10 years ago it was super hard to have usable “frontier” ML. You needed very complex data warehouse, feature engineers, feature stores, multi level ranking, calibrations, tons of different model architectures, etc, etc. Each by itself was extremely hard engineering problem and really only handful of companies could deal with that complexity.

With LLMs, 95% of that is gone, infra to support them is greatly simplified. Of course, to make really reliable, performant, user friendly, etc - you still need to a lot of engineering. But it’s very different challenge.

LLMs are still surprisingly “easy”. You need maybe a couple dozens of right people, a lot of good quality data and a lot of GPU that you know how to operate. There’s relatively little “secret sauce” needed.

You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.

On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.

It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with distillation.

- to take as my personal device when I travel

- do personal stuff when my corporate laptop is connected to my home setup and constant switching between computers is a hassle (even with a built in kvm in a monitor). i know, 1st world problems

It has a price point that makes it no brainer for me.

1. She stopped making money for rich people.

2. She herself wasn’t rich enough.

Leon is too rich, and he keeps on making money for the right people.

But let's go back to the original point, about being able to UPGRADE (not repair/replace) battery in the car. 20 years old car is worth like $1k-2k, which is fraction of the cost of the new battery.

While it's cool thing to do for hobbyists, it makes 0 economical sense.

Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.

That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again.

When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc.

We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of those problems". But they're often involved in evaluation/scoping down/breakdown of problem/supervising/correcting/etc.

There's tons of analogies and decades of industry experience to apply here.

That being said - feature I LOVE added recently-ish that made really happy I’ve upgraded my many years old garmin was a flashlight (proper one, not screen brightness). It seemed like a gimmick but it’s now one of most used features on my watch - walking dog at night, looking for kids toys under the bed, fixing things around the house, looking for things in the bag, etc.