lavendermon

Look at how many AI adjacent products Google talks about in this press release along with its model names. Anthropic and OpenAI are guilty of it as well, so many models and ways of working with them right now, letting the users figure out the nuances of each.

Earlier today I found myself asking ChatGPT to research and explain exactly what Anthropic Playground is for and how specifically it may differ for my tasks from Anthropic Workspace, Chat, Code, and API credits. I chose ChatGPT Sol 6.1 high for this task going on gut feel, hoping it was the best model to handle that job without wasting my precious Claude tokens.

As someone who has played a lot of WoW, this is a reasonable response.

This is the type of change I am referring to when inferring that AI may have helped develop the changes that enabled such a massive improvement over previous launch events.

I am not a Blizzard employee and don't have insider information. I'm just impressed with their improvements and hopeful it was at least partially enabled by their use of AI to help ideate, design and implement.

Just tried to load a couple games and received error 1027 - rate limited - you need to upgrade your Cloudflare plan.

"Anthropic is a public benefit corporation" in the second line of their announcement. I would like to see some more open source releases from the company to signal better intent towards that statement.

Anthropic's spend commitments at half a trillion are unbelievable. I love their product but think they've leveraged up awfully hard... makes me wonder how quickly software engineering, marketing, and other valuable features will soon be siloed and locked behind increasingly lucrative paywalls.

In a roundabout way, I hypothesize about Anthropic's future pricing power by using the analogy of historical cable TV package pricing compared with the total price that households are now paying for various streaming services. Cable TV was often $100+ per month in the 2000s when Netflix came along and offered most of a viewer's favorite shows plus movies and eventually originals for $7/month, streamed at any rate a viewer wanted. Over the years since we've watched media companies snatch back their most valuable IP and start their own streaming services, and the result is households now pay a total cost that approaches what people used to pay monthly for cable TV packages.

There's little doubt we're in an era of very cheap AI, as most people are well aware given the amount of money Anthropic and OpenAI are losing. I also hope local inference can help suppress the future pricing power of Anthropic and OpenAI and continue to enable somewhat equal access to all of the benefits of AI in the future.

My belief that AI may have helped Blizzard plan, set up and smoothly launch WoW Forever is inferred and based on the poor quality of their other recent launches. WoW Classic released in 2019 and was a laggy mess for the first few days. Blizzard recently said WoW Forever is their biggest launch in history for peak concurrent players, bigger than Classic or any expansion they've released including Burning Crusade and WotLK.

Blizzard has long been derided for its poor performance when handling massive player events, showing worse performance in that regard than large private servers such as Nostalrius.

The biggest technological advancement in the past couple years that could help explain their sudden and dramatic improvement is AI, in my opinion. I think it's fantastic if AI is indeed a large part of the reason for their rapid improvement.

The Quake 3 demo was one of my favorite games I wasn't allowed to play as a teenager. Loved blowing people up with a rocket launcher and laser beaming with a railgun. I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.

On a similar note World of Warcraft just launched "WoW Forever", a nostalgic throwback to vanilla WoW. Millions of people tried to play on the first day and for the first time ever during a major launch of WoW, everything went smoothly and players were able to log in and play without lagging out. Normally it took a few days after launch for servers to catch up to demand and allow people to actually play the game without lag or disconnections. I'm confident that AI played a major role in allowing Blizzard's team to navigate a WoW launch successfully for the first time.

A good point and the line of thinking you're describing implies that power should override anything else. Rather than rules that apply to everyone, what level of power within a company should no longer be subject to firing for engaging in a power-abuse sexual relationship?

Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.

Jensen has been one of the few outspoken billionaires for promoting higher taxes on himself. In fact, only he and Buffett come to mind as the members of that category.

Then again, below is a 2024 article from the NY Times claiming Jensen was taking advantage of loopholes to save $8 billion on taxes. I'm not sure whether playing by the existing rules is a sign that he wants lower taxes at the expense of everyone else, who wouldn't take advantage of loopholes while they exist? Any good accountant would recommend the same. The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/business/nvidia-jensen-hu...

What is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.

AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.

I live in a two party consent state and have yet to pull the trigger on an AI transcription service. Yogurt is the first appropriate implementation of the service in my opinion, both for personal privacy and to limit potential issues if Granola or similar service gets hacked and transcriptions go public.

I appreciate that you included a default warning for the owner to let everyone on the call know they are being recorded. It might be ideal to take that a step further and have the popup occur again if another party joins the call and should also be notified of the recording.

Apple has a fascinating history of waiting and seeing how a market develops before entering with a better product and eventually dominating, the iPod and iPhone are two examples. It seems they may be building a strong position to pull that off again in the personal assistant AI category ChatGPT is trying to dominate.

I enjoy watching the slow burn approach Apple is deploying as they quietly gear up to offer some % of local inference on iPhones to provide most of the AI services consumers want. Local inference could enable a very low price point for AI services that Apple would leverage alongside their massive ecosystem advantages and privacy claims to compete very effectively for personal assistant AI subscriptions.

Tried this on desktop and mobile, totally different experiences. I love the residue effect on the screen after I tilt the sand around on mobile. Next step: hourglass or maybe a snow globe?