Honest question: Is anyone here looking to put their own money into the Anthropic, OpenAI or SpaceX IPOs?
Maybe it is my poverty mindset that is holding me back, however, I can't imagine becoming an investor in any of the AI 'startups'.
There are plenty of pundits able to advise others on where to put their money, and sometimes there is everyone and their dog advising you to get into Bitcoin, gold or some other scheme. With alt-coins there were lots of people saying that you should get in, and plenty of naysayers. Yet I am not hearing anyone that uses AI professionally try to convince others to get into the AI IPOs coming up. Maybe the overall economic situation precludes it.
Hence my question, is anyone here planning to put their own hard-earned money into Anthropic (or the other AI 'start ups')?
I can’t imagining investing into these frontier labs for the simple reason that Open Source is very likely to catch up in a relatively short period of time. I don’t see how OpenAI/Anthropic could then continue to serve their models with such large inference margins.
I'm considering Anthropic. I think they will be one of the survivors if/when the AI bubble bursts.
I was dubious about SpaceX (orbital data centers need to solve for extreme radiation and error-correction during training), but then I remembered that xAI is actively working on virtualizing white collar workers ("Macrohard").
In my opinion, this is the only TAM that justifies $1T in data center investment, because the consumer market for ChatGPT-style AI is saturated. There's a lot of enterprise TAM available for AI, but I think what these companies training frontier models are really after is selling a product that allows companies to eliminate the cost of white collar salaries.
In 2002 I spoke with a lecturer in the humanities and he told me about how nobody was learning French at university level (in the UK). My own course had been cancelled due to the cost of teaching it, and the era of 'easy degrees' had set in during the early 90s.
Before that, I also noticed the decline in newspaper readership in the 80s.
It is easy to blame this general decline on the latest tech (or moral panic), whether that be LLMs or even the existence of the internet, however, the trend in dumbing down has been going on for decades.
In the context of a declining empire and financialised economies, this makes a lot of sense.
I think we are talking about two different trends that have similar symptoms. I do agree there has been a noticeable anti-intellectual trend for a long time, especially in the West. (See also: Grade Inflation.) But that is separate from the drop in attention spans, which is relatively recent has been pretty strongly linked to digital stimulation, constant multi-tasking, and now short-form social media.
LLMs are an entirely new dynamic with significant cognitive implications, but I fear it will be hard to discern their impact from the falling attention spans and other long-term trends that have led to things like grade inflation.
Part of the problem is that images are used by everybody, including the non-technical people. It is usually the non-technical people that make the images, so we can't confuse them with file formats.
Hence the workflow with least amount of man-splaining is to stick to what the non-technical people know. Let them create everything in PNG (or JPG) with absolutely no compression whatsoever. Then have the origin server for the CDN substitute every requested image for a webp variant, mashed down to acceptable compression levels for the product/customer.
Since browsers don't care about file extensions for images, the images can be served with '.jpg' or '.png' extensions but contain webp. The browser will be fine with this because of the internal header in the image file.
Note that if the customer/user right clicks to download one of these webp images pretending to be png/jpg they should get served the PNG or JPG original, rather than the compressed webp. Yes it requires the origin server to read the headers and the CDN to read the headers too, however, this can be setup to be transparent to the people that create the images and the people that see them.
If the images are overly compressed or not compressed enough, the CDN cache can be cleared.
Note that this approach could be used to support JPEG XL right now, serving JPEG XL to browsers that support it and webp to those with lesser browsers.
What I find amusing about JPEG is that it was optimised for analogue CRTs and slow CPUs. We now have digital screens and fast(er) CPUs. The Mozilla encoder is easy to retrofit and this makes JPEG images better suited to what we have now rather than what we had in the 1980s. Things like banding goes away and the file sizes are smaller. Yet nobody adds the Mozilla libjpeg to their /bin/local.
I appreciate the ambition and the tech, however, I do wonder if you have bitten off more than you can chew regarding localisation. I write this as a Brit, so not that far off the Standard American Diet.
First off, the locale switcher needs to be buried in the footer, with the locale provided by the browser request and automatically getting the units and language right. This will work for most people but there will be the theoretical use cases of the person on a VPN using a computer in a public library in Burkina Faso. Yes, you will need to have things going on in the backend to do this, but think of the user experience!
As for my critique of localisation, I would say that this is more of a critique of the USDA database (and LLMs) rather than a critique of your skilled efforts to make a beautiful website. Furthermore, this critique is from the UK, and other no-American English speakers, for example in Australia, might think I am being unreasonable. However, honest feedback and an idea of what you could do with that dubious USDA data, to make it work for people visiting the USA, in the happier times that should be coming soon...
In the UK we have labelling standards that are fairly similar to what goes in the EU. We list carbohydrates per 100g and per portion size, with sugars broken out separately. This is clear. With Nutrepedia I am wondering what a carbohydrate is. We list fibre as its own thing, not as a carbohydrate.
I don't believe the LLM wall of waffle text adds any value whatsoever. You are just wasting people's time and sending people into deep sleep with that slop. Nobody likes to read AI slop, particularly if it is useless, as is the case here. Harsh, I know, and opinion, I know, but AI slop is out there with 'horoscopes' as not worth reading.
I looked up 'haricot beans' because they are extremely popular in the UK, albeit in Baked Beans form. Ask for 'haricot beans' in a supermarket and nobody will be able to tell you where they are, even though there could be a whole aisle of the things.
