Ok, so that’s a pretty inoffensive form of bot. It’s not the bots pretending to be real people, which is what I think of when I hear “Russian Bot”.

It’s presumably also better behaved than the crawlers used by the AI companies. Those just refresh indices, but they’re way more aggressive than the ones typically used by search companies, and often don’t respect the robots.txt file.

By “Yandex bot” and “Russian bot” what do they mean?

Do we mean “bot”, like a social media account that pretends to be an authentic human user, but is actually a “bot”, or some other version of something inauthentic? Or do we mean the crawlers that Yandex sends out to crawl websites to refresh its search index?

I still don’t understand why countries that are being bullied by the US, and having their trade deals unilaterally ripped up, still insist on respecting US copyrights and listening to takedown demands from US companies.

Just start treating it like the US treats pot in most places, decriminalize it, stop enforcing the law.

When the US was a new country, one of the first things it did was stop respecting copyrights on British books.

For a full century between 1790 and 1891 the only copyrights that applied in the US were ones by authors who were residents or citizens of the USA.

I think it makes perfect sense to protest the USA by refusing to honour US copyrights.

open AI has 1 billion

I don’t really believe that. Have 1 billion people used it at least once? Maybe? Maybe part of that 1 billion is the same people on different accounts. I definitely don’t think there are 1 billion regular users.

IOW, the plan is proceeding as “intended”. See: Airbnb, Uber, etc.

That’s where I disagree. Uber maybe has a viable business as long as they keep finding gullible or desperate people to drive for them. Their OpEx costs are tiny, it’s nothing more than a system that receives a message that someone wants a ride and sends out a bid to take that customer. Then it’s a pricing algorithm that drops the price that they pay to drivers as low as possible, while driving the cost of the ride as high as possible. They get whatever slim margin is left.

AirBnB is similar, virtually no OpEx costs, a very simple set of algorithms to match places for rent with people wanting to rent them, then fiddle with the prices and extract a middle-man fee. As long as they keep staying ahead of government regulations, there’s a business there.

But, nobody had to go out and explain to drivers why they might want to drive for Uber. “You drive people, we pay you money”, it’s a simple sales pitch. Same with AirBnB. Hotels and taxis were annoying enough that it was easy for consumers too. But, nobody has yet found a long-term justification for chatbots.

Sure, some companies are trying to use them. But, not successfully. Air Canada replaced customer service reps (presumably in a call centre in India or something) with a chatbot. But, when that chatbot hallucinated a policy when talking to a customer, the courts found that Air Canada had to honour that policy. That’s a massive risk long term, especially once people get good at figuring out how to talk to them.

People are using them to generate vast amounts of code… but code is a liability, not an asset. The things code can do might be an asset, but you have to be able to understand and maintain the code for it to work. If people are using AI to generate the code, and other people are using AI to review it, nobody actually understands it. This is just a time bomb waiting to blow up.

If there really were some kind of guaranteed money making thing that chatbots could do (other than online scams), the AI companies wouldn’t be out there trying to sell AI in general, they’d be buying companies and/or starting divisions that did that one thing.

IMO, the AI companies intended to hit AGI, and hand everything over to the machine god. Now they realize that it really just is a clever word-guessing machine with some vague capabilities that niche users might want (but not at the price they can meet), and they’re scrambling to find a seat before the music stops.

To put that in context, Alphabet (Google’s parent) is the biggest software company in the world. It’s the 3rd biggest company in the world after nVidia and Apple, but they’re mostly hardware companies.

Google’s annual revenues are creeping up towards $500b/year. So, the AI companies (Google included I suppose) would need 12x Google’s annual revenue just to break even.

There are 2 companies that have over $1b in annual revenue, Amazon and Wal*Mart. But, those are companies that sell goods to consumers, they’re not just digital services businesses. But, even then, you’d need 3x the revenue of Amazon and Wal*Mart combined to hit $6t.

Google, Apple, nVidia, Wal*Mart and Amazon each took decades to grow enough to capture hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. So, somehow OpenAI and Anthropic are going to need to grow faster than any other company on earth to hit these trillion dollar targets.

Also putting this number into scale, there are about 8.3 billion people on the Earth. But, most of them are poor goat herders, subsistence farmers, sweatshop employees, and AI model trainers / reviewers living in Asia and Africa. These aren’t the kinds of people who are going to be buying a subscription to ChatGPT. There are maybe 1 billion people globally who have disposable cash they can spend on AI. So, to hit 6 trillion annually, each person living in a developed country would need to personally hit $6000 in AI spending on a yearly basis. Note, that includes children and the elderly. If you limit it to working-age people, that’s more like $10k per person per year.

Now, it doesn’t have to be that this is down to consumers. Maybe this is so valuable that Wal*Mart, the US government, and every other large employer pays for a ChatGPT subscription for each of their millions of employees. But, really, despite the fact that there have been very few actual successful AI deployments that saved companies money, or generated more profits, they’re suddenly going to be spending a significant fraction of each worker’s wage on AI subscriptions?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the AI companies thought that they were about to invent AI jesus. They thought they were just a few datacentres away from the machine god coming to life. They thought that AGI would change the world to such a degree that it might make the entire economy obsolete, so there was no limit on how much they should spend so either they would get there first (and maybe be seen as the god’s parents?) or out of some kind of altruism-type-feeling so that they could make a machine god which would align with their beliefs. But, that didn’t happen.

