I don't know which of us is in the minority. Maybe both of us.

I have to assume that they're probably doing the same with medicine.

Nvidia bought the architecture and killed it, which kind of proves your point.

I feel like I'm being A/B tested by a broken AI.

The statement can use whatever weasel words it likes, but the action pretty clearly says "we aren't mature enough as an organisation to handle this responsibility." Which would be quite the concern for me, if I were a customer for one of eMudhra's other product lines.

Self-driving trucks are not here, nor are they coming anytime very soon, but driver assistance systems really have advanced meaningfully since 2012. They will continue to do so, to the point where I imagine driving without them will feel pretty alien. I feel much the same way about AI; it will change everything, but we need to be thinking of that change on thirty or fifty year timescales. 2030 won't feel so different to 2025.

All that AI has done is to lower the bar of entry for criminal activity. Which is a concern, but it's not the primary concern. The primary concern remains that so much critical infrastructure is poorly secured.

We have real environmental problems, like excess CO2 in the air and forever-chemicals in our biosphere. The narrative must stay with those material issues and not be diverted by trivia.

I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because the two parties' understandings of the concept of "ownership" were not mutually intelligible (possession vs usufruction). However, the quote does have relevance to your post.

https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...

Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.

Note that this study is now over 15 years old.

> a tiny fractional loss in an RNG is not going to make a practical difference

I'm not so sure this is true. I don't think either of us is in a place to say whether this vulnerability has practical applications or not. A 1/65536 bias might seem like nothing important to you. It seems like potentially something to me, in a world where the attacker might control the volume of data generated.

If you want a casino example, then consider a roulette wheel that always lands on 36 but still pays out as usual. I think you'd want to play on it. Now consider one that always lands somewhere between 30 and 36. Still worth it, right? With careful bets and a good starting float you're still coming away from the table up (with a very high probability).

In fact for a roulette wheel you only need two dead pockets for the player to get an edge. Bias is exploitable.

You could be correct that the very small bias here is not enough to be exploitable. But, given the history around this, it would be wrong to handwave it away as trivial.

By your argument, it would not be a problem if the RNG never generated 0. So, it must follow that it would also not be a problem if it never generated {1, 2, 3, ..., 253}.

That means that our RNG now only generates the values 254 and 255. Which of the values is generated is unpredictable on any given call. However, 7 of the 8 output bits are now always fixed and so completely predictable. Can you imagine how an attacker could exploit that?

Failing to generate only the number 0 is a weaker version of the same class of flaw.

Yes! I believe that class of people are called "investors."

Your point is basically correct, I think, but the illusion of value that a corporate entity offers, and the reality of the value that the corporate entity is creating, are distinct things.