They did a lot to make the middle ages more tolerable. After that, maybe they overstayed their welcome.

I disagree, I note that multiple countries have digital ministries drafting plans to drop Microsoft products or to begin a wholesale migration due to sovereignty and security.

Once something becomes policy at the highest levels, the individual orgs will have to follow, even if slowly.

I really think you are grossly misreading the last 12 months or so. There is a big difference between a municipality migration as a cost-saving move and the very state saying declaring a national security threat from foreign-based vendors.

Sure, it needs steering, but I have actually preferred it to claude which is much too eager

Great leader may sic the government on your subversive corporation if the poll numbers are too bad.

Youths lack judgment, so they can’t vote, drink, drive, have sex or consent to adults.

A 14-year-old can’t be relied to understand the consequences of making nudes of some girl.

Beyond that, we regulate guns, speed limits and more according to principles like “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose”.

We do that not only because shoving kids into jails is something we want to avoid, but because regulating at the source of the problem is both more feasible AND heads off a lot of tragedy.

And again, you fail to acknowledge the investigative burden you put on society to discover who originated the photo after the fact, and the trauma to the victim.

If none of that computes for you, then I don’t know what to say except I don’t place the right to generate saucy images highly enough to swarm my already overworked police with requests to investigate who generated fake underage porn.

You can’t just “undo” some girl being harassed by AI generated nude photos of her, so we…

Yes, we should have some protections or restrictions on what you can do.

You may not understand it, either because you aren’t a parent or maybe just not emotionally equipped to understand how serious this actually can be, but your lack of comprehension does not render it a non-issue.

Having schools play whack-a-mole after the photos are shared around is not a valid strategy. Never mind that schools primarily engage in teaching, not in investigation.

As AI-generated content gets less and less distinguishable from reality, these incidents will have far worse consequences and putting such power in the hands of adolescents who demonstrably don’t have sound judgment (hence why they lack many other rights that adults have) is not something most parents are comfortable with - and I doubt you’ll find many teachers, psychiatrists and so on who would support your approach either.

I mean, the long arch of computing history has had us wobble back and forth in regards to how closed down it all was, but it seems we are almost at a golden age again with respect to good enough (if not popular) hardware.

On the software front, we definitely swung back from the age of Microsoft. Sure, Linux is a lot more corporate than people admit, but it’s a lot more open than Microsoft’s offerings and it’s capable of running on practically everything except the smallest IOT device.

As for LLMs. I know people have hyped themselves up to think that if you aren’t chasing the latest LLM release and running swarms of agents, you are next in the queues for the soup kitchens, but again, I don’t see why it HAS to play out that way, partly because of history (as referenced), partly because open models are already so impressive and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t continue to do well.

In fact, I do my day-to-day work using an open weight model. Beyond that, can only say I know employers who will probably never countenance using commercially hosted LLMs, but who are already setting up self-hosted ones based on open weight releases.

It isn’t “have it your way”, he graciously made code available, use it or leave it.

Beyond that, Gentoo, SuSE and a few others.

But generally, yes, be careful with what you install :)

Some insist that Chinese models are a few generations behind, how many probably depends more on patriotism rather than fact.

Those people typically also insist that Chinese models are just distillations and often neglect to see how many of these companies contribute to the theory of designing efficient and capable models. It is somehow thought that they will always trail US models.

Well. i would say look at recent history. China worked up the ladder of manufacturing from simple, bad stuff to highly complex things - exactly what westerners then claimed they’d never be able to. Then as that was conquered, westerners comforted themselves by insisting that China could copy, but trail-blazing would always still be our thing. Well, Baidu and Alibaba face scaling issues few western companies do and BYD seems to match Tesla or VW just fine.

I am unsure why anyone would think US models are destined to remain in the lead forever.

At “best”, I see a fragmented world where each major region (yes also Europe) will eventually have their own models - exactly because no one wants to give any competitive power a chokehold over their society. But beyond that, models will largely be so good that this “generation”/universal superiority idea becomes completely obsolete.

You’re (deliberately?) confusing the issue with e.g. illegal immigration or asylum seekers who often come from poor, war-torn areas with little education and possibly a very different mind-set.

I haven’t been accosted by roving gangs of well-educated IT Indians, I find the thought funny ;)

Frankly, most people have neither the bandwidth nor interest to research people’s projects and understand the value proposition. Speaking from bitter experience :)

All the best though :)

But Anthropic and “Open”AI especially are firing on all bullshit cylinders to convince the world that they are responsible, trustable, but also that they alone can do frontier-level AI, and they don’t like sharing anything.

You don’t get to both insert yourself as an indispensable base-layer tool for knowledge-work AND to arbitrarily deny access based on your beliefs (or that of the mentally crippled administration of your host country).

You can try, but this is having your cake and eating it too territory, it will backfire.

Yes, we have a pays-as-you-go pension system in Denmark (sigh). But regulations were also changed a while back such that employees must pay into a pension scheme of their own. In our case, that's handled via your employer and there's a minimum contribution limit and often incentives to pay a higher level.

((not my area of expertise))