I saw a comment the other day about AI firms and CapEx vs OpEx. CapEx is Capital Expenditures – basically one-time costs for setting up a business. OpEx is Operational Expenses, basically ongoing costs for running a business. A good way to generate money from a business is to have a high CapEx and low OpEx. It’s hard for someone to set up a competing business because of the high initial costs, but once it’s up and running you can provide services for a low ongoing cost, and you can make a high profit on each customer. If CapEx is low but OpEx is high, sometimes it can work as a luxury business. Think an artist who hand-carves furniture. If both CapEx and OpEx are low, it’s basically a commodity business, think something like a nail salon. Cheap to set up, cheap to run, hard to fight off competitors.

The AI companies are stuck in a world where they have incredibly high CapEx (building DCs and training new models), and incredibly high OpEx (inference queries – basically talking to the chatbot, is also very expensive). Right now to try to hook customers they’re subsidizing the OpEx side of things, so each new customer costs them more money. Their paid tiers are even worse because people actually start really using the chatbots once they pay for them, and the money lost per customer goes way up for the paid tiers.

The only thing that would work is if the companies can somehow manage to get customers to pay incredibly high costs per token, so that not only are the OpEx costs covered, but the companies can start to pay down the initial CapEx. But, there’s just no justification for that yet. And the ruthless competition between all the AI companies means that if one of them starts trying to jack up costs to cover their OpEx, the others will keep theirs low to grab market share.

This is why the AI companies are doing all the things they’re doing. They’re talking about their models “escaping containment” and “hacking” other companies. Why? Because that makes it sound like these things are so powerful that they can’t be contained, rather than it being that the AI companies are incompetent and building a locked-down test environment, and how they are just running dumb scripts that they’re not even looking at before the execute. They’re boosting stories about the AIs being so powerful that they’ll destroy the world so that CEOs think they need to buy subscriptions to this powerful machine god for their companies. They’re inviting regulations and laws so that no new AI companies can enter the business, and so that they’re all forbidden from building new models, which is a massive CapEx (sorta) cost.

They can’t admit that the attempt to build a machine god has failed, because that will cause the bubble to pop. What they want to do is survive long enough to go public so that the costs they’ve spent can be foisted on the dumb retail investors – and at this point on pension funds and anybody holding index funds, because these companies are so huge that index fund managers would be obligated to buy them. So, they need to keep scaring people about how incredibly powerful and unstoppable their word-guessing-machines are until their investors have safely grabbed their profits and everything can be allowed to explode.

First you have to imagine that the data is 100% yours to control, and not going to be used for spying, advertising, etc.

Ok, with that in mind:

Have you ever gone to the fridge for something like milk or yogourt only to find out that it went bad and you didn’t know? I hate that. I’d love it if the fridge could warn me 2-3 days before something went bad so I could remember to use it. It could scan everything that went in and that should give it enough data to tell you when something was about to go bad.

What about going shopping and realizing that you didn’t check to see if you still had X at home, and whether X was still good. Like, I’m often buying green onions but I don’t use the whole bunch right away. Do I need to buy more? So, when I’m shopping I either overbuy just in case I don’t have enough, or I take a risk and maybe I don’t get green onions on my dish this time. It would be handy if I could ask the fridge whether I still had green onions.

Before a big shopping trip, I’ll almost always check in the fridge for what I currently have, then start on the list for things I need to buy. It would be handy if I could just hit a button and the fridge could auto-populate the start of the list based on what I currently have remaining, and what I’m low on, based on what I normally buy. I could always edit what the fridge suggested, but it would be nice not to have to manually go through and say “ok, milk, how much do I still have? Is it still good? Veggies, what do I have? What meats do I have…”

If it’s not spam, you’re telling the chatbot that you were one of the people whose penile implant malfunctioned and are part of the class action lawsuit about that. That means you’re telling the Nigerian chatbot quality control expert about that.

So, your suggestion is to feed private, potentially sensitive information to an LLM and then trust its judgment?

I’m sure that a bank / delivery company / doctor’s office that uses such terrible practices is actually on the ball when it comes to making sure all the links they send only work once and time out after a while, right? So, when a guy in Nigeria is working at his job where he reviews LLM sessions to ensure they’re sycophantic enough, there’s no issue. He can’t click on it or sell the data to criminals or anything, can he?

They’re also typically low quality screens and much more expensive.

I searched and couldn’t find a modern OLED from a reputable brand that didn’t have “smart” features.

So by “remotely” you mean “from 1m away”?

When I was a kid we handled this “remote silencing” issue with a broom handle.

If it’s like a lot of other devices, it will realize that it can’t get to “The Internet” through that network, and might disconnect. It’s possible it will then look for another option, and might see an open network and use it.

Because if you want a screen of a certain size, there are no other reasonable options.

The same reason you might buy a phone that will spy on you and show you ads. You can’t buy a phone that doesn’t do that.

my wife and kids needed something they can mute remotely

But… why?

SO SAY WE ALL!