100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
No bio...
User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
I appreciate you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
(also @sarker and @JarJarJedi)
Here's a post from Catholic Answers that is already more fleshed out than what I could scribble into a comment: LINK
@Hoffmeister25, specifically:
I think there are benefits to trying to check my own animal instincts by weighing them against the example of Christ-like charity and temperance
We'll probably just hard disagree here, but there is no "weigh against." It isn't okay to be just the right amount of selfish. In the Imitation of Christ, we continually make hard attempts towards sanctification. We can make progress but will always fall short of his perfect example. That's the inevitability of sin. The good news (Good News?) is that through grace we can be forgiven our inevitable sins. But they remain sins nonetheless. I get worried when I see things like your phrasing "weighing against" -- because this can easily become an obstinate habit towards sin paired with a self-forgiveness.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
What actual bad effects would that have on my life?
Probably very little to none, as you've stated before.
The cost would be eternal damnation in the afterlife. Pascal will take your bet, and I'll offer him some default swaps on the side.
Choosing to get baptized into a transcendental faith, especially (a nominally) Christian one, after or because of creating a list of temporal pros and cons is wildly contrary to the faith itself. The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't know enough about Mormon theology to offer any specific guidance or raise any ideas for you here. Personally, I consider it to be basically a multilevel marketing cult.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Totally agree with this. And young men taking risks is, frankly, how society moves forwards with new discovery.
Right now, however, young men are being told to take zero risk, to artificially castrate themselves, and to enjoy doing it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
and it is every red-blooded Americans moral duty to resist them.
Below is an aside to @Gillitrut 's comments. It looks like he/she/they (idk pronouns) have decided to flame out in this thread.
Regardless of what "it" is, a blanket statement asserting the "moral duty" to react in any way to whatever "it" is ... is something close to the antithesis of the Motte, I think. People get to voice whatever strongly held beliefs the have here without censure, which is a good thing. The requirement for that is to then explain why they have such a strongly held belief, or, perhaps, their assumed likely outcome should people not share their strongly held belief.
Stopping after asserting "it's a moral duty!" is one of the worst things a person can do to discourse or conversation. You're inviting people to disagree with just so you can then perform all of the complex dance steps of moral outrage, probably, mostly, in order to support your own feelings of moral superiority.
I am the Steven Segal of Traditional Catholicism a practicing Catholic and so a lot of my beliefs boil down to "because God said so." But even in those cases (check out some of my posts on porn from earlier today - and smash that like button) I try to, at the least, outline the doctrinal teachings / cathechesim standard response on why and how "God said so." I don't smash and run, I don't think anyone out to either .... for the reasons stated above :-).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I am trying to propose a grassroots way of continuing that decline in violence. I would rather not simply have cops on every corner, even though I am a cringe level of "back the blue" pro-police. Thus, I am suggesting what I am suggesting for young male development.
When you say that providing a pathway for young men into adulthood doesn't reduce violence I am, first, skeptical to the point of doubt and second, curious about what your solution for reducing violence would be (short of cops on every corner).
Remember, the context of my original post was that this seemingly wayward fellow in California burnt down part of a city out of nothing more than a moment of spastic nihilistic rage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Is physical violence in society able to be decreased at all?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Thanks.
I believe that the current liberal order will, inevitably, destroy itself and fall into fundamental illiberalism - actually, something quite close to tyranny or at least a kind of state-corporate oligarch - regardless of any "modifications."
I think that the current liberal order is better on the whole than any new order that is actually likely to take power.
We can quibble about the "actually likely" phrase, but, generally, I disagree with this. I think there are alternatives to the current liberal order - that have existed in the past - that are fundamentally better. No, I am not talking about returning to pre-Westphalian Europe or something. I believe the "Old Right" conservatism that existed in some form or another from roughly the end of World War One to the Civil Rights Act (So, let's call it 1920 - 1965 to use round numbers) was the best political philosophy. It was hugely disrupted by FDR - first King of America - and then eradicated entirely by the 1964 CRA. The Warren Court of the 1970s salted its grave.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Oh, cool! Yeah, that's my missing the point a little bit. Thanks for writing the clarification.
