The brief window between the covid gaming bubble pop/PoS ETH switch and the AI hardware blackhole will be fondly remembered as the last golden age of consumer PC hardware accessibility.
If China keeps releasing decent copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources, then we may get some relief when those models become "good-enough"
>copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources
They might be 20% of the price (because they don't have to invest that much in training), but are probably not 20% of the resources (ie. inference), considering they take more tokens to do the same task, and have slower inference speeds.
I've been using deepseek and it's good enough for my personal use. It takes way more time/tokens/course-correcting to get things done, but I spend in a month what I spend in a day with opus 4.6
There will probably be congressional hearings when it turns out Lazarus Group had access, and then the USG will use it as an excuse to lock AI behind harsh KYC.
What's the current status of the 'biggest computer wins' vs. specialized proprietary research/data in the AI arms race? People had such high hopes for xAI because of the monster machine Elon built. Or has xAI just turned over too much staff too quickly?
Is there an arms race of payment infrastructure for international LLM providers? A common payment gateway so that people can pay providers anywhere for tokens will inevitably emerge if the US is making moves like this.
Is haggling an individualized price? What's stopping companies from allowing arbitrary bids on any item they can choose to reject? What if the future of the grocery store is eBay, a true nightmare.
Culturally, Americans do not haggle and do not to well in cultures where haggling is the norm. It would take a massive cultural shift before negotiating price is even close to normal. Part of this is why so many employees do poorly when negotiating salary during the interview process.
Disclaimer: my father was in the oil business and we lived a lot in the Middle East among other places.
Americans don't do well with anything perceived as confrontation, speaking in general terms. Haggling is on that list. It's why my son sold so damn much popcorn sitting outside of a grocery store for the boy scouts. He asked everyone, and a wide majority of people are too polite to just say no thank you.
I don't know why it is, because Americans are also pretty aggressive about certain topics. But confrontation, even low stakes like price haggling, is a problem.
Is there any technical solution to these centralized ID authorities doing sybil attacks and minting identities out of nothing to manufacture consensus on supposedly "human verified" sites?
"quantum grifting" has hit the cryptocurrency space brutally.
Scammers can take an old defunct coin or create a new one, buy up/create supply, strap ML-DSA on to it, and pump their shitcoin claiming it's quantum safe, then they can unload.
Eventually low information retail will get wise to this, I honestly don't know who this even works on right now.
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