I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.
I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.
"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.
The Substack post takes a rather childish approach by confusing happiness with smiling and laughter.
Personal safety, good health, financial stability, access to education, job security, low stress, and strong family and social ties do not necessarily make people smile or laugh. They create a sense of contentment. That is precisely where Scandinavian countries excel.
Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?
Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.
And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?
Almost all automobile manufacturers are valued with P/Es around 4-15. This is true for GM, Ford, Stellantis, VW, BMW, Toyota, Hyundai, SAIC, Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, etc. Why? Because no-one expect them to grow much.
Right now, after losing almost half of its value, Tesla's stock still has a whooping 122 P/E; Tesla is still valued as a growth company while their sales are collapsing in the US, in Europe and in China, and with no other obvious market to compensate. Tesla hasn't launched a new mass market vehicle since March 2019, when Model Y was presented. That's 6 years ago! What other car manufacturer would survive so little innovation for so long? There are no new mass market vehicles in sight, just some robot taxis and robots and dreams of somehow generating a trillion dollar market on that in the very urban markets in the US and Europe where politicians and consumers despise Musk. Good luck with that. Already in 2024 - long before Musk went full throttle MAGA - Tesla stopped growing.
By now, European and Asian competitors have caught up with Tesla. Yes, Tesla is among the best on some measures, like price and range, but notby much, and it's also far down on the list on other aspects; the market is saturated with its 2 main models, it's not very luxorious, it's not of very good quality, etc. It's one good choice out of many good choices. The growth is gone, the moat is gone, and the Musk brand is now a liability.
Ukraine has the right to defend itself against the Russian invasion. That's not nationalist. It is basic survival. Ukraine cannot be asked to refrain from defending itself in order to secure that Germany has cheap energy import and an export market for its old combustion engine cars.
German economy is facing difficulties because of a number of reasons:
- Closing all nuclear power plants
- Relying on Russian natural gas
- Relying on export to Russia and China
- Being too slow to transition its auto industry to EVs
By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then they will learn what they need.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
It's not a clone. What is ethically murky about it?
You want Brad Pitt for your movie. He says no. You hire Benicio Del Toro because of the physical resemblence. Big deal.
Having seen "Her" and many other Scarlet Johansson movies, I didn't think for a second that GPT-4o sounded like her. On the contrary, I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke. It wasn't until social media went hysterical, I realized that the voices were sort of similar.
As someone who actually uses the API for real products, I don't think the OP understands what the reduced latency and reduced cost means: Everything related to building a more advanced RAG, for example building agentic features into it, sooner or later runs into the same issues of speed and cost. GPT-4 Turbo was simply too slow and too expensive for us to really use it fully. GPT-4 is plenty intelligent for many use cases.
Also, why on Earth would OpenAI launch a dramatically better model as long as their competitors don't force them to? The smart solution for OpenAI would be to almost let their competitors catch up to GPT-4 before launching GPT-5 and no competitor is truly there yet.
"The Court found that Article 8 of the Convention encompasses a right to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life. However, it held that the four individual applicants did not fulfil the victim-status criteria under Article 34 of the Convention and declared their complaints inadmissible. The applicant association, in contrast, had the right to bring a complaint. The Court held that there had been a violation of the right to respect for private and family life of the Convention and that there had been a violation of the right to access to the court. The Court found that the Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties (“positive obligations”) under the Convention concerning climate change."
Not sure this kind of rhetoric ever worked. As far back as I have followed the news - so perhaps for 35 years - it was about to be too late. We were at the brink of a catastrophe. Humankind had to do something now. Tomorrow, it would be too late.
Look, global warming exists, it's (at least partially) man-made, and that's really bad.
But it's one issue out of many man-made or man-fixable issues. Fighting poverty is another. Curing diseases like malaria is also important. Curbing starvation. Spreading democracy and the rule of law. Then there are women's rights. Education. Racism. Avoiding WWIII. I am sure I forgot many large issues. How do we prioritize? Do we have to prioritize or can we deal with all of them at once?
It's a unique form of American subsidies: You don't have to directly pay your businesses to get a competitive edge. You just don't require companies and individuals to pay any way near enough tax to keep basic government functions like education and healthcare going. Then you solve it by printing more money.
When a less powerful country does that, it bears most or all of the cost itself. When the US does it, much of the inflationary cost is borne by all other countries that use the dollar as a reserve currency. Other countries don't have a reserve currency like the dollar.
Yes, technologically, this is amazing. But I honestly think it's sickening that a company controlled by one man is allowed to send 30,000 pieces of junk into space.
The fact that the one man who controls it is a billionaire demagogue (yes, by now Musk is a political leader) with his own media company just makes it worse.
Tesla's revenue in 2 days are roughly the same as the yearly GDP of Tonga. Space X's revenue is 10 times the GDP of Tonga. There will be no real oversight of this billionaire on the loose.
Here in Denmark, all universities are state owned and with no tuition. In fact, you get paid to attend one (around 900 euro monthly). But I can assure you that Danes place a lot of value on the free universities. Some universities are considered slightly more prestigious (often the older ones), and some programs are also more prestigious than others, for example the ones that are difficult to get into, or that lead to jobs with higher salaries, or which are considered particularly difficult.
So how does one compare the "free" (tax paid) Danish universities to the US/UK ones? By citations? Nobel laureates? Amount of foreign students? Salaries of alumni? Patents? GDP per capita? Number of high value companies per capita? I think you'd find that as a whole, Danish, and other Scandinavian universities, easily compete with Anglo Saxon universities, and that the main drawback of Scandinavian universities is the language.