This is the market place, brah.

…

Free market capitalism

then talk about subsidies or non capitalist country controlling the currency, markets, VCs, etc.

What does that even mean?

If you were implying that I said being funded by Alphabet/Google was a good thing then let me be explicit, I did NOT say that nor believe it to be the case. Now, once again, cf my actual comment about pragmatic better alternative we can rely on and support today. If you meant to suggest better and are supporting that, please do share.

I thought saying

contribute however they can up to their own capabilities

was actually very clear but seems I wasn’t clear enough so that means… literally doing ANYTHING except only criticizing. That can mean being an open-source developer, yes, but that can also means translation, giving literally 1 cent, etc. It means doing anything at all that would not ONLY be saying “this is good, but it’s not good enough” without doing actually a single thing to change, especially while actually using another free of charge browser that is funded by advertisement. Honestly if that’s not clear enough I’m not sure what would be … but please, do ask again I will genuinely try to be clearer.

I hope everybody criticizing the move either do not use products from Mozilla or, if they do, contribute however they can up to their own capabilities. If you don’t, if you ONLY criticize, yet use Firefox (or a derivative, e.g. LibreWolf) or arguably worst use something fueled by ads (e.g. Chromium based browsers) then you are unfortunately contributing precisely to the model you are rejecting.

Indeed, AKA the OpenAI playbook.

As per usual, in order to understand what it means we need to see :

• performance benchmark (A100 level? H100? B100? GB200 setups?)
• energy consumption (A100 performance level and H100 lower watt? the other way around?)
• networking scalability (how many cards cards can be interconnected for distributed compute? NVLink equivalents?)
• software stack (e.g can it run CUDA and if not what alternatives can be used?)
• yield (how many die are usable, i.e. can it be commercially viable or is it R&D still?)
• price (which regardless of possible subsidies would come from yield)
• volume (how many cards can actually be bought, also dependent on yield)

Still interesting to read after announcements, as per usual, and especially who will actually manufacture them at scale (SMIC? TSMC?).

PS: full disclosure, I still believe self-hosting AI is interesting, cf my notes on it https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but that doesn’t mean AGI can be reached, even less that it’d be “soon”. IMHO AI itself as a research field is interesting enough that it doesn’t need grandiose claims, especially not ones leading to learned helplessness.

Read few months ago, warmly recommended. Basically on self selection bias and sharing “impressive” results while ignoring whatever does not work… then claiming it’s just the “beginning”.

I haven’t seriously read the article for now unfortunately (deadline tomorrow) but if there is one thing that I believe is reliable, it’s computational complexity. It’s one thing to be creative, ingenious, find new algorithms and build very efficient processors and datacenters to make things extremely efficient, letting us computer things increasingly complex. It’s another though to “break” free of complexity. It’s just, as far as we currently know, is impossible. What is counter intuitive is that seemingly “simple” behaviors scale terribly, in the sense that one can compute few iterations alone, or with a computer, or with a very powerful set of computers… or with every single existing computers… only to realize that the next iteration of that well understood problem would still NOT be solvable with every computer (even quantum ones) ever made or that could be made based on resources available in say our solar system.

So… yes, it is a “stretch”, maybe even counter intuitive, to go as far as saying it is not and NEVER will be possible to realize AGI, but that’s what their paper claims. It’s a least interesting precisely because it goes against the trend we hear CONSTANTLY pretty much everywhere else.

It’s a classic BigTech marketing trick. They are the only one able to build “it” and it doesn’t matter if we like “it” or not because “it” is coming.

I believed in this BS for longer than I care to admit. I though “Oh yes, that’s progress” so of course it will come, it must come. It’s also very complex so nobody else but such large entities with so much resources can do it.

Then… you start to encounter more and more vaporware. Grandiose announcement and when you try the result you can’t help but be disappointed. You compare what was promised with the result, think it’s cool, kind of, shrug, and move on with your day. It happens again, and again. Sometimes you see something really impressive, you dig and realize it’s a partnership with a startup or a university doing the actual research. The more time passes, the more you realize that all BigTech do it, across technologies. You also realize that your artist friend did something just as cool and as open-source. Their version does not look polished but it works. You find a KickStarter about a product that is genuinely novel (say Oculus DK1) and has no link (initially) with BigTech…

You finally realize, year after year, you have been brain washed to believe only BigTech can do it. It’s false. It’s self serving BS to both prevent you from building and depend on them.

You can build, we can build and we can build better.

Can we build AGI? Maybe. Can they build AGI? They sure want us to believe it but they have lied through their teeth before so until they do deliver, they can NOT.

TL;DR: BigTech is not as powerful as they claim to be and they benefit from the hype, in this AI hype cycle and otherwise. They can’t be trusted.

I… agree but isn’t then contradicting your previous point that innovation will come from large companies if they only try to secure monopolies rather than genuinely innovate? I don’t understand from that perspective who is left to innovate if it’s neither research (focusing on publishing, even though having the actual novel insight and verifying that it does work), not the large companies… and startups don’t get the funding either. Sorry if you mentioned it but I’m now confused as what is left.

They just provide the data. They can question the methodology or even provide another report with a different methodology but if the data is correct (namely no fabricated) then it’s not up to them to see how it’s being used. The user can decide how they define startup, i.e which minimum size, funding types, funding rounds, etc. Sharing their opinion on the startup landscape is unprofessional IMHO. They are of course free to do so but to me it doesn’t question the validity of the original report.

Please clarify, as I asked in https://lemmy.ml/post/20245112/13688624 I don’t see how that’s relevant. They are sharing opinions from startup CEO or numbers that are about large “old” (much earlier than the boom, e.g Ant, Shein, ByteDance). That’s certainly interesting but does not contradict figures from the article.

Research happens through university, absolutely, and selling products at scale through large companies, but that’s not innovation. Innovation is bringing new products, that is often the result of research yes, to market. Large companies tends to be innovative by buying startups. If there are no startups coming from research coming from universities to buy, I don’t see how large companies, often stuck in the “innovator dilemma”, will be able to innovate.

Thanks for linking to criticism but can you highlight which numbers are off? I can see things about ByteDance, Ant group, Shein but that’s irrelevant as it’s not about the number of past success, solely about the number of new funded startups. Same as the CEO of ITJUZI sharing his opinion, that’s not a number.

Edit: looks totally off, e.g “restaurants, in a single location, such as one city, you could immediately tell that there were large numbers of new companies.” as the article is about funding, not a loan from the bank at the corner of the street.

OK… unable to argue, blocked.

Thanks for the in depth clarification and sharing your perspective.

this is a good development

Keeping finance in check is indeed important so I also think it’s good.

What about the number of funded startups though and the innovative products they would normally provide customers? Do you believe the measures taken will only weed out bad financiers or will it also have, as a side effect, to bring less products and solutions out? Does it mean research will remain academic but won’t necessarily be commercialized or even scaled? If you believe it will still happen, how? Through state or regional funding and if so can you please share such examples that grew for the last 5 years?

Founded in 2019, right after the peak according to the very graph I highlighted.

Neither I nor the article is saying there are no more startups nor innovation from China. What the article is saying is that it’s radically less than 7 years ago. You can still list few amazing Chinese startup from 2023 or 2024 and it would still not make the article “nonsense”.

I believe that’s precisely the point of the article, that there will be no new BYD which was funded 29 years ago.

Care to unfold a bit more what’s hilarious? Which metrics from the article are wrong or irrelevant for example? You might disagree with the conclusion, and maybe rightly so, but are you saying the data itself, e.g number of companies funded is false? Or it does not matter and something else could help better understand the situation?