Not to be a "snob", but chances are if you know about Voyager 1/2, you probably know that their power supplies are running out. More clarity is never bad though.
I am a long-time Ars reader and subscriber. I am not American, but I always found their articles on various public policy issues to be interesting and fascinating.
One particularly fascinating element is the callousness of the various "legal arguments" used to justify (and enable) various crimes/corruption schemes.
"I didn't know this was illegal ... it's the fences fault ... we sold both voice and data info, so umm it's legal."
Motherfuckers, you were selling real-time location of your customers to random thugs. By any real understanding of the term "justice", you should be locked up for decades with full asset seizure.
No sane person would agree for you to sell their real-time location data to random goons. You know this and you dare to come up with this gibberish?
It's not even so much the corruption/criminality that is fascinating (things like that happen everywhere), but the arrogance and callousness inherent to their world salad.
We are all waiting. If they don't come up with proven revenue opportunities in the next ~18 months, it's going to be difficult to justify the astronomical capex spend.
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).
Having multiple DND profile would be very helpful.
At last a new Android feature that I somewhat excited for. I honestly stop following Android updates around 9/10.