I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.
Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.
> It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.
You mean pension savings accounts? You're right these are major scandals not being talked enough about.
And it's only just a tiny less bad than how the system works in socialist europe: in socialist europe the various states' public debt is the pension "savings". Those mandatory contribution have been long spent already by the states with the IOU promise that, once you'll retire, the state shall keep paying you a monthly pension. It's totally unsustainable.
It's nearly as if thieves voted, worldwide, a system allowing them to part their taxpayers from their hard-earned money.
Pension funds, private or public, are the scandal.
You have to be more specific when talking about "socialist europe". The Netherlands, for example, has the best-managed pension system in the world. Despite what many people believe, "Europe" isn't one country and it doesn't have a single healthcare system, pension system, or anything else related to the welfare state.
US social security on the other hand is exactly as you describe pension systems in "socialist europe". Money taken from current workers and invested in state debt.
In order to be incredulous at xAI, you'd have to be incredulous of the AI business in general, which is fair.
But then you'd also be basically betting against the entire tech sector, and really the entire US economy and against the value add of AI. That kind of bet is much more difficult to swallow.
They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time.
No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching.
The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale.
Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank.
It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.
I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people.
I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage.
Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there.
This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.
As an adult working in tech in the 90s, Google hit the Internet like a bomb. They were a relatively late entrant, long after most people had their favorite 2-3 they used (I was primarily Altavista). There was word of mouth, but search engines advertised heavily to raise awareness.
Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.
Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.
And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.
A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.
The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.
Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.
As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.
By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.
And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).
I think that’s a fair point. What I would say in response is that you should bear in mind the times back then.
The internet had just blown up. CompSci programs at major universities were still teaching Fortran and COBOL. Linux had its very first release in 1991 I think (when the initial Google folks were in high school), people knew what BSD stood for back then, web protocols were not horribly dissimilar to the Wild West, and don’t even get me started on web standards.
In addition to all of that, they actually fixed search. There was this golden era where searching worked. The other responses you’ve had so far are much more enlightening than mine, I’m spent. I didn’t meant to come off as an ass, it’s interesting to hear your perspective on this.
You can post-IPO - depending on liquidity. I don't think that'll be an issue here.
And if the thesis of "it's going to look good for the first 15 days" holds, you can indeed be very profitable by e.g. buying ATM puts. (The problem being that markets don't like sticking to time tables just to accommodate your investment thesis ;)
So yes, you'll be able to take a bearish position fairly shortly after the IPO.
Sure. It's the market that's irrational, not the people here. The people here are the truly enlightened rational ones and know what the true value of things are.
xAI's value is irrelevant here. This is about Elon throwing his weight around and rigging the game to create an artificial squeeze so him and his early investors can make bank by transferring wealth from everyone's retirement fund.
The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme
Overall it's worse than the other frontier models, but it's decent for queries about breaking news, due to being trained on twitter data.
It's also better for queries about controversial topics, and topics that the other labs have deemed to be "unsafe".
Politically, it differs quite a bit from other models.[0] It's right leaning, although it's closer neutral than other models, defining what neutral is a challenge though.
The study you link to doesn't take into consideration the Overton window of opinions. Perhaps there's some dimension along which you could say that one ideology lies 'opposite' to another political persuasion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the two ideologies are equally acceptable to support in a given society.
I don't think calling defining neutral a 'challenge' does the question justice - neutral will always be context-dependent, and what may be in the center of the Overton window of one society may be unpopular or even highly illegal in a different society.
I tried it when it has the most extensive free offering, and it definitely answers my worldbuilding questions in more detail than I expected and compared to Gemini or Chatgpt. Can't say anything about hallucinations tho.
I use it, overall, it is not too bad. I wouldn't use it for coding etc, but its access to X means it can answer news related stuff much better. Its guardrails are lower so it does fairly innocuous things that will have ChatGPT or Gemini refusing to do.
Right wingers and generating creating nude images of girls and women who post on xitter, without their consent? Those are the only things I even associate with Grok anymore. The venn diagram may line up pretty nicely between them, too.
