I think the author hit on a core challenge gleam will have to face, outside of dx. its main niche would be highly scalable type safe server apps, pretty similar to what scala is/was originally imagined as.

Its very hard to occupy that niche when by definition the projects you look to take on are large enough for languages to be heavily scrutinized. Your CTO wont really care if you choose rust, node, or go for some internal tooling. They will absolutely care about what is being used for core distributed services, and that just makes adoption hard.

It's not a gift. It's a transaction, but you pay with your attention and data about yourself so that someone can more effectively try to sell you something you might not really need. Upside: people who don't have money can now participate in knowledge pool. Downside: thousands of other people try to make sure that those people don't ever have more money because they spend them on marketers that were the best in marketing.

When it's done well, I agree with this sentiment, but the vast, vast majority of online advertising is done terribly. It almost always has a negative impact on my use of the hosting site.

2. “What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free”

That is a financially “free”, sure. But the world doesn’t get to use it for free at all really, we pay by giving google our statistics and my god, first of all the amount of statistics collected would surprise most people, yeah you hear about “big businesses are collecting your data” but to see what data they can collect through like a webrequest can actually make it feel real. The world does not get any Google product for free, not in the whole sense of the word at least. To sum it up best I’d say Google and businesses like it have you get used to a (financially) free product, to such an extent that you integrate it as one of the base pillars of your online existence and then they enshittify that ‘free’ version to such an extent that they kind of threaten to pull that pillar away unless you pay.

(1.) which I also don’t love, cause subscription models also feel like you don’t own anything but in the case of a YouTube it’s more sensible than buying individual videos if ads weren’t a thing.

I also have been around a while, but I am the opposite opinion as yourself, mainly because I really appreciate actually owning something that I don't need to pay to continue to consume like Media which is a good example.

> I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising

This is basically the same thing as the advertising models that are being used except the advertising is a bit more nefarious (IMO) into manipulating you into feeling like you have to buy something, gamble a little bit or whatever it is just to remove money from your wallet to them.

The products you mention are obviously great for society, this isn't for debate I think, but it's how these services are monetized, which they should be 100% but there is a disgusting extreme in play these days to my eyes.

In the same service based ecconomy, I am okay with paying for Kagi for example, pay as you use without (hopefully) my data being sold to the highest bidder.

There are better models possible then the one we have, I think that's somethign that should be explored.

They are going to do everything they can to make sure no one uses the time that models and data centers are limiting factors to disrupt them.

In the same way google demonetized the application layer of the web to prevent walled gardens from blocking search.

If models and hardware become commoditized at the end of the race meta will have a complete psychographic profile of people on an individual and group level to study, and serve incredibly targeted content to.

Their only real competition in that would be someone developing a 'her' like app that takes people out of social media and into their own individual silo'ed worlds. In a lot of ways discord is the alternative world to meta's ecosystem. hyper focused invite only small communities.

I take it you have not tried the new Gemini models on ai studio? It does real time streaming video input and conversation you can genuinely ask it questions about what you are looking at in a conversational audio in-out way. This is basically "her"-level technology in an unpolished form, right here today.

Will those walls keep AI-generated content out, or will they keep the people outside from accessing the AI-generated content in the garden?

If it's the first, somebody should tell them the slop's already up to their navels and they probably shouldn't be helping people generate more of it.

If it's the second, then the models that supply the content to the garden must have some kind of uniqueness/value, because otherwise you could get identical content from anywhere.

This is a genuine question, because I don't understand the logic here.

(I had assumed it was more like hardware companies funding open source way back when - Commoditize Your Complement).

One would imagine Meta can readily quantify how much AI-generated content is consumed across its properties.

Meta's play is simple: more engagement means more money for Meta, and this can be done by "slop" as you called it, or alternatively expanding the audience of high quality human-generated content, say via translation. A funny video in Albanian is probably still very funny after being translated to English.

Apple tried that and it’s crumbling. Meta/Zuckerfuck is always behind the curve.

- AR (failed)

- “metaverse” (failed)

The only thing that has kept them above water is social media and selling off user data, and that’s crumbling as well. Smaller players have been eating their lunch and the user base is aging out.

The writing is on the wall, and his "falling in line" with theb political climate speaks volumes on his effort to keep Meta afloat.

Talk to any staff+ eng at Meta in Ads and they will tell you there's a lot of low hanging fruit left. Sure the music will stop eventually (it always does) but there's no evidence that's soon.

People need to separate their hatred of Meta/Zuck from an objective analysis of the company. Meta has been and continues to be an amazing stock to own.

This is an incredibly generous way to admit that Meta failed their pivot to VR and they will probably never recoup the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on it.

They were instead talking about the implications of GPDR, how they are switching to secure multiparty computation to try and side step restrictions, the looming threat of other data restrictions coming onto the scene soon internationally, the aging userbase, the concern they can't trace who is buying what via ads anymore (i.e. did that sneaker ad result in a Nike purchase), etc. They either didn't have any low hanging fruit left, or were certainly tight lipped about it.

