People please, an LLM is just a vector database that spits out statistically viable answers which highly depend on its training material. There's no real "intelligence" involved.
Embedding vectors assign semantic features to syntactical structures of the vector space. Operations on these syntactical structures allow the program to engage with semantic features of program state directly, leveraging the meaning of program state to alter its execution. Intelligence is leveraging information/experience to achieve one's ends. Manipulating meaning through embedding vectors in service to answering prompts is an example of that.
I can't explain how the bunch of atoms inside my skull interact to produce me. If I can't explain that, I don't have a good grounding to explain why a bunch of atoms in a data center can't make something like me. That's my point.
Intelligence is the ability to predict. To pretend that only we can do it, is silly. I mean read the article, and see what AI is doing to the math community.
He talks about applications he generated without specifying what they are or do. Does he really believe everybody is going to generate their own text editor, paint program, file explorer or graphical windowing environment with A.I. just because they can?
I believe the author is misguided about A.I.'s capabilities just like many analysts and investors are.
A.I. (or should I say LLMs) is useful for specific problems but contrary to its name it has no "intelligence."
He's talked about this before. I don't remember exactly what those apps were, but they sounded like reasonable tools one would want. Thomas is a competent guy, but I think he's vastly overestimating the agency and competence of normal people. They don't have a product-oriented mindset; they might get annoyed by a bug or slow loading times, but they're not good at coming up with features or entire apps that they would want to use. Even if there are people who can do this, they don't want to spend their weekend thinking about a detailed spec for an app they want. They really just want to consume.
People could already vibe-code simple products today, but there's hardly any non-programmers that do. This is even true for businesses. For the last year people have been boasting about canceling their SaaS products, but nothing seems to have changed. SaaS stocks got hit by the ai hysteria in January, but many are back to previous levels and some even higher. There's an Indiehacker on Twitter whose product is a simple stage timer. It's not a hardware product. It's literally just the software for a stage timer. One would expect his business to have died already, but he's apparently doing completely fine.
I often wonder if our brains are capable of understanding the Universe around us. Our brains were made to help us survive on this planet, not to understand the laws that govern our Universe.
The story that haunts me is the one where scientists attempted to understand how the brain of a simple organism worked. It only had 40 neurons yet they were unable to unravel the mystery on how it functioned.
I think about this sometimes too but I do believe we have at least for a fact described some aspects of the universe (speed of light for example) so we are at least capable of doing that, if not understanding much of the rest too.
Soon the musical chairs game will come to a screeching halt. Interest rates are skyrocketing and not even a Presidential decree will make them come down.
To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.
Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.
The idea of "orbital data centers" was conjured up merely to justify Musk's merging of xAI and SpaceX. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently there are still plenty of little-minded people that see Musk as some sort of God and suck up every lie he shoots from the hip.
Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.
Solving climate change by mostly eliminating fossil fuel use, antibiotic resistant bacteria with new antibiotics, eliminating risks of pandemics generated from meat agriculture, creating novel antimycotics, curing various cancers, and reversing shrinking peace, freedom, privacy, and middle classes around the world to name a few.
> The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads.
Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.
Europe is mostly interested in supporting its car industry. But soon they won't have to worry about that either.
There are no companies in Europe designing high-end semiconductors because the wages are much lower than in the U.S. The best European talent is moving Stateside and raking in ten times what they can get at home without having to build up seniority first.
There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial. NXP and ST are designing ICs in Europe but relatively commodity stuff like low-end MCUs and motor controllers.
The problem with the Blackbird were its two engines. If the airplane had one centrally located engine it would've been safe to fly but with two engines even a small "hiccup" in one engine could lead to a thrust difference which would tear the airplane apart in mid-flight.
> “The airplane yawed to the right so far and so fast, it felt like it was going sideways!” said Osterheld. The SR-71’s right engine had just experienced an “intake unstart.”
Doesnt seem like a "hiccup" would "tear apart" if one engine failing entirely (intake unstart) didn't.
Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
The European Commission wanted to put hefty tariffs on dumped Chinese steel but the carmakers sought an exemption. They don't care about European sovereignty, only about their profits. Penny wise and pound foolish. I doubt there will still be a European car industry in two decades or so.
> Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
You clearly have no idea about the value creation chain. Steel is a commodity, why shoot yourself into the foot by buying expensive one. And semiconductors are not commodities.
But I guess this logic only makes sense to a country that insists on using its own overpriced steel to save a couple jobs.
How are you gonna fight a war when you can't make the steel for your bullets and artillery grenades? Yes, that's the scary logic we need to take into account these days.
Steel is not a commodity, it's a basic ingredient in any industrial base.
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