infoseek12
infoseek12 on Hacker News
Bugs are ever present. And beta software should be treated with charity. But Photoshop, let alone the entire suite, is a beast. An effort, like this says it is, aiming for parity fundamentally misunderstands the reality of both the software they’re trying to replicate and the capability of AI assistance now and in the foreseeable suitable future
He’s flogging a paid newsletter.
What surprises me is that they had the mini subs door open and bright lights on inside. This seems like surprisingly poor light discipline.
There are kind of a lot of errors in this piece. For instance, the problem the author had with Gemini CLI running out of tokens in ten minutes is what happens when you don’t set up (a free) API key in your environment.
That’s a complex encoding. I wonder if current models could decode it even given your explanation.
There is a time and a place for everything. Software development is often about compromise and often it isn’t feasible to work out a solution from foundational principles and a comprehensive understanding of the domain.
Many developers use libraries effectively without knowing every time consideration of O(n) comes into play.
Competently implemented, in the right context, LLMs can be an effective form of abstraction.
With a few prominent exceptions, the Wikipedia Foundation has been wise enough to enjoy the perks parasitism and not get in the way. However, their stated fundraising goal is amassing a large enough endowment that they can exist perpetually on it’s interest.
I sometimes worry if they ever achieve their goal they might not be wise enough not to kill the golden goose.
This new plan really highlights the need for open models.
Individual users will be priced out of frontier models if this becomes a trend.
There are lots of cases in businesses where there are integrations with other software that are difficult to port.
Can you talk about what book you’re trying to digitize?
It’s extraordinary!
Perhaps how quickly we become jaded should be taken as evidence of how quickly the world is changing right now.
When I looked at the examples they seemed like the kind of one off scripts, of limited complexity, that we’ve seen many times in the last year or so.
That’s a rather idiosyncratic interpretation that doesn’t align with current views or legal structures in the Western world (look up ‘publicity rights’)
‘Ownership’ isn’t a property of the universe. It’s a value imposed by human society and philosophy. The physical reality you describe is true but irrelevant
Writing and being a voice actor are two quite different skills. My experience with author narrated audiobooks is that there isn’t very much overlap.
I think software engineering is just as complex as medicine, both endeavors try to utilize human cognitive ability to the maximum extent possible.
I do entirely agree about software engineering being a lot less stressful though.
A cemetery would be a bad place for them as cemeteries tend to attract looters.
It will be interesting if a lot of research gets published in Chinese journals and not the West. If this happens I wonder if Western researchers will get their information from Chinese journals or lag a bit behind Chinese researchers on the answers to these questions.
That’s awesome! Though, I think the headline underplays what he’s doing and done
Having a part-time job as a welder for a private company would be awesome and no doubt useful in a variety of ways. However, he’s not only helping his countries technical industry as an individual contributor, he’s also running a small business and educating quite a few future welders
Many public-private partnerships between academia and industry, that were far better resourced, have a accomplished far less
I was in Germany a couple months ago. My experiences are entirely anecdotal but I’ve never seen so much anger before. I kept seeing fights and hearing angry yelling everywhere I went in Berlin.
It may be just about as unethical as someone discussing something they overheard in a crowd.
It’s a very fast moving space and if OpenAI doesn’t keep sailing forward they’ll be dead in the water but I don’t think GPT-4 or GPT-5 is the end of the story. The deployment of the vision API and other iterative improvements are somewhat substantive.
In the end more competition is a good thing. I think we have a lot of reason to be optimistic about the progress being made.
> "we've been doing this ai stuff since you (other AI companies) were little babies"
Well in fairness he has a point, they are starting to look like a legacy tech company.
Probably after a couple more years. ARPANET accelerated progress but the idea of large interconnected networks is an obviously useful one and the technology to build was coming to maturity at that point in time.
In an ideal world I agree with you with you about effective governance, in the one we live in I’m not so sure.
The pace of technological change and the complexity of this technology contrasted with the ability and rapidity of politicized bureaucracies and the sovereignty of 100+ nations almost guarantees government regulation will lose.
This is a fact I think we should be glad of, despite an increasingly reflexive authoritarianism from outlets like the New York Times, I think most people would agree that innovations like the Internet would be much worse with a fraction of their potential if they had been subjected to regulation and governance before their formative period had passed.
Adaptation to have the power and nuance necessary must come organically not from top down fiat.
> Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in AI won’t retain any value in the transition to the space.
They’ll obviously retain some value. Google can integrate more easily and seamlessly with things people are using but that’s a competitive advantage not a moat.
Google’s trajectory has been from innovative market maker, to dominant market leader, to megacorp that has a strong established position that keeps them competitive and relevant, to legacy provider, to kind of irrelevant.
Google’s still strong and significant but every day they are less so.
And given the present turmoil they aren’t likely to remain in the position very long. Unless there are significant financial inducements, that vest without any tenure requirements, it’s hard to see an upside.
Even if he isn’t critical to OpenAI’s future there is the issue of how the board handled this. They surprised everyone from their most significant investors to their employees, which would be justified if they have a very good reason. Without an excellent reason, all of this looks capricious and incompetent.
The linked article shows they’re not wholly immune. Some publicly available technologies can be quite powerful as Bellingcat demonstrates.
It’s certainly an asymmetrical field but, especially moving forward, I doubt it will be an entirely one-way street.
I hope AI will end up being a bit less murderous