In that case then, my personal method of thinking about the sacred in the context of the sexual is pretty straightforward:
- God created everything with a purpose in mind. The Thomistic view on this is that everything has a 'telos' or properly ordered end (or goal) to it.
- In the context of man and woman and sex, the telos is eternal unification (marriage) and procreation. This is the Catholic view on not only sex, but marriage. The well ordered purpose and end of a marriage is to create children and then raise them in virtue (Side note: For couples who cannot conceive, a marriage is still good and valid so long as it results in a mutual support for sanctification - 'becoming a saint' - in the course of life. You don't divorce because of problems with conception).
- Sex is a sacred act because it results in the creation of life and is also a manifestation of true feelings of love between man and woman only so long as it is performed licitly in the context of the sanctioned sacrament of marriage.
- To have sex outside of marriage is to violate the laws governing sex.
To comment more specifically about porn:
-
Porn is a disordered use of sex. It isn't done within the bounds of marriage with the intent of conception. Even in a strange edge case where two married people are filming themselves having sex with the expressed purpose of conceiving, this is still disordered because the specific character of sex reserves it exclusively to the participants - man and wife. Sex is never "shared" with spectators.
-
Masturbation, likewise, is a disordered use of one's sexual organs for the purpose of self gratification rather than towards the well ordered end of procreating (again, within the context of marriage).
A lot of it comes down to what a thing of any kind is supposed to do - what I started with, it's "telos." When you misuses that thing, you're sinning because you're out of concert with the will of God. Of course, there are many different degrees of severity to this. Mortal vs venial sins and all that. But the underlying assumption is that there is a way to all things and that that way is defined by God and also totally knowable by man.
I am allowed to judge people who are having pre-marital sex and using porn because I want them to be in sync with God's natural law and ordering of the universe because it will be to their greater happiness, joy, and benefit.
Translated to the more secular, I don't like porn because I think it's bad for everyone involved - the porn viewer, the porn maker, the porn producer, etc. All of these people will be spiritually worse off for having engaged with what is an intrinsically disordered act.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Plenty of societies that had/have very clear pathways for boys to become part of society nonetheless had/have horrific levels of violence.
Hell of a stawman!
Do you truly believe I'm advocating for pathways to manhood to include the active cultivation of violence against others (in a non military, State governed sort of way, of course). You immediately jump from my "the boys need purpose" to "YOU MEAN LIKE NAZIs?!" This is a bad faith argument.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I am begging you for an effortpost on cell phones and criminals.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I'm sure that that is exactly what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to slip it in. To quote the original post:
Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this.
I'm not even sure what kind of argumentation you're using here. It's like mini-maxing what I explicitly said as I kind of snide way of cultivating doubt? It's strange, that's for sure.
If you want to get into a discussion about proposed solutions and their cost / benefit profile, I'm all for it! But, cards on the table first - do you see the current "liberal order" of things to be all well and good?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
(Don't) Burn This Fucker Down!
A guy's been arrested for the Palisades fire. Note: link to an article from the Guardian, which I know is goofy, but the details are better in that article than in a few others that I pulled.
Of note:
After dropping off a passenger, according to the investigators, Rinderknecht parked his car and walked up a nearby trail, taking iPhone videos at a hilltop location while listening to a rap song whose music video included objects being set alight. He had reportedly listened to the song and watched its video repeatedly in the days before the fire.
First, I'm pretty stoked that the government went to what seems like a lot of trouble to find this guy. In fact, I can't remember if there was much reporting, at the time, on this being an intentional / negligent fire. This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?
