It really is exciting to see alternative battery systems beginning to see wider commercialization.

I am not aware of sodium-ion batteries for home use, I believe it's mostly for industrial-scale battery systems. I could be wrong though, would be interested in learning more.

In an apartment setting, IMO the current gold standard is LiFePO4 (Lithium iron phosphate) batteries.

I live in Ukraine and we have constant problems with electricity supply (thank you dear russians). At times you have 1-2 full charge/discharge cycles per day on a 1 Kilowatt-hour battery system. Several LiFePO4 systems in my extended family seem to work close to baseline even after 1.5 years (not used daily though).

I have not seen any options for sodium-ion batteries for home use, but this maybe a local thing.

In a more rural/suburban setting, generators work as backup power supplies for most people. Typically only the well off get a high capacity LiFePO4 systems for house setting.

It is very likely.

I was surprised to see that their negotiations broke down because of price/cost as opposed to technology (unproven node and to my knowledge intel doesn't really have any experience with semi-custom x86 business).

Not all surprising, he's been pushing the russian narrative for a while now.

I didn't really get this either.

I did think the final paragraph was notable, a "zeitgeist of our times" if you will:

The absurdity of the situation prompted tech author and journalist James Vincent to write on X, "current tech trends are resistant to satire precisely because they satirize themselves. a car park of empty cars, honking at one another, nudging back and forth to drop off nobody, is a perfect image of tech serving its own prerogatives rather than humanity’s."

Given a sufficient amount of text, the method is said to be 99.9 percent effective.

If that's really the case, they should release some benchmarks. I am skeptical. Promising the world is a key component of their "business model".

According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55 billion since 2019.

$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That's a substantial amount.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott is of course not a reliable source due to conflict of interest and his position in the US corporate world.

If anything, the fact that he is doing damage control PR around "LLM scaling laws" suggests something is amiss. Let's see how things develop.

I am increasingly starting to believe that all these rumors and "hush hush" PR initiatives about "reasoning AI" is an attempt to keep the hype going (and VC investments) till the vesting period for their stock closes out.

I wouldn't be surprised if all these "AI" companies have come to a point where they're basically at the limits of LLM capabilities (due to problems with its fundamental architecture) while not being able to solve its core drawbacks (hallucinations, ridiculously high capex and opex cost).

Representatives for developers of the remaining three plugins couldn’t be reached because they provided no contact information on their sites.

You're asking for trouble if you're using such random plugins on production sites.

Pretty dystopian article.

But this will continue, until oligarchs like Altman, Cook, Nadella etc. start getting put into difficult situations; ones that create very strong incentives for them to show humanity (or at least emulate it).

That's wild! 692 "partners", I wonder if anyone even sees the irony of that message.