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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • My son has doubled in size every month for the last few months. At this rate he’ll be fifty foot tall by the time he’s seven years old.

    Yeah, it’s a stupid claim to make on the face of it. It also ignores practical realities. The first is those is training data, and the second is context windows. The idea that AI will successfully write a novel or code a large scale piece of software like a video game would require them to be able to hold that entire thing in their context window at once. Context windows are strongly tied to hardware usage, so scaling them to the point where they’re big enough for an entire novel may not ever be feasible (at least from a cost/benefit perspective).

    I think there’s also the issue of how you define “success” for the purpose of a study like this. The article claims that AI may one day write a novel, but how do you define “successfully” writing a novel? Is the goal here that one day we’ll have a machine that can produce algorithmically mediocre works of art? What’s the value in that?



  • The key difference being that AI is a much, much more expensive product to deliver than anything else on the web. Even compared to streaming video content, AI is orders of magnitude higher in terms of its cost to deliver.

    What this means is that providing AI on the model you’re describing is impossible. You simply cannot pack in enough advertising to make ChatGPT profitable. You can’t make enough from user data to be worth the operating costs.

    AI fundamentally does not work as a “free” product. Users need to be willing to pony up serious amounts of money for it. OpenAI have straight up said that even their most expensive subscriber tier operates at a loss.

    Maybe that would work, if you could sell it as a boutique product, something for only a very exclusive club of wealthy buyers. Only that model is also an immediate dead end, because the training costs to build a model are the same whether you make that model for 10 people or 10 billion, and those training costs are astronomical. To get any kind of return on investment these companies need to sell a very, very expensive product to a market that is far too narrow to support it.

    There’s no way to square this circle. Their bet was that AI would be so vital, so essential to every facet of our lives that everyone would be paying for it. They thought they had the new cellphone here; a $40/month subscription plan from almost every adult in the developed world. What they have instead is a product with zero path to profitability.






  • It’s not the standard because it will likely have a LOT of unintended consequences.

    How do you share evidence of police brutality if they can use copyright to take down the video? How do newspapers print pictures of people if they have to get the rightsholders permission first? How do we share photos of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute if he can just sue every site that posts it for unauthorized use of his likeness?

    Unless this has some extremely stringent and well written limitations, it has the potential to be a very bad idea.






  • There are, as I understand it, ways that you can train on AI generated material without inviting model collapse, but that’s more to do with distilling the output of a model. What Musk is describing is absolutely wholesale confabulation being fed back into the next generation of their model, which would be very bad. It’s also a total pipe dream. Getting an AI to rewrite something like the total training data set to your exact requirements, and verifying that it had done so satisfactorily would be an absolutely monumental undertaking. The compute time alone would be staggering and the human labour (to check the output) many times higher than that.

    But the whiny little piss baby is mad that his own AI keeps fact checking him, and his engineers have already explained that coding it to lie doesn’t really work because the training data tends to outweigh the initial prompt, so this is the best theory he can come up with for how he can “fix” his AI expressing reality’s well known liberal bias.




  • They also point out that more than 50 percent of Helldivers’ revenue came from microtransactions now. Again, you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop. They also confirm they will conitnue to milk that and “maximize revenue”.

    The thing is, Helldivers is priced, delivered and supported in such a way that it’s worth spending that money on.

    In Helldivers 2 it is possible to earn premium currency simply by playing the game, and at a fairly reasonable rate. You can basically grind out every bit of content in the game if you want. And even without any of that “premium” content, you get a huge library of weapons, cosmetics and strategems to play with, many of which are better than the premium stuff.

    Plus the warbonds are very fair compared to how most games price extra content. In a world where you can easily spend twenty dollars or more on a skin, here’s what a typical warbond - priced at $10 - includes;

    • Two or three full cosmetic sets
    • An emote or victory animation
    • Three primary weapons
    • A secondary weapon
    • A grenade
    • A booster (special power for the squad, not an XP booster; Helldivers does not have any form of XP booster, everyone grinds at the same rate)
    • Enough premium currency to cover 30% of your next warbond

    (Newer warbonds have gotten a little slimmer in terms of weapons and skins, but now tend to include new strategems as well; it’s a slight downgrade in terms of bang for your buck, but still very good compared to the industry averages)

    On top of that, the game itself is very reasonably priced, incredibly fun, and constantly getting exciting new story content. Which means you buy this thing, enjoy the hell out of it, and end up thinking “Man, I’ve still got this money left over that I would have spent on a full price game, why not spend it on some cool shit? Look at all the cool stuff I could get for just ten dollars and I’m still coming in at way less than the price of a new Battlefield game.”

    That’s how it should be. That kind of behaviour from a developer should be rewarded. Arrowhead are doing pretty much everything right when it comes to crafting a brilliant product and treating the fans of that product with respect. We can’t stop Sony learning the wrong lessons from that, but if good games don’t succeed they certainly won’t ever learn the right ones.