Is this true of operating systems for most people?

Personally I’d take macOS from 15 years ago (with security bug fixes and new hardware support, assuming modern apps still worked, but no new features) over today’s Windows any day.

Someone will still need to ask for something (or maybe it will just run autonomously making things it thinks we'll like) but it won't require any expertise in the field.

EDIT: oh, they do offer grants of $1000 of API credits to researchers https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10139500-researcher-acce...

Apple, the world's second most valuable company, seems like a counterexample.

1) They sell compute: chips (Nvidia), data centers (AWS, Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, etc), or even end-user device manufacturers like Apple (e.x. M7 rumored to have 1.5TB of unified memory). If Jevon's paradox holds, then cheaper (or free) models means more demand. But compute is likely supply-constrained for years anyway.

2) Their product isn't AI but depends on AI being cheap, or they don't want competitors to capture that value, i.e. "commoditize your complement" https://gwern.net/complement

It probably doesn't make sense for these companies to invest a lot of money training models that will be obsolete in a few months anyway. When progress starts to plateau I'd expect more companies to start training models they give away for free.

Ok, I claim that if something draws reasonable conclusions to questions it hasn't previously seen by performing steps that look like reasoning, then it is reasoning.

If you disagree then please define reasoning.

Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.

It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”

Unlikely for a number of reasons, and actually a large commercial constellation could help with scientific discovery.

Satellite trajectories are predictable from published ephemerides. It’s trivial for telescope operators to exclude the small fraction of pixels in a frame occupied by a satellite. They already do this.

Satellite operators are also careful not to transmit towards radio quiet zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_quiet_zone

Furthermore, the same technology that makes it economical to put millions of satellites into LEO (e.g. Starship) also makes it cheaper to build larger telescopes in space where they’re unaffected by the earth’s atmosphere (and satellites in LEO).

If SpaceX spent a ton of resources developing Moon and Mars base plane they’d be criticized for not focusing on the launch vehicle. The railroad company also doesn’t necessarily need to be the ones building the towns.

Starship has experienced setbacks but isn’t a “massive failure” by any measure.