Seems like they reached the laugh / hate border. Or am I the only one reading that ?

What is the horizon for openai and anthropic to _make_ money ? Will they achieve that by charging more for frontier models, or investing slightly less in training frontier models, etc... ?

But, I guess some very religious people did not got all the subtleties of "Thou shall not kill" yet, do, let's give everyone another 2000 years to process the idea.

(Also, maybe it's hard for a camel, but easier in ocaml ? I'll have to try marketing "Static typing as a way to reach heaven")

Caml was how I was taught computer science in prépa and first few years of engineering school, a mere 25 years ago.

(Ok, I had done bits of BASIC before, but I had time to recover.)

To be honest, the learning path was

1. Lots of maths. Then add some more.

2. Algos in pseudo code. (In "French", pseudo code, of course, because, why not ?)

3. Caml as "executable pseudo code". With all the warnings and a hints of disgust as the use of mutation and side effect. (And of course ":=" his completely different from "=", what are we, beasts ?)

4. Lots of exams where you have to write properly indented programs on paper on the first try to submit all sorts of recursive trees to all sorts of horrendous manipulations - and you can imagine the grader doing the mother of all code reviews

5. Re do that again in engineering school, because a third of the class had done zero computer science, and the other third had learn in Pascal

6. Then learn C and assembler, and get your mind blown in the exact opposite direction

7. See your teachers reluctantly say that "you should just learn java", because "that's what used in the industry", and "no one will ever get a job writing caml anyway"

...

25 years later : yup, some people managed to get jobs writing a dialect of caml for this small startup in a garage serving cat pictures and racist memes to billions of people

26 years later: "you should just learn to prompt LLMs anyway", because "that's what the industry needs, and no one will get a job programming any more"

My fairphone 2 had lasted 5 years, but was completely unusable at the end. My current phone works very well (again, huge kudos to the team if anyone is reading this), and I would not mind trying to reach the decade with it - but in a few months, someone (my bank, a shop, a 2FA, whatever) will ask for an unsupported android feature.

I know people will give me names of exotic non-android distros, but will they run my bank's app :/ ?

And everyone _got along with it_.

And in a sense, we're still doing just that (ask the other 2/3th of the world to explain why your standards of living are above theirs.)

I don't know if, at the time, people where doubting that it would be useful. (Practical ? Affordable ? Other legitimate questions.)

But here, the contrast between the promises ("it will cure cancer and solve climate change") and the demo ("it can cost you money on stuff you never asked to buy") is a bit telling.

But I agree that you can't expect the enablers to think of all the uses cases and applications.

Still, just so I know: what ARC-xyz score means the LLM has cured climate poney cancer, exactly ?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTOtty7ZVcA

I'm curious if we'll ever get a form of civil war where corporate militias (corporate _robot_ militias in the case of xAI, of course) draw fire on good old meat policemen coming to bring the CEO to court.

Sure, it may happen, but I suspect the alternatives (bribing, sending a scapegoat to jail, buying the elections, etc... and focus on the "making money" part) will stay preferable for a while.

That being said, consensus would not necessarily settle the thing.

Even when the worldwide scientific community reaches a consensus and accepts using plain language (as in "It _is_ unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" [1]), you still have a number of politicians begging to differ. [2]

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-polic....

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/de-pire-en-pire-sur-france-5-... (Sorry, fr-fr)

But thanks for wording the press release as "company X acquired company Y", and not some weasely lingo line like "Y is joining the X family".

As a friend says, "Our collective cognitive dissonance is something I would not want to climb with a bike."

We're definitely better at maths than at promotion.

But yeah, my mum at the border of la Creuse had a better internet access than me for a few months :D

(Also, I dread the fact that I know a few boomers that I would actually like to stick around for while...)

But I also understand how the comment might have rubbed many people the wrong way, given how she seems to be one of the last few "generally" liked people in the USA.

I mean, her name ringed a bell, but it does not seem like her popularity crossed the Atlantic (not as much as other artist, I mean.)

Again, I have nothing against her, but I was surprised.

(The loss is sad, don't get me wrong, but it's the second submission I see..)