"Commited capital" - is this the same commited as the $500B for the Stargate project ?
Not gonna lie, I hate those announcements lately. It's full bullshit mode, worse than the Dot-com bubble. Numbers don't make any sense, any more, and yet journalist don't ask any real questions...
The way this war is shown to us (West) is very loopsided - Iran was never going to be able to stop the bombing and they knew it. But they still retain most of their ability to blow up anything they want around their country, which is most of oil and gas fields in the Middle East, and this time they actually proved it.
We like to think we're winning, but are we ? Iran leadership is supposedly decimated, missile capabilities destroyed etc. And yet, when Israel attacked their gas field, they immediately wiped out 17% of Qatari gas productions capacities which will take 5 years to rebuild and they could have wiped out everything. Seems their leadership structure is doing just fine.
As for all the killed - what did we actually achieve ? Replace Khamenei with his son - a guy who had all of his family blown up to pieces by US / Israeli ? That should do wonders to Iran's future relationship with those countries.
While I somewhat agree, you should also look at the results of those precision strikes. Usually, when they kill a senior Iranian officer sleeping in his appartment, they level the building or at lest blow up several adjacent units, probably killing at last 10 innocent people.
That's an inherent limitation of precision strikes. The objective is minimizing the collateral damage required to achieve the objective, not avoiding it entirely. Even the various explosive-free precision-guided munitions the US uses have a non-zero damage radius.
One can argue whether or not it is a good idea for the bombs to be flying around in the first place, but there is no version of physics that allows anyone to avoid collateral damage as a practical matter.
I know. I'm just saying that the way we talk about 'precision strikes' in the west, make one feel like only the target is eliminated, while in reality we usually blow half of the building the target was in, along with all the people. I would actually be interested by a poll on what people in the US think about how many innocent people are killed in a precision or elimination strike on average - I bet it would be something like less than 1.
I agree that targeted strikes which miss or take out adjacent areas is not carpet bombing.
However, the above commenter suggested the U.S. has phased out carpet bombing, and while I'm suspect of that, we know with certainty that Israel will happily "carpet bomb" an area if it can string together a few words justifying it.
Even if it's true that what they've done isn't technically carpet bombing in the sense that they may not just dropping bombs out of planes indiscriminately, the same effect can be achieved with nominally "targeted" strikes now, especially with many of these being conducted by automated "targeting" systems.
Seriously, it's unlikely in this age of advanced weaponry that we'd see carpet bombing like we did in Vietnam, when the U.S. and Israel are capable of creating the same effect, but with thousands of supposedly tactical strikes over the entirety of some densely populated area.
Recently, the U.S. decided that Cuba can no longer import any oil, and they are enforcing that. Is this a surprise that the grid collapses in those circumstances ?
Communism is bad (I'm from Eastern Europe...), but this collapse has nothing to do with communism. It has everything to do, with the U.S. deciding unilaterally that Cuba needs to fall.
It's an interesting situation though, since many people believe that now with Twitter and other social medias, they have real time reports from each war, while in reality we mostly see what we're allowed to see - and it's very different depending from which side you're watching.
Of course it was. That can happen in a ... war. Unfortunately, and as said as it is, it's ... normal during a war.
What's not normal is that US is supposedly not at war with Iran. What's not normal is that there isn't even a slightest effort being made to hold anybody accountable about it. What's not normal is that it probably happened because of AI tools that are right 99.9% of time, but this was this 0.1% of time.
What's not normal is that the US has a Secretary of War that seems to get off on the cruelty and on breaking international law.
> “Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, wearing a red, white and and blue tie and pocket square, bragged to reporters at the Pentagon near Washington. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
> As defence secretary Hegseth has vowed to “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence” on enemies and promised to dispense with “stupid rules of engagement” – rules designed to restrict attacks on civilian populations.
What is the optimal strategy for Iran, if they assume that the regime can withstand the intensive bombardments and people won't take it to the streets like US / Israel are assuming ?
Wouldn't it be to only launch cheap missiles / drones for a week or two to deplete interceptors and only then start using more advanced missiles ?
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
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