that point the market may consolidate and progress slow, but not all providers will disappear - there are enough good models that can be hosted and served profitably indefinitely.


Seems like there can never be good enough models; the user will want it up-to-date models with respect to news and culture.


For some uses, sure. But for plenty of uses that can be provided in context, RAG, or via tool use, or doesn't matter.

Even for the uses where it does matter, unless providers get squeezed down to zero margin, it's not that new models will never happen, but that the speed at which they can afford to produce large new models will slow.


Why do you think Gemini is the authority on the internal costs of AI providers and their profit margins?


> Why do you think Gemini is the authority on the internal costs of AI providers and their profit margins?

Where did I say I think that?


That's the source you chose to use, according to you.

You don't mention cross-checking the info against other sources.

You have the "make of it what you will" at the end, in what appears to be an attempt to discard any responsibility you might have for the information. But you still chose to bring that information into the conversation. As if it had meaning. Or 'authority'.

If you weren't treating it as at least somewhat authoritative, what was the point of asking Gemini and posting the result?

Gemini's output plus some other data sources could be an interesting post. "Gemini said this but who knows?" is useless filler.


The mediocre AI summaries aren't promoting Gemini when you can't use them to start a chat on Gemini. They effectively ads and search results for no benefit.


The electric bill does not pay for itself.

What is also interesting is one of the biggest search companies is using it to steer traffic away from its former 'clients'. The very websites google talked into slathering their advertisements all over themselves. By giving them money and traffic. But that worked because google got a pretty good cut of that. But now only google gets the 'above the fold' cut.

That has two long term effects. One the place they harvest the data will go away. The second is their long term money will decrease. As traffic is lowered and less ads shown (unless google goes full plaster it everywhere like some sites).

AI is going to eat the very companies making it. Even if the answers are kind of 'meh'. People will be fine with 'close enough' for the majority of things.

Short term they will see their metric of 'main site retention' going up. It will however be at the cost of the websites that fed the machine.


Good point.

Looking ahead, Search will become a de facto LLM chatbot, if it isn't already.


> Competition may avoid dark patterns.

Oh bless your heart.

You don't even need to bring up corporate collusion, countless price gouging schemes, or the entire enshittification movement to understand that competition discovers the dark patterns. Dark patterns aren't something to be avoided, they're the natural evolution of ever-tighter competition.

When the eyeball is the product, you get more checks if you get more eyeballs. Dark patterns are how you chum the water to attract the most product.


“The world will carry on without them”. Sure but at the end of the day it’s not because companies can go bankrupt that debts etc magically disappear. It still impact other companies.


Not directly, no.

The impact of firms and people going bankrupt that other people making investment and lending decisions will see risk more clearly and may (for a time) be less greedy and stupid when they make capital allocation decisions.

Debts can & do magically disappear. To be clear someone paid for the lost money, but at that stage it's far too late for them to be able to do anything about it, let alone raise prices.

Here's an example: Founder A founds a startup with equity funding from B & C. Later they take loans from D & E. They spend all the money but never become profitable. None of the original investors or lenders is interested in pumping in good money after bad. They voluntarily declare bankruptcy or they default on a loan and D or E forces them into bankruptcy. Either way, whatever is left of the company's assets are sold to reimburse, in part, the loan D & E made. A, B & C got nothing.

A, B, C, D, and E, all lost real money.

But by the time this loss is crystalized, there is no way any of them can go back in time to raise prices to pay for it. It's gone and so is the company. The only thing they can do is act differently in the future.


“Debts can & do magically disappear. To be clear someone paid for the lost money,” you contradict yourself.

So no it doesn’t magically disappear. A bankruptcy somewhere is a loss for others somewhere else. Even cutting dept to pennies on the dollar means lenders are losing money. Bankruptcy is not a magic trick…


Exactly I am so tired to hear about AI… And they are not even AI! I am also losing faith in this field when I see how much they all push so much hype and lies like this instead of being transparent. They are not AGIs not even AIs… For now they are only models and your definition is a good one


> they are not even AI!

From the "Artificial Intelligence" Wikipedia page: old-school Google search is AI, chess bots are AI, Google Maps is AI, the YouTube recommendation algorithm is AI...

LLMs are definitely AI.


The percentage is irrelevant without knowing how they really work and how much profit they make. They could be at 95% with 0.1% of margin it wouldn’t mean much for the market.

At the end of the day talking about HFT this way is to not know what they do and what service they offer to the market. Overall they are not trending makers but trend followers.


What? THAT CASH comes from owning the inside spread on roughly half of every US equity share that trades. They quote a micro-price adjustment, and it pushes out anyone slower - which exactly the “service” that lets retail investors, like us, hit a bid or ask.

Honestly, whether YOU want to call that trend-following or market-making - I can't be arsed, but it’s still data-retrieval that runs THE institutional scale


The ghost of Charlie Munger has entered the chat.


Get to my original reply to you with all the sources first :) then Charlie can join in the fun!


Your argument is unconvincing.

Even if the HFT market is 100 times the smallest estimate, it's still a relatively small portion of the world economy, which is approximately $100 trillion. HFT is a fascinating intersection of finance/C++/JVM for competitive super-nerds. It happens to add liquidity to the market, as far as I understand. I am not demonizing it in any way.

However, it's not a significant portion of the US or global economy by any stretch. The argument over whether it sets or follows stock prices is mostly philosophical at this point.


>"HFT is a fascinating intersection of finance/C++/JVM for competitive super-nerds. It happens to add liquidity to the market, as far as I understand. I am not demonizing it in any way."

>"The argument over whether it sets or follows stock prices is mostly philosophical at this point."

Sure, I respect that!


Revenue is not profit


I thought they learn their mistakes from the time they gave a U2 album for free on iTunes (but forcing everyone on iTunes to have it). It’s the same thing here but worst with ads. Pushing their stuff in our personal apps and lives without our permission, free stuff or not. But they still made the same mistake…


Thank you for the video! This is so much coming. Plus with thermal cameras too which is even more scary.

On the same topic it reminds me Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (from 2005!) where an AI called "Masse Kernels" was automatically creating missions sent to different PMCs, managing war assets, supervising the war effort, coms, and the like... Feels also that's coming, at least in some forms for now.


And that video links to several petitions here: https://autonomousweapons.org/take-action/


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