There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20% more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment, leaving us suddenly crippled. I'll keep the thing I know works, I know will always be there (because it's open source, etc), even if it means I'm slightly less productive over the next X amount of time otherwise.
What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”? I would say Claude right now has probably made worse code and wasted time than if I had coded things myself, but it’s because this is like the first few hundred days of this. Open weight models are also worse but they will never go away and improve steadily as well. I am all for people doing whatever works for them I just don’t get the negativity or the skepticism when you look at the progress over what has been almost zero time. It’s crappy now in many respects but it’s like saying “my car is slow” in the one millisecond after I floor the gas pedal
> What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”?
Simple. The company providing the tool needs actual earning suddenly. Therefore, they need to raise the prices. They also need users to spend more tokens, so they will make the tool respond in a way that requires more refinement. After all, the latter is exactly what happened with google search.
At this point, that is pretty normal software cycle - try to attract crowd by being free or cheap, then lock features behind paywall. Then simultaneously raise prices more and more while making the product worst.
This literally NEEDS to happen, because these companies do not have any other path to profitability. So, it will happen at some point.
Sure but you’re forgetting that competition exists. If anthropic investors suddenly say “enough” and demand positive cash flow it wouldn’t be that hard, everyone is capturing users for flywheels and capex for model improvements because if they don’t they will be guaranteed to lose.
It’s going to definitely be crappy, remember Google in 2003 with relevant results and no endless SEO , or Amazon reviews being reliable, or Uber being simple and cheap, etc. once growth phase ends monetization begins and experience declines but this is guard railed by the fact that there are many players.
Comsidering what I described is how tech companies actually function and functioned in the past, theoretical competition wont help.
They are competing themselves into massive unprofitability. Eventually they will die or do the above in cooperation. Maybe there will bw minor snandal about it, but that sort of collution is not prosecuted or seriously investigated if done by big companies.
So, it will happen exactly as it always happens with tech.
My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service you depend on could crash out of the race, and if one emerges as a victorious monopoly and you rely on them, they can charge you almost whatever they like.
To my mind, the 'only just started' argument is wearing off. It's software, it moves fast anyway, and all the giants of the tech world have been feverishly throwing money at AI for the last couple of years. I don't buy that we're still just at the beginning of some huge exponential improvement.
My understanding is they make a loss overall due to the spending on training new models, that the API costs are profit making if considered in isolation. That said, this is based on guestimates based on hosting costs of open-weight models, owing to a lack of financial transparancey everywhere for the secret-weights models.
"With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income. This amounts to an average annual family savings of $12,000 per child."
Also, once police are no longer occupied ticketing motorists, I hope cyclists are prepared for actually being held accountable to laws. The police budget isn't going to refill itself.
Or maybe we prioritise the class of vehicles responsible for almost 5 fatalities and 75 serious injuries a day[1]?
For comparison, [2] says that 30 pedestrians were killed and 1093 serious injuries involved cyclists in eight (8) years. In 416 weeks, that's less than one (1) week of car deaths (0.2% ratio) and two (2) weeks of serious injuries (0.4% ratio).
Anyone that says "we should prioritise X and 416*X the same" is either not arguing in good faith or should be nowhere near decision making.
Of course, this is not really a useful (or provable) criticism as long as the actual obstructionists are obstructing! Much more useful to oust the obstructionists, then you can work on holding the alleged lip-servicers accountable.
Well, if you get to teach a lot of well-off kids who have a lot of extra support at home and you can siphon off the undesirables onto others, you get good marks when most of them inevitably "succeed".
If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.
Here's a good way to think about it - there is no world where education improves if teachers are not a well-paid profession. It's a race to the bottom, as we're seeing today. So if you want to get better, you have to create incentives for otherwise smart/talented teachers to enter the profession, rather than other professions. The only way to do that is to provide some base level of pay that would be enticing. Once you clear that bar, then you work on things that are unique to the profession, like protecting teachers from abusive parents.
If you don't care about education and you just want to extract the most money from parents for the least amount of effort, you do nothing and let the market take over.
You have to weigh actual policy proposals, though. Throwing money around doesn't always help.
This particular proposal doesn't seem likely to help. It's a nationwide hack. An obvious likely consequence is larger class sizes. Is that good or bad? Hard to say in general, it depends on local factors.
We price in externalities all the time. A lot of the time it's priced in as the cost of complying with government regulation, like food safety and labeling. Other times it's priced in the other direction, like subsidies for green energy or particular crops (corn/ethanol). We just don't necessarily price them appropriately, or in a way that some people may think is accurate, but we certainly don't ignore the concept of externalities.
Absolutely. I wasn’t making case that we are always ignoring them. But I think there are some subset of cases where we don’t price them in proportionally to consumption. One example apropos to this thread is pricing in atmospheric carbon (or the externalities of extracting/protecting those resources). Based on your reply, I’m assuming you think regulation is a suitable way pricing in externalities?
