>Why are industries dominated by large unprofitable companies?
The logic is quite simple: by undercutting your competition, you aim to quickly drive others out of business and secure a monopoly. Once in such a position, making a profit becomes much easier.
Every time I think about this I keep coming back to anti-trust enforcement, we need more of it. And perhaps a single entity having enough money to essentially buy an entire industry isn't a good thing.
The problem is, that the thing that's happening is shirt-term good for the users, and people don't want any government action until it's too late.
If i start offering $5 oil changes (oil included, price difference covered by VC money), that's good for the consumer... then all the other shops close down, but consumers still get the $5 oil changes... then I hike the price, and only then people start to complain. And if you close me then, who will change your oil?
Imagine government banning google for offering free email and killing most of the competition back then... people would complain, a gigabyte was a HUGE amount of space for then, and all that for free!
I would argue that there is a significant difference between Ted Kaczynski and the numerous conspiracy theorists out there. A quick read through his works, most notably his latest piece, "Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How," will quickly reveal the careful, rational approach he applies to his arguments.
Conspiracy theorists often fail to comprehend that secret agencies can naturally emerge in modern societies. A society without such agencies would be at the mercy of those societies that do have them.
What if, for instance, China successfully develops a mind control program and your country does not?
Asserting that the CIA is "bad", without considering larger societal trends and developments, is overly simplistic.
In primitive cultures, reaching old age could be seen as an achievement, given the difficulty of surviving without a healthcare system. In most modern societies, however, aging isn't as challenging and elderly individuals are often "locked away" in retirement homes. In other words, they essentially disappear, living a life of a ghost. Moreover, what kind of wisdom would you expect from someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement?
> Moreover, what kind of wisdom would you expect from someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement?
The kind of wisdom that they have earned dealing with the daily practicalities of personal life, society, law, bureaucracy and in general the knowledge of navigating the winds of change for many decades. But in order to get the benefit of that wisdom, you have to value them as individuals with valuable experience instead of thinking of them as someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement.
Perhaps the wisdom of advising that is not a good idea. And also that young whippersnappers who think that that is what the majority of old people spend their time doing may not be paying much attention to the world.
Reaching old age is still an achievement, especially for young male motorcycle riders, and experience of society and its history always comes for free. The "locking away" stage is something old people generally try to actively avoid, and mostly generally for those with actual dementia in any case.
I suspect it has less to do with specific parameters of modern society and more with the general experience of living in it. It's a rat race that, for many, lacks any meaning. another point to consider is the psychological difference between being a big fish in a small pond as opposed to being a small fish in a very large one. With the Internet, we now have the means to compare ourselves with everyone else, and our minds can quickly reach the conclusion that who we are and what we have is simply not good enough. From there, it's an easy slide into a downward spiral.
I think it's complex and hard to breakdown. Modern life may have something to do with it, but it certainly isn't more difficult to live today than it was during the great economic depression. Additionally, the internet should tell us that If you live in the US you are way better off than people in places like Ukraine, Mexico, Argentina, Uganda, etc. Now, if they are comparing themselves to the Kardashians or erroneously to pretend-rich Social media personalities, that's on them.
I think how easy life is has little to do with psychological wellbeing. If life is very hard but you are doing great relative to others you will feel good. Furthermore, a more demanding life often generates a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.
It has to be something else. Lots of people around the world live in dire conditions, in sub-modern conditions, picking garbage dumps bathing in ditch water. And they and their friends are equally poor and living under cramped tin roof dwellings. They're not doing "great" from an economic standpoint, but may be doing well from a social standpoint and mental health standpoint. They may not be individually tougher, but as a social group, they seem tougher.
>it's really underdiscussed how averse people seem to just contemplation.
Another observation I've made is that the more time people spend consuming information, the more they feel compelled to talk. It's as if humans are programmed to share the information they've gathered. I'm certain that in the past, people eagerly listened if you had new information, but these days, everyone is constantly collecting new information. It seems like everyone wants to share/talk, yet no one wants to listen.
>the EU has a history of crippling their native tech industry to the general detriment of the EU. It is quite possible that this will end up being one more nail in the coffin.
The primary factor is brain drain. As many experts in geopolitics suggest, the European Union, in collaboration with Russia, could potentially rival, if not surpass, the United States in terms of power. However, it appears they are content to be pawns on the larger chessboard.
The EU is happy to deal with Erdogan. Well, maybe not happy, but willing. The only thing that puts Putin into a category of his own is the Ukraine war. Before that happened, pulling Russia closer to the EU and maybe making them a bit more moderate over the decades was the strategy. Compared anything that happened before and after, the USSR with its hostility towards the rest of Europe was an outlier, just an outlier that Putin seems to be fond of. Now it looks like we have to wait for Putin to leave his position to get back to good relations.
What you got wrong is putting all the blame on Putin. The US has made it clear that it is not accepting that Europe gets its gas from Russia regardless whether Putin is friendly, not in power, or Russia is a democracy. Not everyone agrees with the US stance (Germany went with the pipeline, France/Macron tried to avert the war). It seems that US intelligence has prevailed, however, to the advantage of the US (or their plans at least).
Europe got badly screwed. Now Putin is an enemy forever. And he is not going down since all of Russia's powerful people are on a watch list. They have nowhere to go, and so they might as well stick around to the bitter end.
The US as well, Turkey is a NATO country after all. Heck, Israel and Turkey are in bad with the Saudis to some extend. If anything, Erdogan isbwilling to deal with Putin (explicitly using the people, not the countries, here). None ofbthat jas anything to do with AI so, does it?
This assumes that human lives will be more valuable than war robots. However, humans may be used as cannon fodder to distract enemy robots from targeting valuable equipment.
I'm not sure whether the number of parameters serves as a reliable measure of quality. I believe that these models have a lot of redundant computation and could be a lot smaller without losing quality.
The Chinchilla scaling law describes, apart from the training data size, the optimal number of parameters for a given amount of computing power for training. See
For training, yes, but these models are optimized for inference, since inference will be run many more times than training. The original Llama models were run way past chinchilla-optimal amounts of data.
The logic is quite simple: by undercutting your competition, you aim to quickly drive others out of business and secure a monopoly. Once in such a position, making a profit becomes much easier.