China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.

American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.

Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.

  NASA wanted to avoid pencils because the lead could easily break off and float away, creating a hazard to astronauts and sensitive electronics on the spacecraft In fact, a pencil is such an impractical alternative in space that cosmonauts also have been using Space Pens since 1969

You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes.

Good engineers learn to smell out simple but wrong answers.

Pentel use manga (漫画 whimsical/informal drawings) to write the history of a burnt rice ball being the inspiration: https://pentel.ca/docs/e_manga.pdf (page 7 with the title "Pentel's Sharp Pencil Refills").

Previously there were clutch pencils using the historical fired clay and graphite https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/the-history-of-the-pen...

As usual Germans claim inventing it first https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t... ). Why are there no teutonic Space Pencil jokes?

I think it's easy for China to be more open right now (and Western governments to essentially not worry about it yet) because they're playing catchup.

If we reach some endpoint where American models stop improving for the general public and only party apparatchiks and sycophantic oligarchs can access them, the situation is different. Chinese models could exceed the publicly available SOTA, and surely they would close off their own models in the same way.

This policy just keeps the powerful in power.

And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.

I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even.

Shit! I'm with you, esp. in these times.

Am I allowed to ask out ofcuriousity, what happened? Feel free to share, you are on HN :)

Ran platform tooling with an active Dev team Two years in our director retired My manager at the time (good guy who cared) and a sister team got in an argument My manager told me on our last 1:1 together that he hated those guys. They play politics and speak bullshit Leadership took just me and the app/ tooling to that sister team New manager made me responsible developer. He was okay. Year later he is promoted and promotes his best friend from highschool to be this groups manager That new guy takes a few months off, paternity leave Before he somes back higher leadership starts allowing us to use AI I created a pull request with AI help to fix some logging that I couldn't get to, too busy with other things This new manager is currently anti AI, tells me he noticed I used AI slop and proceeds to say I'll never be a software developer even though I've been doing it for 15 years. He starts emailing me about a bunch made up busy work and stuff "I didn't do" and was late about everything Reality is he didn't attend out team standups. He would constantly reschedule 1:1 with me last minute and then end up canceling after rescheduling a handfull He just didn't like anything my first manager created and hated me by association and was very anti AI like a lot of the management at the time. Summer comes along and I request a mentor. He denies it without reason I even traveled to his office location with my own money to get some. Facetime with him but he didn't show up to the office those days I was in town. That AI pull request started this guy digging in Then company wide. AI is open for all and we need to use it He still shames me for using Claude. Even small. Focused PRs. Didn't matter. January I talk to three level directors up. That guy just shrugged his shoulders and said to do what my manager wanted Two months later that guy setups another second call with me. Starts out well. Then manager joins. They told me the news. I told them on that call that it was insane that I couldn't tell my side of the story and that that manager opinion was all that mattered. At that time my manager was starting a AI project. Full hypocritical timeline. And my account was restricted right away. And security found where I was on campus and escorted me out while taking many photos of me and my vehicle.

Almost five years thrown away. All I did was make my tooling and software less buggy, more reliable, and help all people using the tooling. But that kind of work isn't respected. And management at these places could care less that my dog got cancer during this time. They could care less I moved to that town to work at that company and was there for almost five years with a mortgage. Could care less that I need healthcare. Could care less about all the things I did.

Hell I had good to great performance reviews with the first and second manager. But that third just gave me

Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit.

This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future.

One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy).

This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up.

LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a _much_ smaller scale of course).

Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.

In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).

I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.

Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.

At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.

My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.

That's why we need innovation.

And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).

Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.

Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.

The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.

Nitpicking here: I bet 100 USD that this type of innovation, is not that type of "innovation" meant by befores posting? :-D

Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.

Ignoring wealth differences is another instance of dreaming of a magical world where greed has disappeared.

A good read is Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism

Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke.

Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse.

When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone.

(To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)

This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.

Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here.

The only way AI can turn a profit is from a government bailout.

In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.

What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.

If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat.

Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front.

If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...

But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few

I worry, like other emerging industries, the administration will make hamfisted decisions that let the Chinese take the lead. See also EVs / clean energy and the war in Iran which has only accelerated that transition.

There’s currently cronyism. There’s no laws that give companies certainty about a regulatory framework (it’s all just being made up). Add to that deep suspicion of expertise at the White House. And a huge disconnect from the economic reality.

It’s a great opportunity for the second tier US labs to release open weight almost-as-good models. Meta kicked off this race, maybe they can release something? Microsoft wants to develop more of their models. Maybe Google should go open weight?

"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"

Seem they only got the country wrong.

Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.

There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.

Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.

Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.

- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...

- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...

- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words

… then, OK, I guess.

But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.

There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.

> to make intelligence available for everyone

say that again but slowly..