What exactly are they doing? I've seen a lot of hype but not much real change. It's like a different way to google for answers and some code generation tossed in, but it's not like LLMs are folding my laundry or mowing my lawn. They seem to be good at putting graphic artists out of work mainly because the public abides the miserable slop produced.
Any fool could have anticipated the eventual result of transformer architecture if pursued to its maximum viable form.
What is impressive is the massive scale of data collection and compute resources rolled out, and the amount of money pouring into all this.
But 10 years ago, spammers were building simple little bots with markov chains to evade filters because their outputs sounded plausibly human enough. Not hard to see how a more advanced version of that could produce more useful outputs.
Any fool could have seen self driving cars coming in 2022. But that didn't happen. And still hasn't happened. But if it did happen, it would be easy to say:
"Any fool could have seen this coming in 2012 if they were paying attention to vision model improvements"
We do not. We have much better cruise control and some rudimentary geofenced autonomy. In our lifetimes, neither you nor I will be able to drive in a car that, based on deep learning training on a corpus of real world generated data, goes wherever we want it to whenever we want it to, autonomously.
Everyone who lives in the show belt understands that unless a self driving car can navigate icy, snow-covered roads better than humans can, it's a non-starter. And the car can't just "pull over because it's too dangerous" that doesn't work at all.
That works fine. Self driving doesn’t need to be everything for all conditions everywhere.
Give me reliable and safe self driving for Interstate highways in moderate to good weather conditions and I would be very happy. Get better incrementally from there.
I live solidly in the snow belt.
Autopilot for planes works in this manner too. Theoretically a modern airliner could autofly takeoff to landing entirely autonomously at this point, but they do not. They decrease pilot workload.
If you want the full robotaxi panacea everywhere at all times in all conditions? Sure. None of us are likely to see that in our lifetime.
As soon as a platform gives control to the fullscreen, harmful apps are possible.
See for example Apple detecting if a user is typing on a keyboard while in a fullscreen website, and then blocking the website. Yes it's as crazy as it's sounds.
> They also mastered the world of DC lobbying, successfully outmaneuvering Boeing and Lockheed’s attempts to use anti-trust regulations to shut the European entrant out of the US market.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
All valid points. Made me actually think about the likely first actions an alien or newborn would take with a 2025 touch screen device. Chomp. Chew. Swipe.
Persistently bad behavior can be anticipated and accounted for, random actions cannot. Importer have as much issue with the tariffs as they have with the unpredictability of those tariffs.
In theory, you try to limit the influence of a persistently bad actor, but it seems the U.S. didn't get the memo.
> In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers
It may not be exactly true, but it's close to be true, and then like you said the workers have way more expenses (rent, children).
I will point out that in the 90s we in France already knew that the retirement system was unsustainable. It is quite obvious if you look for 2 seconds at the population pyramid :-)
Generations of politicians tried and failed to do something about it, thanks to the left (and sometimes extreme right wing) saying that there was enough money and we just need to tax the rich more.
Oh please. What LLMs are doing now was complete and utter science fiction just 10 years ago (2015).
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