One of the responses to this announcement was Jarred asking: “What issue did you run into with the Rust rewrite? If there’s something specific I’ll fix” Dude, this is a comms problem, not a technical problem. Refusing to accept that makes the situation worse and I think it is completely believable if Bun eventually dies over this because it’s clear the folks running the show don’t understand part of the process of winning customers is to build a community where Bun is just considered the obvious choice. I remember awhile back they also forked Zig to do some “optimization” that was pointed out by Zig maintainers to be worthless. There’s a pattern developing here and it’s not a good one.

This is ridiculous and the response is entirely expected, it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about people. If you claim that doesn't matter, then I think the user response tells you otherwise. It signaled that Bun was not being transparent while asking people to trust it as a core runtime system. Why would I trust a runtime that actively would just do major changes so callously? There’s a balance between all of this. You don’t need to be as methodical as Python is now with PEPs. I think Swift got similar crap, though, nowhere as bad when it rolled out major language changes out of the blue to support Apple’s own product needs a few years back. This was kept secret and released in one burst, bypassing the entire Language Evolution process they crafted for Swift. Apple’s actions are more understandable by the nature of the company wanting to keep some things under wraps, even though it did erode trust somewhat. Apple is now a 50+ year old Fortune 100 company and Apple engineers really just kinda demurred on the bad taste it left in the community’s mouth, but at the same time, what do you expect from a company with a long history of being rather tight-lipped on major product changes. Bun has not really built this reputation nor has their parent company, but they are asking for that here and I just don’t think they have the leverage to do it.

They could have done this more methodically, made sure that the community and industry were okay with it. Maybe they actually did this more thoughtfully behind the scenes and this entirely a marketing stunt, but their lack of transparency at this moment makes it difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt. Trust is currently in short supply, burning it up on stunts like this is stupid.

Leaks are inevitable, but the current situation is absurd. The liabilities and incentives to do anything about them are virtually nonexistent and security is almost always viewed as a cost.

I really doubt this. There’s too many people who suffer from motion sickness to make this payoff. 33% of the population suffers from motion sickness to varying degrees and current mitigations including blowing a fan at suffering users, is an unrealistc barrier to causal usage.

Doesn’t this sum up most of the AI “innovations” we’ve seen shoveled in this bubble?

We constantly see AI thought leaders backpeddling on promises and just spouting general nonsense. Altman originally talked effusively about an era of “abundance”. An abundance of what? It’s a word salad of feel good vibes without any substance.

Sam Altman has gone from claiming AI might cure cancer to shoveling ads and the scope of AI seems to be reduced to mostly be suitable as flawed, imperfect, but mildly useful coding/automation agents that are likely subsidized beyond economic viability, but you can’t point that out because it’s the future!

If the argument is that AI is being used in the background or for some VFX, sure, I’ll buy that. It’s just another tool, then. If it is being used to generate entire scenes, there’s no evidence of this, unless something like that atrocious holiday Coca-Cola commercial is a herald of our future.

As written, your claim is just handwavy. I get you might not be able to cite anything concrete due to NDAs or whatnot but, you also have to understand why a lot of people find this kinda unpersuasive.

I don't think there's any way for all of the current AI models to work except as a usage model. The question is whether or not people are willing to pay for it that way in the long-term.

It sounds like it is producing positive ROI for your side, but I’m curious what the bean counters at the studios think of the bill when the budgets tighten.

A lot of applications just required a lot more computing power to be practical. This all starts to happen around the same time (unsurprisingly) and if you’re going to make hay that Reed-Solomon coding was invented in 1960, I think it’s worth pointing the first big use of was on Voyager because the computing power was finally able to make these work. It’s not like people hadn’t started to notice some of this decades earlier.

I want to see their S-1s, then we can fight.

This is after the fact justification. You are arguing that because a thing (number theory) showed practical applications we should have dumped a lot more effort into it. There is no basis for this argument whatsoever; it also seems to involve inventing a time machine. Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.

Once we get something working, sure, you can justify more aggressive investment. This is not to say that we should not invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. We absolutely should and need to. Moonshot research or even somewhat esoteric research is vital, but the current investment in AI is so far out of the ballpark of rational. There’s an energy of a fait accompli here, except it’s still very plausible this is all unsustainable and the market implodes instead.

These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.

I think LLMs can help in limited cases like this by just coming up with a different way of approaching a problem. It doesn’t have to be right, it just needs to give someone an alternative and maybe that will shake things up to get a solution.

That said, I have no idea what the practical value of this Erdős problem is. If you asked me if this demonstrates that LLMs are not junk. My general impression is that is like asking me in 1928 if we should spent millions of dollars of research money on number theory. The answer is no and get out of my office.

I think this has been pushed too hard, along with general exhaustion at people insisting that AI is eating everything and the moon these claims are getting kind of farcical.

Are LLMs useful to find bugs, maybe? Reading the system card, I guess if you run the source code through the model a 10,000 times, some useful stuff falls out. Is this worth it? I have no idea anymore.

Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.

That $20/month is not profitable? That Anthropic thinks that people are willing to pay a 400% markup without batting an eye? That Anthropic is desperately trying to clean up their burn rate? Why should we trust a company that can screw up basic PR this hard?