The biggest risk to AI companies IMO is further optimization and distillation of the capabilities into smaller and more efficient models. The moat these companies have right now is that higher intelligence requires more specialized and expensive compute. If you can do that for cheap then it kind of negates their business model. Everything is moving fast, we also yet to see world models/embodied AI and how that impacts thing. I think we've reached the peak with regards to capabilities of pure text trained LLMs.

A database is a data structure with (generally) many small items that need to be precisely updated, read and manipulated.

A lot of files don't necessarily have this access pattern (for instance rendering a large video file) ... a filesystem has a generic access pattern and is a lower level primitive than a database.

For this same reason you even have different kinds of database for different types of access patterns and data types (e.g Elasticsearch for full text search, MongoDB for JSON, Postgres for SQL)

Filesystem is generic and low-level, database is a higher order abstraction.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/how-pakis...

You are very naive if you think the IRGC truly killed 10's of thousands of it's own people. Israel openly talks about Mossad organizing and supporting the coup, and good old Donny has admitted they have given weapons to organized resistance.

I estimate that many of the death numbers come from armed resistance being killed by the IRGC, not ordinary peaceful protestors. I also think armed resistance killed many Irani citizens. There is obviously fog of war here. The thousands of deaths were likely inflated and obfuscated.

Look at the coups we have backed in the middle east (including formerly in Iran which is what originally led to the Islamic revolution) -- and you will see a pattern. Both US and Israel provide material support to groups like ISIS or actors like Bin Laden. An Al-Qaeda fighter is literally the head of Syria now thanks to Israel.

I don't love Hamas, IRGC or Hezbollah, I don't like their ideology. But it is myopic to think they exist in a vaccum.

I have a pet theory that the visual cortex when developing is linked to some kind of mechanism such as this. You just need proteins that create some sort of resonating signal that feed into the neurons as they grow (obviously this is hand-wavy) but similar feedback loops guide nervous system growth in Zebra fish for example.

If you are NYTimes and publish poisoned data to scrapers, the only thing the scraper needs is one valid human subscription where they run a VM + automated Chrome, OCR and tokenize the valid data then compare that to the scraped results. It's pretty much trivial to do. At Anthropic/Google/OpenAI scale they can easily buy VMs in data centers spread all over the world with IP shuffling. There is no way to tell who is accessing the data.