Never call a man happy until he is dead. Also I don’t think your argument generalizes well - there are plenty of private research investment bubbles that have popped and not reached their original peaks (e.g. VR).
Okay, but the only part that’s specific to AI (that the companies investing the money are capturing more value than they’re putting into it) is now false. Even the hyperscalers are not capturing nearly the value they’re investing, though they’re not using debt to finance it. OpenAI and Anthropic are of course blowing through cash like it’s going out of style, and if investor interest drops drastically they’ll likely need to look to get acquired.
Here is one sentence from the referenced prediction:
> I don't think there will be any more AI winters.
This isn't enough to qualify as a testable prediction, in the eyes of people that care about such things, because there is no good way to formulate a resolution criteria for a claim that extends indefinitely into the future. See [1] for a great introduction.
That's a hydroelectric dam, not a water wheel. A water wheel captures mechanical energy directly for eg grain milling, not conversion to electricity via turbine.
I'd hope so. As an aside, I wish Waymo was more transparent on the app that their cars are not allowed to take passengers on the freeway. I was unaware of this restriction when I booked a ride from SF to Burlingame last month and I was stuck in a Waymo for an hour going down residential streets!
I wonder how that'd feel. I took a Waymo in SF last fall and I was pretty impressed. But it was also slow city speeds. I wonder if it feels different going at freeway speeds with "no one" at the wheel.
While the margin of error is much lower on a freeway due to the speeds, other drivers are generally a lot more predictable (also in part due to the speeds).
There was a good overview on here a while ago about the challenges[1]. You need to plan longer in the future and your sensors need to reach further. It's also a much bigger challenge to collect sensor data as fewer diversions happen per mile (but those that do have higher stakes).
Sure - a good freeway is actually a lot more predictable in most circumstances than city driving, so as a problem to solve it's likely a little bit less complicated. What I wonder about is what it feels like as a passenger. I wonder if it would be more or less frightening than being a passenger when my 17 year old is driving.
I use adaptive cruise control a lot, where I rely on the car for keeping a safe distance.
I have a limited version of SuperCruise which means it operates hands-free on freeways but nowhere else. My wife's Equinox EV has the regular version, which operates on a lot of arterials near us and has more capabilities. The first time that the Equinox signaled, changed lanes to pass, signaled, then changed lanes back was shocking.
We moved to a small town and drive a lot more than we used to and I find that having those capabilities really helps relieve the stress.
I will say that I move to the center lane when going through a notorious set of curves on I-5 in Portland because my Bolt doesn't steer as smoothly as I'd like near the concrete barricades. I wanted SuperCruise because it has a fantastic safety record. There are lots of times it's not available but when it is, I have near-total confidence in it.
I took a Waymo that drove on an 'expressway' which had a speed limit of 40mph and it was definitely a different feeling. I did feel a bit scared, at 25mph it feels like a gentle theme park ride, at 40mph it's beyond that and feels dangerous.
Roads that get used more collect more debris. They also break and require maintenance more often. That maintenance is exceptionally disruptive to the normal operation of the road.
Other drivers aren't your only challenge out there.
From the article “ Pickups and dropoffs will initially start at SFO’s Kiss & Fly area – a short AirTrain ride from the terminals – with the intention to explore other locations at the airport in the future.”
I'm more "capitalism good" (8 billion people on earth, 7 billion can read, 5 billion have internet, and almost no one dies in childbirth anymore in rich countries, which is several billion people), but that is really interesting that he has no stock and just gets salary.
I guess if other people buying stock in your company is what enables you to have a super high salary (+ benefits like company plane, etc), you are still kinda selling stock though, and honestly, having considered the "start a random software company aligned with the present trend (so ~2015 DevOps/Cloud, 2020 cryptocurrency/blockchain, 2024 AI/ML), pay myself a million dollar a year salary and close shop after 5 years because 'no market lol'" route to riches myself, I still wouldn't consider Altman to be completely free of perverse incentives here :)
Still, very glad you pointed that out, thanks for sharing that information ^^
The phys.org link does have this relevant statement as to why those two are a different type of thing:
> Although other types of magnetism, such as diamagnetism and paramagnetism have been categorized, these describe specific responses to externally applied magnetic fields rather than spontaneous magnetic orderings in materials.
Can confirm the workbench does with `claude-sonnet-4-20250514` returns Biden (with a claimed April 2024 cutoff date) while Chat returns Trump (as encoded in the system prompt, with no cutoff date mention). Interesting
Most of their training data says that Biden is president, because it was created/scraped pre-2025. AI models have no concept of temporal context when training on a source.
People use "who's the president?" as a cutoff check (sort of like paramedics do when triaging a potential head injury patient!), so they put it into the prompt. If people switched to asking who the CEO of Costco is, maybe they'd put that in the prompt too.
If you were disappointed in the brevity of the article, you may enjoy this multi hour podcast on the ELT, in the form of an interview between one of the scientists working on it and a German CS PhD / podcaster: https://omegataupodcast.net/150-the-european-extremely-large...
They get into the details of the active & adaptive optics, flagship science missions, engineering tradeoffs, etc. The podcast itself is also free and non commercial, so no ads or sponsors!