Haricot beans are navy beans in the US and they are notable for phosphatidylserine. Unless you are eating offal, there isn't a better source of phosphatidylserine than haricot beans. Yet, despite the wall of LLM slop, no mention of phosphatidylserine or whether this matters (allegedly phosphatidylserine is important for cell wall strength and you can get snake-oil-supplements if you are gullible).
Then there is the small matter of cholesterol. Not present in haricot beans because plants don't do cholesterol. However, why not explicitly state the big zero? You have cholesterol listed if I look up beef.
I am also not sure that I would describe a bean as a seed. What is the difference between a bean and a seed? Why not call it a grain? Or a nut? Or a plant-fetus?!?
I suppose a bean is a seed, but, for legumes, beans are beans, not seeds. It is 'baked beans' not 'baked seeds'. Coupled to this is the gym-bro-influencer on the carnival barker diet that has a biological hatred of 'seed oils', so 'seed' is already a controversial word in the world of gym-bro 'science'.
The search did return navy beans for the keywords 'haricot beans', but the results were different when I switched to my chosen locale. In fact, with the same search terms, I had three different result sets and no way of going back to the search page to see how the LLM gaslighting was going.
The big long list of amino acids cribbed from USDA in the full details was also perplexing. Which ones are essential and which ones can be made by 'liver gymnastics'?
Why does this matter? Beans and rice. Beans have some essential amino acids in abundance but not all, same with rice. So you need to mix and match.
Nit-picking at the navy beans seems unfair, but they are listed as 'boiled without salt'. So I look for the words 'salt' or 'sodium' and can't find the entry.
In the UK it is all about HFSS (High fat, sugar and salt). You can get salty plants, e.g. samphire, as consumed by people that watch the TV show 'Masterchef'. Therefore, it should not be assumed that salt (UK) or sodium (simplified English) needs to listed, even if the result is zero.
We have a traffic light system for HFSS on most foods. Haricot beans should be green for everything, whereas beef is going to be red for saturated fat. They don't have traffic light food labels in the USA because freedom, however, that is the important summary on the front of the pack.
Most American food is either banned or boycotted in the UK and Europe. US agricultural commodity crops just go into animal feed, to fatten animals kept in captivity. Therefore, everything on the USDA database is not applicable outside of the land of the burger.
This is particularly true for processed foods. An internationally recognised product such as a a KitKat bar will be formulated very differently for British tastes to European or American tastes. In the UK, HFSS rules will come into play, so the USDA values don't apply, even at the macro nutrient level.
Incidentally, according to the USDA there are FIVE macro nutrients, not three.
Since there is no attribution to USDA or wherever the pictures come from, with no links to describe what some of the micro nutrients are, does this help anyone? Is the content misleading to an international audience? I would say so.
So, what to do?
IMHO the USDA data is garbage as far as the rest of the world is concerned. It won't be possible to shoehorn it into a form even for a British audience any more than an American pick up truck makes sense on a British road. As for our cousins in countries that don't have English as their first language, you have your work cut out there.
Consider asking questions about whom the user is, and what their pain points are. The international traveller going to the USA could be that user you want. I know nobody is going to the US these days but times change and people will be back.
> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Generation X was the last generation that had 'general knowledge', as in an abundance of fairly useful information stored in 'grey matter' that could be recalled quickly. When search engines came along there really wasn't much need to know anything since most things could be looked up. However, you still had to think.
With LLMs, thinking is kind-of optional. This really is an existential threat to our intelligence since 'use it or lose it applies'. I am glad these mathematicians are doing their duty as canary in the coal mine.
My great-grandfather used to complain about crappy German tools.
My great-great-grandfather used to complain about crappy Scottish tools.
He was English. I am not sure you can buy as much as a paperclip made in England now.
Has to be said that nobody on this side of the pond ever complained about the quality of American Snap On tools though, just so long as the boss was paying for them.
Yes and no. The article does not go into the full history of the phrase, but it goes back to the work of Dr Ancel Keys, who was a fascinating genius of a man, with an equally talented wife. He did his crucial work on nutrition in the post-war years and this included a massive study of what people ate around the world, for longevity.
In his findings, the Okinawa people scored highly but they were Japanese and Japan was not liked that much by Americans after the 1940s for some reason. The Mediterranean folks scored highly as well, so the advice was to follow that rather than the Japanese diet.
Ancel Keys did his work before the Boeing 747, affordable cars and the shipping container came along, so people in the so-called Blue Zones were not exposed to international cuisine or the Standard American Diet.
The sad fact is that the Standard American Diet (processed food) does tend to wreck many a blue zone, or even a high standard of cuisine. Also, from the article, good old capitalist greed gets in the way too. The Adventist community did well in the original studies because they were not eating meat, or most of them were not. They were vegan before the word vegan was invented, or at least the 'strict vegetarian' members of their community were. Nowadays it sounds like 'Adventist' + 'LLC', an unholy alliance, you just know it.
Despite blue zones no longer being real, all of the original research by Ancel Keys is legitimate. He had no ideological axe to grind, his work is just exceptional science, albeit easily knocked down by social media nutrition influencer types that happen to get funding from the beef and dairy industries.
Hence the clickbait of the article, times have changed, no longer do people live in communities that are spared from the Standard American Diet (processed food) and yet the OG Ancel Keys work doesn't get a mention.
Great. I tried the Google examples a while ago and got nowhere with it, time for another go, within the netherworld of SVG, to map to several different layers.
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