I agree an academic research program wouldn’t spend billions on a datacenter, but that’s just a reason why foss AI as described in this article won’t work - because big compute is required to do anything of real relevance.
FOSS is the wrong analogy. Building frontier LLMs isn’t primarily an engineering discipline, it’s a scientific research program.
Of course we do have basically open source research programs, including most universities and big projects like CERN. But AI grew up in universities until it transpired that sufficient capital could only be found in the private sector.
It would be possible to make a decent publicly funded AI research program. But it would look more like the Manhattan or Apollo projects (which frontier labs already model themselves after) than some extra research grants for universities.
Very interesting! I honestly would have expected the opposite: I was optimistic about strongly functional languages in the age of AI. The more modular and side-effect-free your code is, the easier it should be to constrain changes, catch slop, and reduce LLMisms like spooky hacks-at-a-distance.
It looks like the issues are in the compiler and documentation so hopefully it’s fixable… I write in Python every day but I do miss smarter languages and I hope AI doesn’t fully obliterate them.
The next Jonathan Blow is going to be massively empowered by their tools and make something wonderful. Having fewer people involved can lead to a more focused execution of their vision - most amazing indie games are like this. But yes your average game isn’t bad because it’s hard to write C#, it’s bad because it’s hard to design great unique mechanics and levels, and it’s hard to see AI helping (indeed not harming) that.
I love the concept - blocking apps are often too restrictive which makes me disable them. Slowing could be a nice alternative.
This probably uses a vpn? It’s important to think about how to stop me disabling it casually. I use Opal which blocks my settings page too. Which works great but frustratingly it blocks my legitimate needs very often too!
A decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.
Happy new year from SF. 2025 was about hanging on, balancing a heavy workload and a new baby, but in ways which I’m confident are the right decisions for our future. I did a lot of Becoming An Adult this year, learning to trust myself and my partner, and prioritizing what matters. 2026 will probably be more of the same..! But I am hopeful things should ease up over time.
Happy new year, this community has given me a lot and I’m grateful for you all.
The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
Not easy, but I have a friend who did this by reaching back out to his old professors and colleagues, figuring out what they needed, and ended up doing a swe project in his old lab and built that into a consultancy which does tech partnering for science.
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?