I’d bet the other way: You could have said exactly the same thing about computing 60 years ago, when IBM systems cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms. And of course many people did.
Personal, commodity access to compute won, and won so thoroughly that it enabled this wave of scary compute centralization.
Centralized, scaled compute will always fill a purpose. But neither Microsoft, nor Facebook, nor OpenAI started out needing “Cloud Scale”.
The first one man unicorn startup will, I’m fairly certain, not be paying Anthropic per month or per token for the vast bulk of their matmul.
While I do believe there may be valid path forward with smaller models, there are still significant financial barriers to entry that didn't exist to the same extent in the past.
Very true. Observed in Hiroshima as well.
Education in the United States especially is highly sanitized when it comes to the dropping of the atomic bombs and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Michael Scott: There are four kinds of business: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales.
[pause]
Michael Scott: And hospitals/manufacturing. And air travel.
We need to very rapidly decouple human worth from the economic lens otherwise the economic argument is against humans.
How's your transducer lobe developing?
The letter aims to maintain the status quo of the project of the Church.
The world is shifting under the Vatican's feet and the crappy system they once lorded over is done.
It's time for change, maybe people don't need to work anymore and maybe people should aim to reengineer humanity and eliminate illness, old age, suffering and vulnerability. We can fundamentally change how society distributes wealth.
Some of the arguments are rich coming from the Church: being scolded about centralization of power, claiming truth and shared information is a common good, and consider the history of the Church in their anti-war declarations.
The most astonishing thing in this letter is the pope declaring that modern technology has rendered Aquinas's just-war theory out of date.
sure, that's exactly where AI is headed.
also: just imagine a world where people don't age. just imagine it for a second.
(I highly recommend the book. I do not recommend the world it imagines.)
I can imagine an utopia though were this works out well. I can even imagine that after 100 years or 200 a lot more people become more melowed out and our society overall will be more calm.
I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.