Klimt is one of those artists that I feel primed to dislike, because it's so reproduced that's it's turned cheesy. I've probably seen more Kiss posters and fridge magnets and whatevers than any other painting in the world.
But good god are they beautiful. They just make me so happy to see them. Or sad.
My favorites are probably the birch forests, though, perhaps Birch Forest (1903) [1]
> If the proprietary models stop moving forward, the open source ones will quickly close the gap.
This is the Red Queen hypothesis in evolution. You have to keep running faster just to stay in place.
On it's face, this does seem like a sound argument that all the $$ following LLMs is irrational:
1. No matter how many billions you pour into your model, you're only ever, say, six months away from a competitor building a model that's just about as good. And so you already know you're going to need to spend an increased number of billions next year.
2. Like the gambler who tries to beat the house by doubling his bet each time, at some point there must be a number where that many billions is considered irrational by everybody.
3. Therefore it seems irrational to start putting in even the fewer billions of dollars now, knowing the above two points.
> it seems irrational to start putting in even the fewer billions of dollars now, knowing the above two points
This doesn’t follow. One, there are cash flows you can extract in the interim—standing in place is potentially lucrative.
And two, we don’t know if the curve continues until infinity or asymptotes. If it asymptotes, being the first at the asymptote means owning a profitable market. If it doesn’t, you’re going to get AGI.
Side note: bought but haven’t yet read The Red Queen. Believe it was a comment of yours that lead me to it.
Why would being the first at the (horizontal) asymptote mean owning a profitable market? In six months, somebody else is at the asymptote as well. If different models are mostly interchangable quality-wise, then the decision will mostly be made on price.
For a market to be both winner-take-all as well as lucrative, you need some kind of a feedback cycle from network effets, economies of scale, or maybe even really brutal lock-in. For example, for operating systems applications provide a network effect -- more apps means an OS will do better, a higher install base for an OS means it'll attract more apps. For social networks it's users.
One could imagine this being the case for LLMs; e.g. that LLMs with a lot of users can improve faster. But if the asymptote has been reached, then by definition there's no more improvement to be had, and none of this matters.
Excellent point, but now consider the availability of open source models as well. They’re not as good as the frontier models, but at some point they get close enough, right?
I run Llama 3.x locally on my 5+ year old GPU. It’s pretty decent. It’s not as smart as GPT-4 or Claude, but it’s good enough for a lot of what I do, and most importantly there’s no cap on the number of prompts I can send in a given timeframe.
For many consumers, it’s fine to be a little bit behind the cutting edge. My smartphone is 2 models behind now. It’s fast enough, the camera is good enough, and the battery is holding up just fine. I don’t feel any need to fork over $1,000 for a new one right now.
I think the same phenomenon will become more common for AI enthusiasts. It’s hard to beat free.
And what happens to the economics of building frontier models then? I suspect a lot of air is going to be released from the AI bubble in the next couple of years.
> In six months, somebody else is at the asymptote as well
But you were there first. That gives you all of a first mover’s advantages plus the profits from that period to set the terms of the market sharing.
None of this requires winner-takes-all economics. And given OpenAI’s revenues, it’s unclear they need to be the sole winner to make an investment thesis work.
The first mover advantage isn't as big an advantage as being the one to monopolize a commodity. While there are some historical advantages to first mover's doing this, it is the common case. I also think that is very nearly a winner take all sort of thing, or at least a very API providers will still matters, if this asymptotes.
Compare this to toilet paper or fuel, if AI asymptotes and everyone catches up in 6 months it will be be just like these. There are some minor differences in quality, but if a customer can buy something good enough to keep their ass clean or their car powered then they will tend to pick the cheapest option.
Sometimes it is subterfuge like ms stealing the OS market from IBM or there might be a state sponsored AI lab like so many state run industries pushing out competition, but there are a ton of ways to beat first movers.
If there is no niche, first-mover is useless. But if there is value to be had, it’s valuable. Fighting to tread water in a moving stream with the expectation the flow will slow isn’t irrational.
Are you claiming there is no Niche to making commodities? I haven't really considered it I could see an argument being made either way. Or are you saying that it's a product these API based llms are just not going to be how we use these tools? Or are you saying something else entirely?
Ok, so let's say I was there first. But now you're offering a product that's (by definition) just as good for a lower price. Why will the users stick to my product rather than paying your cheaper prices?
As for your second point, the profits from the first six months are going to be basically nothing compared to the years of massive investments needed to make this happen. Why would those profits give any kind of sustainable leverage?
Very cool. Although I wonder if the analysis really answered the question it set out to ask. The author's hypothesis was that the "entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo." He then tries to show this by showing who played music with who.
I would imagine that influence could be transferred even without artists playing in each other's bands. I can think of plenty of extremely influential bands that defined the start of a whole genre, whose members never played in another band.
But perhaps the original argument that the author was making was that Maroccolo is important because he played with everyone, in which case this analysis makes sense.
This and the other top comments are right that sharing an artist is only the crudest (and very noisy) way to estimate actual influence. I suppose one way to improve it would be to actually looking at the songs themselves, which might be possible with some deep learning? But that would require to actually have all the songs, which might not be feasible.
I think GP's point was specifically Google's famous history of starting projects and then shutting them down within a few years. Old Rokus still work. My Roku 3600 is eight years old.
My old Roku is now so sluggish and slow, it's a paper weight and I had to buy a new one.
All consumer electronics are designed to be disposable. GP's point was a grievance with consumer electronics at large, not Google's. What other consumer electronics allow you to replace the OS with your own, or receive infinite updates forever? Zero.
Chromecast lasted for a decade, and is "dead" only in name. None of GP's statement is on-point for a typical "Google kills things all the time" complaint.
If we're going to throw shade at Google, make sure it's about legitimate things.
My Chromecast is 11 years old and still works fine. Sometimes YouTube thinks it can try playing back the higher bitrate 4k version of a video and it'll get choppy but I've never had issues with 1080p content.
My older Roku 2 is effectively unusable as most apps are just outrageously sluggish and videos often crash loading.
And famous art that's much smaller in person than I expected: The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. For such an epic image, it's only 25x37 cm / 10x14".
Japanese woodblock prints were not considered art at the time, they were for the day to day. From advertisment to low cost decoration. Japanese Woodblock prints do not really have an original other than the woodblocks themselves (or the original painting the wood was carved from).
I use "NFC Tools" to write the URL, which I copy the album/song URL from Spotify and embed it. When I hold my phone near it, the URL appears in the notifications, and clicking it opens it in Spotify, which then starts playing it. I have a bag of 100 tags I got from a friend so no shortage there.
The regular https://open.spotify.com URL is registered to be handled by the Spotify app on iOS devices, so no bouncing from Safari - it opens straight away in Spotify. Nothing to play on a specific speaker, though - but my homepod mini is nearby so a tap to my poster then a tap to my speaker starts my listening session.
I have NFC Tools Pro from these guys, https://www.wakdev.com/en/ (but affiliated); I'm assuming you're referring to them. They're on Google Play store too.
But good god are they beautiful. They just make me so happy to see them. Or sad.
My favorites are probably the birch forests, though, perhaps Birch Forest (1903) [1]
1. https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/farmhouse-with-birch...
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