Second, culture war angle (of course) - Odd and lonely uber driver dude sets something on fire while listening to rap music. Was it truly intentional? Maybe, maybe not. Negligent, yes. What's truly frightening however is that this is literally an almost literary manifestation of alienated male nihilism. Rinderknecht didn't shoot up a school / church/ political figure. He didn't disappear into drugs / porn / 4chan. He didn't commit suicide. He just kind of got pissed off one night and started a fire that deleted a whole section of a city.
We need to give the boys something to do. I've written about this before on the Motte. One of the primary tasks of human civilization has always been to manage, curtail, and, when necessary, punish the violent impulses of young men. War and famine did a lot of the heavy lifting for a while, and "frontierism" helped out towards the end (i.e. the idea that listless young men could at least try to find fortune in physically difficult locations. Not just "The West" but think also whaling ships, mining, etc.) But the world is fully mapped now, more or less. If you pack up your shit and hit the road, YouTube is going to be the same wherever you go. You can't get it away from it all when it's all in your pocket.
The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this. Young men, on their own in a truly atomized sense, turn into their own kind of decentralized stochastic terrorism. Stochastic chaos might be the more accurate term.
But this won't be accomplished by TikTok ads (lol) encouraging the boys to man up and / or talk to a therapist on BetterHelp (thank you for sponsoring this podcast, BTW). I think it requires the sincere confrontation of a modern liberalism that prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society. I can see a good argument to be made that liberalism should be about the tension between those two things. But I don't believe we're living in that world. We're in a world where individuals demand acknowledgement, recognition, and validation from all of society all of the time regardless of any conflict between an individual's value system and societies. This is "live your truth" in a nutshell. And when that nut cracks open, it burns down everything it touches - like, literally.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred. (In fact they arrange regular mass public gatherings where they come together to worship that which is considered sacred. Apply the same logic to sexuality and...)
I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way. Obviously, there are different "special rules" for different things. Yes, the mass and general catchesis should be spread as far as possible. No, the same shouldn't be said for explicit sexual relations. Ha.
But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful. I mean, as far as porn goes, the Catholic response is "100% pure evil, don't engage with it at all." Which I agree with. But I also live in America and do believe in free speech so, while on a personal level I am 100% anti porn, politically I can't just shout "perma ban!" and then walk away.
How do we demarcate the sacred things that need to be disseminated from the sacred things that need to be protected? Do we have a schema outlining the different modalities in which something may be sacred?
At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children? So, right off the bat, this means that porn, booze, gambling, drugs, and guns have to have my ill-defined "special rules" consideration.
When I say "children" here I do literally mean minors. More conceptually, however, we can think of "children" to mean people who don't necessarily have the fully developed character or faculties to make generative decisions for themselves. To be clear, I'm not talking about the mentally incompetent or retarded here. I mean "normal" distribution IQ folks who have glaring inabilities to manage their own life.
Another possible rubric could be on "length of time it takes to fuck your life with x." You don't get addicted to porn after a single use. Smoking one pack of cigarettes won't give you lung cancer. On the other hand, you can go down to the liquor store right now and for $50 or less buy a quantity of alcohol that will 100% lead to death. Guns ... I mean, I don't even have to spell that out. I should probably point out here that "special rules" does not mean banning. In fact, "special rules" need not even be particular onerous. For example, I am as pro-gun as they get, but I do think purchasing a gun (from a business, not privately) should require 1) valid and current identification and 2) proof of no convictions for violent felonies (perhaps with some sort of age out provision - haven't thought it all the way through).
I am always suspicious of the State and think it should be as small as possible. I wish a lot more work of social management would be done by local culture. Bring back slut shaming, but don't make laws against being a slut. Bring back social condemnation for being a drunk, but don't make purchasing limits on the amount of booze I can get. Real freedom is preserving the ability to make choices, even bad ones, so long as there isn't an oversized risk of collateral damage to others. I'm not advocating for the freedom to drink and drive, for instance.
