What's your ARR, anyway?

(I'm not factoring the benchmarks into the discussion, because I've never quite cared about them)

However, I don't see it as such a massive leap compared to Fable or Sol. As ever, there's a mismatch between the benchmarks and my daily experience of the models.

What do you all think about Astra now that it's been out for a few weeks?

There is plenty of evidence in the article from real professors at real universities (ex: Princeton), saying that they’ve had to dramatically cut reading workloads from humanities courses. I’ve heard similar things from European universities.

Other hard evidence is in plummeting reading comprehension scores in many countries that participate in PISA.

In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.

And all you have to contribute is that this is “idiotic”? The irony. Inform yourself.

I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around.

I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.

The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.

Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

I’m not an Anthropic fanboy - Codex has been my daily coding driver for the last year.

But my point is these companies are building app + model combos that are very sticky. Certainly not as much as an OS, but much more than the “there is no moat” crowd give them credit for.

This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making.

To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.

We're all unhinged about the data we're giving LLMs but here I'd draw the line. I'd rather keep paying the small amount I pay to have my accounts done.

In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.

This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!