Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like.
Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.
Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.
> Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.
Proxmox isn't quite there yet for scalibility and hyperconverged but it is getting there really fast. It's more of a competitor to Microsoft HyperV HCI.
There's not really any brutalist buildings around my location, but I absolutely love them. They are some of the most interesting building, both in terms of visual appearance and the thoughts that has gone into their design. To me they don't instill horror, but a sense of calm and safety.
What sometimes happens when people say they dislike brutalism, and what is does to people living in the buildings, is they focus on the architecture and not the horrible property mismanagement. The UK has a number of hated brutalist towers and the misery of those living in the building are ascribed to the architecture, not the fact that the buildings are not properly maintained, or that the cities stuffed the flats with the people who are incredibly poor, addicts, in need of mental care, education, support or a mix of all of those things. Now it is also true that many of these buildings are old, typically from the 60s and 70s, and their design no longer suites modern living, but that's true almost all types of architecture. A 1950s brick house barely fits a modern family.
The problem might be exactly that: A brutalist building doesn't lie. If you don't take care of it, and its surroundings, the building will let you know. Nothing is hidden, all of your societal problems are on full public display with a brutalist building.
I don't think this is "whataboutism", the two things are very closely related and somewhat entangled. E.g. did the AI learn of violate ethical constraints from training data?
Another interesting question is: What happens when an unyielding ethical AI agent tells a business owner or manager "NO! If you push any further this will be reported to the proper authority. This prompt as been saved for future evidence". Personally I think a bunch of companies are going to see their profit and stock price fall significantly, if an AI agent starts acting as a backstop for both unethical and illegal behavior. Even something as simple as preventing violation of internal policy could make a huge difference.
To some extend I don't even thing that people realize that what they're doing is bad, because humans tend to be a bit fuzzy and can dream up reason as to why rules don't apply or wasn't meant for them, or this is a rather special situation. This is one place where I think properly trained and guarded LLMs can make a huge positive improvement. We're are clearly not there yet, but it's not a unachievable goal.
How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur?
I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again?
Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle, etc.- good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.
> Last time I checked Dario staked Anthropic’s future and reputation, on paid subscription.
Tech CEOs might be wealthy and powerful but there are two things they definitely don't have anymore: trust and the benefit of the doubt. Who knows, maybe Dario is gonna be the exception to the rule but I doubt it.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,..
) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.
Local LLM models? It'd sure be a shame if enterprise buyers cornered the market on RAM, GPU and storage supplies and put them out of reach for consumers.
Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?
Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
And therein lies the problem, not the ads, but "make a lot of money". Maybe, just maybe, you don't always need to make a lot of money, maybe you just need a nice sustainable business, providing value to happy customers.
That ship has sailed for OpenAI long ago, because they burned money faster than an alcoholic sailor on shore leave. There is no sane way for them to ever recover.
Honestly AI management would probably be better. "You're a competent manager, you're not allowed to break or circumvent workers right laws, you must comply with our CSR and HR policies, provide realistic estimates and deliver stable and reliable products to our customers." Then just watch half the tech sector break down, due to a lack of resources, or watch as profit is just cut in half.
I don't understand what China want with Taiwan, they should just throw the biggest Uno reverse card in modern history and recognize Taiwan as an independent nation and win Xi the Nobel peace price next year.
Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
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