> "Our goal is to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows," said Satya Nadella, chairman and head of Microsoft.
Then:
> However, Ian Fogg, Research Director at industry analyst firm FDM CCS Insight said the change was "likely to come with a significant price tag" and Nvidia would be targeting "those looking for workstation-class performance".
First, make it possible. Then, expand the market. The early adopters help pay R&D for later efforts. Every desk is a good goal, even if not hit by the first doodad.
It just feels too much like what they said about Apple II and early Windows. A play at nostalgia instead putting real thought into it.
I was an engineer at both MS and Apple, and wholeheartedly agree with you.
My question is, what happens to the people who use RTX cards for gaming? This new solution isn't meant for that. Do they need an "AI accelerator" and a gaming-centric GPU?
Sure, but it's good to have some perspective and some awe that any of this would've been absolute unbelievable magic just 3 years ago. Even if all AI progress stopped immediately, we'd need 10 years to digest and incorporate the technology.
As someone who's been building developer tools (Visual Studio and Xcode) for 25 years, I don't have a perspective problem. We were doing "code completion" back in the 90s and could never have predicted that an LLM would write code at the current level of quality.
My point is that with every new model release, the expectations grow. I don't know how else to say that.
Why look back in awe when technological innovation will just keep accelerating. Soon what we have today will seem quaint. Best to keep looking forward with impatience and discontent.
I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look.
He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly.
It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.
These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.
What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request.
Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.
He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long.
I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.
He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.
Finding out that one's boss cannot estimate work time is a blessing if an engineer is wise enough to use that. "Yes boss, this task will take me all of June to do" (finish it in two days, enjoy a relaxing June)
> Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.
Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.
People have done this long before vibe coding was a thing. I've seen this everywhere. Not every business employs devs or can afford to. So people hack things together with powershell or python. It has always been this way.
I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
I'm not anti-AI. I'd just like to see companies play by the rules everyone else has to follow.
> I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
Because training isn't redistribution.
You can also listen to the song and make a new one that sounds similar, just like the AI can.
To do that training, you must first obtain the item with the content you require. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book they trained their models on?
Answer: They did not. That is literally why there are dozens of ongoing lawsuits in progress.
For songs, it's not that hard to legally get access to it, I think. I'm not sure if Spotify can legally prevent you from using songs for AI training for example.
> I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
Because when you say you are “using” the song, what you mean is that you are distributing copies of the song, which is protected by copyright.
When AI companies train on the song, the model is learning from it. Outside of the rare cases of memorisation, this is not distributing copies and so copyright doesn’t have any say in the matter.
Learning isn’t copying, so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.
I appreciate your comment, but you answered as if this question had been answered legally. It has not.
The New York Times is suing both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI. Getty Images is suing Stability AI. Disney is suing Midjourney. Universal Music Group and Sony have filed suits against multiple AI companies.
> so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.
The dozens of ongoing cases that discredit that statement.
Which statement of mine do you think is not settled law? Which law do you think is being broken and how?
Your objection doesn’t make sense. In the event that an AI company loses a lawsuit for copyright infringement based on simply training on copyrighted works, the answer to you saying you’d like to understand why they can do it and you can’t is simply “your premise is wrong; neither of you can”.
> Which statement of mine do you think is not settled law?
I object to your statement that "copyright doesn’t get involved at all" when that is objectively untrue. If that was true, many of the world's largest companies wouldn't be spending tens of millions of dollars to have that question answered in court. Go to any law-focused forum, and you will find attorneys arguing over these questions.
To train a model using a book, you must first obtain a copy of that book. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book not already in the public domain used during training? They did not.
Some of the suits I mentioned claim that OpenAI literally stole copies of books to train its models.
My point is that the copyright question has not been answered. If the NYT, et. al. win, it will be a watershed moment for how AI companies pay for training data moving forward.
I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
You're right, it's an unjust situation. And you may note that no one else besides the AI companies has made any progress at all towards changing it.
Copyright will soon die, having outlived its usefulness to society. Whether the knife is held by someone named Stallman or someone named Altman is of little consequence.
I worked for MS and Apple for 20 years and heard that opinion constantly; i.e., "People only work there for the money."
I have no idea if Andrej "sold out" but perhaps he realizes that if he wants to work on the cutting edge alongside talented people, with a seemingly endless budget, Anthropic is a good choice.
I chose my employers for the same reason; the compensation was secondary.
MS and Apple. Infinite resources, plenty of smart people that consider compensation to be secondary (I remain skeptical, but choose to entertain the idea nonetheless), and the software output is incredibly, unbelievably, comically bad.
There's some poetry there that I am unable to capture with words.
I understand where you are coming from, but at least when I was there, we were still trying to develop solutions that had never been implemented at that scale before (just like Anthropic today). I helped create the first version of Visual Studio (Boston). People tend to forget that even by the 90s we still didn't really understand how to solve a lot of the main technical problems. That's what I loved about the work. Everything seems easy/obvious after the fact.
When I left MS, a full Windows build was about 18M LOC. The fact that 18 million lines of code, written by tens of thousands of engineers, worked at all was a mini miracle.
With regard to compensation: like Karpathy, I had already earned enough to be comfortable for the rest of my life. Once money stopped being the primary driver, I was able to focus on what made me happy. Building things, even if you don't like them, brought me happiness and fulfillment. I hope Andrej finds the same at Anthropic.
Then you must get one to monitor yourself for our corporatic overlord's benefit, pleb, or welcome to the enviable place known as "not their target demographic".
Where "target demographic" is a euphemism for "compliant people".
Oh, I didn't mean that this specific project wouldn't work. I just wish HN were a little friendlier towards projects that are primarily thought experiments.
Some of the best things I've ever created started from, "I wonder what would happen if I tried this crazy approach..."
Why not just comment out the macNotify() calls in watcher.js and then run it periodically? There are also a few calls to send iMessages that you should remove.
> "Our goal is to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows," said Satya Nadella, chairman and head of Microsoft.
Then:
> However, Ian Fogg, Research Director at industry analyst firm FDM CCS Insight said the change was "likely to come with a significant price tag" and Nvidia would be targeting "those looking for workstation-class performance".
So... not every desk with Windows.
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