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Re: Bayer - the non-health industry side? I'm surprised NIH hasn't rolled out something like this earlier, to be honest, with their increasing emphasis on commercialisation.

If you want to skip the fluff, the actual funded program abstract here:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2624416

Appropriately enough for a pilot, there's a structured usual cohort-mentoring and outcomes evaluation component.

(NSF brings 3 years of $$$, but as it is, it doesn't seem like attempt to nudge people screwed over by GRFP restrictions towards industry.)


I'd recommend the I-PhD's page instead of the NSF grant as it goes deeper into the partners as well as the program.

https://uidp.org/i-phd-scholars/


Looking at the $$$ awarded -- that's interesting: $37k/year, and while there's a $22,000 "ancillary expenses" component, institutions administer it, and can use it like any other indirect cost $$$. Conversely, industry funders have to stump up at least $100,000/year per student.

Thanks - the program guide at the very bottom seems to have the most detail.

https://uidp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/UIDP-I-PhD-Schol...


Notoriously after Halo for Macintosh was canned, too...

It's funny to think that Bungie, a mac developer, created Halo and the original demo was mac-only (as far as I remember) only to get picked up by Microsoft to be the flagship game on the Xbox. I spent many, many hours playing that demo with friends.

This is incredibly superficial, but that’s the most thoughtfully laid out and typeset official report I’ve read in ages.

Better than a 2026 human, worse than a 2016 machine. You win some, you lose some, I guess...

This is a sleeper option, but 'xonsh' as a Python superset is a very pleasant experience, especially when you just don't feel like learning another bespoke language for the complex stuff.

I once had to scrape the output out of something hacked together by a grad student 10 years before me, scrape yet another hacked together application, do some fancy numerics, and then plonk it into a database. I did it without tears!


We’re at the gamification stage of motivating people to use your product, eh?

> It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.

Honestly, the proof is the least surprising part -- Apple's been paranoid about leaks for decades, even when the stakes have been lower.


> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.

That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.


I tend to agree with this sentiment. I'm not in the tech sector. As an outsider, it seems to me that OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing government and the defense industry as their main clients. Google and Microsoft are chasing business clients and educational institutions. Amazon and Apple are chasing consumers.


Isn’t Anthropic literally flagged as a supply chain threat?


in the US only insofar as they wont let claude decide who to kill.

from a non-US perspective yes, but so are the rest of the major providers


No, what I mean is that the pentagon is still labeling anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning it shouldn’t be used for government contract work and anything military related. I don’t see how they can have a strong presence in the defense sector when that’s the case


At least from some smaller marketing companies I know that isn't necessarily true. They often have Gemini or Copilot and Claude nowadays and before Claude it was ChatGPT.

The moat is way smaller than with Office or Gsuite because they feed data into the chat interface and it gives them an answer. The moat for Gsuite and Office is higher because you have to move all your data and reorganize it. Oh and everyone has to learn how to use the new software clients.


There is a time window when it will flip. When Internet came along, we had a number of businesses that did not survive over the next years.

This time, it is different with AI. The rate of change is significant.


Just out of curiosity, what is the change and how are you measuring its rate?

From no internet to internet the change is pretty profound. But my job is already very automated for the most part. It's true AI might automate it a bit more, but it's not like I'm going from zero automation to full on automation. That's not nothing, and it is worth something, but it's also not internet from no internet level of change either.


Copilot isn’t a model per se, no? It’s a harness that can use any model that supports tool calls from what I understand. It’s the way Microsoft commoditize ai models


Another casualty of Microsoft using Copilot to describe so many different things.


Actually surprising that windows hasn’t been renamed CopilotWorkbench yet


Agreed, the common Joe isn't switching the second Anthropic drops a new SOTA

I think you don't understand moat - that's not a moat.


The trick is antitrust style bundling. The massive pile of documents and processes tied to GSuite is a moat which makes it hard to switch to something like o365. Since a company might effectively be locked into GSuite (the primary product), if Google forces companies to buy Gemini (the secondary product) by bundling it with GSuite, they've given themselves a moat in the LLM space using their document/email moat from GSuite.

This is essentially what Google has done, and it's a shame the US is so weak on enforcing antitrust laws.


It can be if it’s really sticky. But I don’t think ai models themselves will ever be sticky, the harnesses might be. But there is very little money to make in the harness itself, and they are also very easy to copy, so yeah, no moat


The "curb cut effect", right? I'm sure there's a human-friendly interface to MCPs myself. I think we're reinventing application scripting that way.


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