Better moderation (to the extent they still care)

Generation of AI slop for the sheep to feed on

Use of AI is really core to their business, so understandable they want to build it themselves, but not so clear why they want to "open source" (weights) it other than to harm companies like OpenAI

I personally think that the population scale surveillance and behavioral manipulation infrastructure built by meta is unethical and incredibly dangerous.

I keep telling parents that Meta et al are spending the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the Manhattan project — not to defeat Japan — but to addict their child.

I think atomic power or even better drugs / medicines is actually a good analogy considering the dual use nature of the stuff that they are building. Can improve quality of life if used prudently and responsibly, or cause devastation if not.

So Climate Change is a problem that can be 'solved' while the main goal is pursued. This is ideologically consistent with gates investment in terrapower. Where as AI isn't because the desired outcome is the threat not a bi-product.

So your questions a bit flawed fundamentally.

As for gate's point is it true, almost certainly yes, the game theory is peruse and lie that you aren't, or openly pursue. You can't ever not pursue because you do not and cannot have perfect information.

Imagine how much visibility china would demand from the US to trust it was doing nothing, far more than they could give, and vice versa.

Do you think the us is going to give its adversaries tracking and production information its most advanced chips? It would never, and if they did why would other powers trust it if theres every reason to lie.

That's just a matter of how you slice your concepts. You could say burning oil is a threat in and off itself, for example. Or oppositely, "the threat of bad AI" is a byproduct of "useful AI".

So Climate Change is a problem that can be 'solved' while the main goal is pursued.

I don't think many people trying to solve climate change are trying to end industrial society. They are trying to find an energy source that doesn't produce Co2 pollution.

We asked our investors and they said you're very excited about it being less good, which is great news for you ;D

The whole TPU line makes no sense to me, if its as good as it says (which is does seem to be) sell it publicly and add a trillion to your market cap.

The only way this makes any sense is if inside google people legitimately think google cloud is going to be bigger than nvidia+ a lot of azure&aws, which seems crazy

Google has vastly different constraints than an average startup or user of machine learning.

The flexibility of Nvidia GPU's, the software, these things are really valuable for most people. Only recently with LLMs has the majority of uses started to look very very similar (some slightly modified transformer)

Early versions of TPU required you to write your ml logic using a very restricted subset of tensorflow. (It had to be somewhat functional, etc)

Normal people don't write code like that, and it's not worth it for them to re write a working model to run on a TPU because software engineers are expensive and Nvidia GPUs are really good and general.

If TPU's are really that good why on earth would google not sell them. People say its better to rent, but how can that be true when you look at the value of nvidia.

On the GPU side - One way to look at it is lets just ignore whether you're selling chips. Let's just look at where compute is done - because Google let's you rent time on the TPUs so if they're really great people will just choose to rent time on them. How much time is being rented on TPUs in the cloud vs. Nvidia GPUs? Google's TPUs are not a market leader, they're probably not even significant market share. Pretend Google decided to sell TPUs tomorrow - are many people who weren't choosing to rent TPUs going to decide to buy them? No. There's an element of interoperability and supply chain etc. etc. but I think the core of it is a full ML product the TPU isn't anywhere close to the Nvidia GPUs.

The only way the current situation makes sense is if your last sentence is true, which is what i'm getting at. Either TPUs are significantly behind Nvidia chips, or google is choosing not to add like a trillion dollars of market cap to their business its really one or the other.

Right now if Google can earn more from using their TPUs than they would selling them (ie profitably utilize them) they would be crazy to sell them.

Companies are valued not on their present value, but the net present value of their future earnings. So the big multiple implies that there is much more revenue growth potential here. For example, NVidia has Cuda, Google doesn’t have anything as good for third party users. Maybe the market is pricing in that Google doesn’t have a good path to manufacture and sell these chips externally, while NVidia has room to grow into every 1GW datacenter that’s built over the next few decades.

Reminds me of what happened with Bitcoin mining ASICs. Everyone capable of making them realized they could make more money using them directly vs. selling them to others.

nVidia sells nearly 4M GPUs per year. Google claims like 100K TPUs. Scaling a production line by 10x is very difficult and Google has not shown aptitude in this area of expertise.

Even if Google wanted to scale 10x I'm not sure they could. nVidia is believed to be taking like half of TSMC's new capacity (existing capacity is not idle). I suppose technically that means the other half could be consumed by Google but it's likely TSMCs other customers wouldn't appreciate that.

Hence, buy $GOOG.

Each company would either rush to get a phone out with the new snapdragon chip, or take their time to polish a release and have a better phone late cycle. But the real improvements we're just the chip.

Nvidia chips/larger data centers are the chips. the models are the plethora of android phones each generation.

That kept going until progress stabilized. Then the best user experience & vertical integration won over chasing chip performance (apple).