So I don't support a State level ban on porn or impossible-to-enforce-and-also-1984-style digital age verification attempts. But I do support the return to the common idea that porn is for weirdo perverts. Trevor Wallace, a comedian I sometimes have pop up on my nonsense YouTube account, often has porn "actors" on his podcast and in his comedic clips. This does make me sad and its made me shy away from his content more because it normalizes the "everyone uses porn" meme. That isn't true. It was never true. Furthermore, on the topic of cultural memes, I think it's pretty easy to draw a line from the sexual revolution of the late 1960s to the ridiculous sexualization of society today along with all of the mental gymnastic that accompany it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
They are angry at Trump. But not in a "bullied kids shoots up a school" way. But in a, "I cry in every therapy session" way.
I like this framing. For goofy effect, I'll boost it by linking this nails-on-chalkboard level of unwatchable Satanic Grotto Podcast.
Timestamps at 22:00, a direct quote:
"When you see is walking down the sidewalk, and we're dressed in all black, you know that we fuckin' mean business.
I'm sorry that Chad McBro was mean to you in the 10th grade, but it seems like you've been holding onto this for too long. No one gets intimidated by people wearing all black. In fact, we kind of think it's sexy. But this is deeply layered performative emotionality; the constant refrain of "hail Satan", the goofy pit-of-fire green screen backdrop.
And I do believe that's what Jay Jones is all about as well. He types out those moronic texts as a way to hyper up his inner bullying victim self. He's never been in a real fight, but he can rhetorically decapitate Trump over and over. Do I think Jay Jones would actually take the opportunity to kill my family the way @WhiningCoil does? Not directly, no, but he might do what a lot of cowards in the past have done; use the state to make my family's life meaningfully worse.
And that's where, although I like @DirtyWaterHotDog 's framing, I disagree with the "harmlessness" of these kind of swamp creatures. The ones that really commit to it can really fuck things up. "Oh, come on, what are they really gonna do?" stopped being easy to say when, in 2020, they started to coerce everyone into getting mystery juice injected into our arms.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Also, I hate The Office and I'm very glad that it seems to be mostly fading as a cultural touchstone
Please say more - because I vigorously agree with you.
Jim Halpert is responsible for more actual work place sexual harassment than Don Draper.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
It's interesting to see how porn has become somewhat of an obsession not only at opposite sides of the political/cultural spectrum, but all across it. Depending on the group, it's an issue of free speech even if it is kind of icky, it's sexual expression, it's destroying the family and the children, it's an unavoidable by product of digital technology, it may be consenting adults - but also inextricably linked to human trafficking, and on and on and on.
My idea for why porn keeps occupying this position is because it forces a question that individualism doesn't resolve well. "Two consenting adults with a camera" paired with "a private person in their own home" should be a pretty cut and dry issue of personal privacy within the liberal tradition (as in philosophical-political liberal tradition - not the generally center left of left political movement of the post WW2 USA).
But it isn't. It has been, and always will be, more weighty than that. This is because sex is something significant. We've all heard some version of the joke about when the little kid accidentally walks in on his Mom and Dad and the quick thinking father pulls the covers up and informs the wayward youth that he and Mommy were just "wrestling." This is because wrestling is something that can easily occur in public. And people of wildly different ages and genders can wrestle with one another without causing alarm, until that "wrestling" goes too far or seems to be less than innocent (side note: avoid and Sandusky references in the comments, it's too obvious of a joke). There's some sort of hard-to-define "line" about physical touch that isn't necessarily sexual but could be. This is where we get to use the famous line of "I can't necessarily define pornography, but I know it when I see it".
