Plenty of people want ads. Every time someone asks “hey ChatGPT what do I need to buy to fix my sink” or “hey Claude what’s the best cat food” or “what’s the best island in the Caribbean for me to visit” they are specifically asking to see an ad.
The ads are the product that people are paying for. “Consumer” AI is currently marketed as agents that book restaurants for you, buy cat food before you run out, organize your travel, etc. etc. These are targeted ads for a particular restaurant, pet store, airline, etc. Some people find this desirable.
The economic article is a summary of a preprint paper that surveyed thousands of Americans. Seems like a research paper to me, but I don’t know economics well. Am I missing something?
A summary of a research article isn't a research article. Do you think newspapers are scholarly journals? Also, you do understand that anyone can just upload a document to SSRN, right? "Preprint" doesn't actually mean anything academically. Also, the methodology of that paper is absurd: Google trained a model and then asked that model what it thought about AI policy. Can you not think of any way bias might be less than controlled for doing it this way?
Shipbuilding is but one proxy for China’s dominance in industrialization. A more relevant one for AI is: China has built more energy capacity in the last 4 years than the USA has built in the last 150. AI is increasingly limited by power. For this and other reasons, IMO the US will inevitably be surpassed on AI.
Last I've seen, it was compute and not solar panels that is limiting AI. And the US share of worldwide compute capacity has increased from 40% to 70% over the last 4 years, while China has shrinked to just 15% from 35% over that period.
> The coverage of Chinese companies is particularly poor. Our average coverage of 8 major companies is 15%.
The bigger issue is that if you're interested in frontier training, the national aggregate doesn't tell you much. The question is whether your top labs can get to the chip scale necessary to train a frontier model and China's labs have already demonstrated they can. See https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/deepseek-debates
But it's not even clear that training frontier models is where the real innovation occurs. When it comes to fine-tuning, deploying, and building AI-based products, inference is the name of the game and the chip quality is less important. Huawei's Ascend is already pretty competitive here and then you're also discounting China's open-weight access to good models, a huge base of engineering talent and a massive domestic market to iterate against.
And unless Anthropic, OpenAI et. al. are willing to invest billions of dollars training models that will only be used by a small number of clients (like the government), there's no way to fight distillation. Protecting any model from distillation means forgoing its full revenue potential, improvement via feedback and all the benefits AI is supposed to bring to the broad US economy. And if you restrict your most advanced models, you just push people to Chinese open-weight models, which is what we're already seeing.
The doomsday virus has a first-mover advantage over the vaccine. The time that people start to drop dead from the virus is the time you start to make and distribute a vaccine. Even if AI can design and synthesize a vaccine within hours, how fast can it be rolled out to the general populace? It took months to distribute the Covid vaccines, even when we already knew how to make them. You have to physically load the doses on trucks[...]
was just 'make a viral vaccine with a shorter incubation period and infect everyone'. Handwavey problems require handwavey solutions.
“It’s too late” is a logistical issue IMO. In this article, virus production is totally decentralized and fast, but vaccine production is centralized and slow. Why?
It still doesn't say anything about vaccine production being slow either:
> Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world.
"overnight", that's way faster than the virus production! And I doubly don't see how "decentralizing" that would help, at all, what that has to do with anything.
It says why it's too late right in the next sentence:
> It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work.
You might say by the time production starts it's already too late. A vaccine isn't a cure. It could be distributed by teleportation into the bloodstream of anyone on Earth instantly, the instant it was discovered, and it would still be too late.
well they didn't really die on the hill. the NYT headline is still "OpenAI says it has cracked one of math's millennium problems" and the whole article doesn't mention this controversy. Normies don't know what NS is and don't care, they'll just see "wow OpenAI is the best I guess"
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