i do agree that there is a good chance that one of these post- OpenAI/Anthropic competitors probably will get some sort of unanticipated foothold, if only because enough talent will drain out over time. what i push back on is the idea that being 90% as good as frontier models is actually good enough to matter in even the slightest. especially since we know that the "real" internal models are so much further advanced than what we get access to publicly.

i absolutely agree that it isn't impossible-- if the only thing stopping a new entrant is capital (as in: they have the trillion-dollar idea necessary to be competitive) that will absolutely never be a true impediment to a worthy competitor.

the former is demonstrably untrue (and wildly so), and the latter is just an egocentric/anthropocentric "the genie in a bottle only answered my wishes, it didn't tell me what to wish for". buried in that statement is the presupposition that humans being able to understand that something is actually Important; short of religious/faith-based reasons I don't see the justification for the primacy of human understanding when it comes to the determination of Truth. if anything, being "understandable" to humans strikes me as an anti-goal. are we really to believe that human comprehension is the limiting factor keeping society from degrading into "decoherence"? how well is that going for us? the reason humanity places such a premium on identifying "The Truth" is precisely because of how illusory it is for our fallible minds. LLMs struggle with many things, but coherence is least among them. that is why "slop" works so well-- if it wasn't at least mildly coherent, it would be easy to discriminate.

> there are A LOT of lazy executives, and lazy developers who are spewing a lot of slop all over the place and there are even more lazy humans who are happy to ascribe this to a shortcoming of the technology and not of humanity itself.

insofar as we are descending further into post-truth, it isn't because of AI slop blurring the lines between fiction and reality; it is because we are all collectively realizing that Truth isn't all it's cracked up to be. LLMs are forcing us to take a long hard look into the mirror and we don't necessarily like what we see.

I don't see any reason whatsoever why "AI regulations" would become antifragile from their having been "written in blood" in the way that aviation regulations have been; if anything, our inevitable present and future AI crises will each be exponentially more devastating than the last. Modern aviation is a triumph because of how fallible humans are-- that's why we delegate control of aircraft mostly to machines. The shape of AI disruption isn't "the computers aren't following the rules", it's that even by our own rules of rationality our world is terribly underspecified-- we have computer security that isn't secure, subjective rules of ethics/fairness/judgment that defy straightforward explication, "knowledge work" that is actually neither "knowledge" nor "work"... the whole situation is much closer to the human domestication of the dog (letting a potential threat into one's home) than any traditional story of humans coming to terms with their own technological innovations. human behavior is FAR easier to predict than un-aligned AI behavior-- that is why it is such a singular moment in human history.

what I really push back on is the idea that there are magically going to be all sorts of entrants into the space that meaningfully compete with Anthropic or OpenAI in the near or even medium term. for as much as the reddit set continues to put their collective heads in the sand while screaming "there's no moat"... there is a moat, and one so prominent as to be self-evident. not once has an open-source model come even close to genuinely reaching frontier performance for anything other than cost, and cost is by definition the easiest thing to improve on-- just distill bigger model into smaller model: boom, cheaper!

> hallucinate an entire operating system every single frame 1. I don't know that "hallucinate" is the right word here... any more than Windows 11 itself is a hallucination, for example 2. I don't personally think that this system is a million (thousands x thousands, from your attestation) times slower, but given Moore's Law, even that isn't the worst thing ever. this is the low water mark.