So it turns out Anthropic was gaslighting everyone on twitter about this then? Swearing that nothing had changed and people were imagining the models got worse?
No, unfortunately. In a past life, in response to an uptime crisis, I drove a multi-quarter company-wide initiative to optimize performance and efficiency, and we still did not manage to change the company culture regarding performance.
If it does not move any metrics that execs care about, it doesn't matter.
The industry adage has been "engineer time is much more expensive than machine time," which has been used to excuse way too much bloated and non-performant code shipped to production. However, I think AI can actually change things for the better. Firstly, IME it tends to generate algorithmically efficient code by default, and generally only fails to do so if it lacks the necessary context (e.g. now knowing that an input is sorted.)
More importantly though, now engineer time is machine time. There is now very little excuse to avoid extensive refactoring to do things "the right way."
Performance can be a direct target in a feedback loop and optimised away. That's the easy part. Taking an idea and poof-ing a working implementation is the hard part.
Generative video is insanely expensive and OpenAI is burning through money. They need to use the compute on things that they actually might make money on - like enterprise Codex usage.
OpenAI is bleeding money faster than they can afford to and they are literally running out of people that they can go to for more. They need to stop the bleeding.
There were voters who could do part of it. Long term, having a US President that doesn’t cancel wind projects, tear up EV subsidies, and promote coal would probably be a difference maker for US emissions.
And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.
Here's the thing: NOTHING we do in the US matters when various Southeast Asian countries are rapidly industrializing. And in the rapid growth phase sustainability and clean energy is not a priority.
Then there's a billion and a half people in Africa, also rapidly growing, that may be next.
Trump is still all bluster and words. He can't change the math. I've convinced 2 people to get EVs over ICE this year. They still make economic sense even without federal subsidies (dependent on your home/work situation). Though I don't deny that most OEMs are likely selling at a loss now.
It's foolish how foreign wars directly affect how much it costs you to get to work.
You are not in defense contracting. You are in the business of war contracting.
Take from that what you will.
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