Individualism can't demarcate that line effectively because we all have an innate sense that sex is something more than wrestling, more than shaking hands, more than a hug, more than laughing together. But how much more and to who / whom and in what context will be defined an infinite number of ways by billions of different subjects. To use an complementary example; define "horny." We all feel it (okay, I guess Scott doesn't. Whatever, nerd) but we don't feel it like we do heat, cold, wind, or wet (settle down). There's no danger in feeling horny for an extended period of time (no four hour dick jokes, please) and it pretty much self resolves one way or another (seriously, no dick jokes here!). But define "horny" for me. Don't cop out and say "The imminent feeling of sexual desire and arousal." I mean quantify and specific define it in general for all people. You can't. And you can't define porn either.
Even worse, the inability to define porn doesn't mean we can agree to disagree. One man's hot fetish is another man's "eww who the fuck looks at this shit?!" It can, and does, trigger a disgust reaction. All of a sudden, a subjective taste is catapulted, potentially, into an object sense of not only moral outrage but hostility to a private and vulnerable act (sex).
And so people try to bridge this gap with all of those secondary arguments; free speech / expression etc. Where non-individualists have at least much more cohesive and simple argumentative advantage is in plainly stating "Sex is special. No one person or even a group of people get's to say it isn't special. We should make special rules to protect the special things." It doesn't matter who finds what inherently "sexual" in nature. All that matters is that, should such a circumstance occur, we all agree that it is handled with a strict sense of decorum, discretion, respect, and sensitivity -- we keep "it" sacred.
So the problem with porn isn't what constitutes porn or the subject evaluation of pornographic content, it's that such content exists in ways that betray and lower its conceptual weight in society. Having a nudey mag stashed under your mattress in 1979 was to be in possession of a talisman of great power. That conceptual weight is no longer the case when every person with a cell phone has, in a Schoredinger's cat sort of way, unlimited insane-o porn in their pocket at all times.
I don't have a solution - in a legal sense - to the porn-free speech tension. I could see a kind of "Canadian Prostitution" paradoxical structure where having porn and acting in porn is legal but producing or facilitating the production of porn is not. Then, with a lot of prosecutorial discretion, amateurs who want to get weird all of the internet aren't targeted, but scammy/scummy bro-dude production studios are.
In a conceptual or philosophical sense, the solution to porn is realizing that is is significant inherently because of it's inherent sexual nature and then making the personal and active choice to avoid it in order to better preserve the better nature of sex in and of itself.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
The operating loss is due to research.
No.
Here's some recent accounting guidance
"Inference margin" is not, and has never been, an accounting term. Server rental being "cost of production" is also completely misguided. Cost of production can be traced back to salaries for intellectual property. You could maybe shoehorn server costs into COGS, but that's usually mostly made up of SG&A. The original AWS value prop quite literally stated "turn CAPEX into OPEX." Hosting (servers) is 100% an operating expense, not a "production" cost that's amortized. Then again, there are some corporate accounting teams in silicon valley that want to look at it this way so they can defraud lenders and investors create financial engineering solutions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
Just little things like character and virtue. Do you lie, steal, cheat? Do you work hard, help people in need, participate in local communities?
I will take 100 honest retards who are happy to watch a Fourth of July parade down main street over 1 IQ-dork post-quantum-researcher who never leaves the basement and is running a crypto scheme on the side.
"Elite human capital" is a term used by people, mostly, who wish we could still, ya know, create assets out of people.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
In a competitive environment where new models are getting released about monthly, your idea is to stop developing new models?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Notice that I specifically mentioned baseline humans. That is an important distinction. The average nag might be rather useless today, but people will pay money for a thoroughbred race horse that can win races. People who wish to remain economically relevant might well need to upgrade their cognition to stand a chance of competing with AGI or ASI, and to an enormous degree to hope to stand a chance. The question of whether there would be anything recognizably human about them at the end of process is an open one.
Stopped reading after getting through this insanely elitist and eugenic passage. I'll restrict my comments before I run afoul of the mods.
People are far more than their cognitive and physical abilities.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
From your own link:
•Losses: Operating loss $7.8B, net loss $13.5B (over half from remeasurement of convertible equity).
