They took the slavery / serf distinction seriously in the Slavic world. While the distinctions might have mattered in the 1800s, by any modern-slavery standard the serfs were slaves, as you rightly say.
Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.
Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.
FWIW I think Acemoglu writes very well & I loved his book "Why Nations Fail" for introducing lots of interesting ideas to me, while also helping me understand my own (non-failed) society better.
Mistral have moved to actually trying to make money, and been relatively successful; at least if we lived in a normal world.
They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...
Of course it can. They can license the code for use under almost any terms they like, including restricting how you use the code.
The GPL imposes conditions on your use of the code / program, as does the MIT License. If you don't follow the conditions then you do not have a license to use the program / code & are open to claims of copyright infringement.
You might choose to ignore the licenses on the code you use, but it certainly isn't a great idea in a commercial context (and in your personal projects probably just a moral dilemma). Although, sadly, I'm not sure any of the many public GPL violations have really "cost" the companies that did them all that much.
Edit: I guess you're saying, yes, you can just go ahead and use it. Which I guess is the position large LLM training corpuses have taken ..
Which is quite the contrast to Mercedes new axial flux electric motor, which goes all in on rare earths- the design relies on the highest end high-grade permanent magnets.
Still, presumably Mercedes ambitions are for few motors than BMW or Renault.
The public sector, simple, no frills, accessible, no flashy graphics, websites were a massive eye-opener.
They just worked. They had a job. They did it. I wasn't going to buy more from them because of it, and they didn't care. It was great.
I've heard that recently they've dismantled the centralised team that wrote all the rules, enforced it, and started moving to decentralised hosting, but so far the whole still seems to hold to together really well. I think, I hope, they have embedded the expectation that the local council, the tax office, your visa status, etc, should just be utilitarian in nature, and work for everyone.
but many of the current crop will never return money to investors.
I largely agree with you, but the huge investments currently being made will be very hard to get a return on. Token costs will come down, performance will go up, and you want to be in the business of selling the picks & shovels, not doing the mining.
Which is of course why nvidia, google & TSMC are in pretty good positions, but even their valuations have some bubble in them.
Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.
Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.