And
•Cash burn: $2.5B in H1 2025; projected $8.5B for full year.
I think the 42% margin you're talking about is the Server rental cost which that twitter post calls "cost of revenue" but ... that's not how operating margin works.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
This is a great comment and I thank you for it.
Let's be specific about three things, however; 1. LLMs/AI as a broad field. 2. Specific models 3. The commercial marketing of those model.
-
LLMs /AI -- Go for it. As something close to a free speech absolutist, I want progress in all directions on this front at this level.
-
Specific models. Go for it, again. I don't believe there is such a thing as an inherently "evil" model besides some embarassingly obvious ones (i.e. one trained on pictures of cheese pizza - that's an internet euphemism for the most very bad thing, btw). I have no inherent issue with even "produce marketing slip only!" models. This is where I think your comment operates at -- yes, generativeAI that could make a Shawshank level film would be excellent!
-
The commercial marketing. This is the level at which I am raging. Not because I don't want to see more AI-slop. I can already do that, I just turn off my computer monitor and phone. I rage because you have OpenAI, which has tens of billions of dollars to burn, sprinting towards the lowest common denominator use for gen-AI that's made even worse by the fact that it's attempting to replicate the attention capture model of social media. They could be putting infinite Dostoevsky in your pocket but they actively are choosing not to. That's the contemptible feature for me. Like my previous comment stated, even Google is going "hey, maybe let's try to make dense textbooks more accessible?" You can draw a straight line path from that to "I want to read Dostoevsky, but I find it hard, hey RussianNovelistGPT, can you explain Roskolnikov to me?"
But, again, the median appetite seems to be a re-hash of attention economy capture processes. Anthropic I am more optimistic about because they seem to be doubling down on using Claude to build agents and to make coding open to people who don't code. But I also worry that will turn into a bunch of MBA types re-building their own shitty versions of SalesForce and pitching it to their boss as "one man AI project to synergize all of the KPIs!"
This is some perfect world thinking, but I want to see the $100 bn of AI spend go to a company that's trying to develop new materials to help humanity economically escape the gravity well (and, no, this is no Elon an xAI). Or some AI company that actually has a non-vaporware approach to analyzing the big diseases that are responsible for the most suffering and death on earth. I'll stop here before I actually veer into "why can't all the good things be!" territory. My point remains; we're selling out early on AI because the charlatans by the bay captured a bunch of money and are re-plowing it into their business models from the 2000s and 2010s. We could be sprinting towards so much more.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Yeah, if that's your goal, 100% go for a paid-to-host solution. I like TogetherAI because you can easily pull from a lot of stuff on HuggingFace and it's all pay-as-you-go. $25 will last quite a long time if you're in pure chat mode. If you're using an API to sling code at it, $25 will evaporate quickly.
There will be no fundamental enshitiffication. The crucial IP feature of LLMs is that their architecture is pretty easy to grok for anyone with a basic ML background. The cost comes in 1) Collecting and preparing training data and 2) training the models - especially big ones - at scale. There's not really a lot of secret sauce in the model itself.
The secret sauce, to the extent it is real, is what happens during inference time. This can be system prompts or other intermediate prompts that are both visable and not to the user. We also know that all of the Big AI firms are now using multiple models at once to "route" different parts of the user query. I also heavily suspect that there's a middle layer that does some sort of context management to create a proto "memory." What do you need to build a system like this? The same thing you need for any software system; a bunch of talented engineers with a defined vision for the product and some coordination overhead. That is difficult to replicate.
The question is how much does it matter? We're going to be able to run open source versions of very good LLMs on our phones one day (and, maybe, one day, have actually private phones!). Will those private LLMs be so much worse in terms of performance than the Big AI system-of-systems in place? Hard to say. They're making $100 billion bets on it right now.
This is a better take on the Palisades fire than my take.
And my general point still stands.
More options
Context Copy link