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Grok 3 just came out, and early reports say it’s shattering rankings.
Now there is always hype around these sorts of releases, but my understanding of the architecture of the compute cluster for Grok 3 makes me think there may be something to these claims. One of the exciting and interesting revelations is that it tends to perform extremely well across a broad range of applications, seemingly showing that if we just throw more compute at an LLM, it will tend to get better in a general way. Not sure what this means for more specifically trained models.
One of the most exciting things to me is that Grok 3 voice allegedly understands tone, pacing, and intention in conversations. I loved OpenAIs voice assistant until it cut me off every time I paused for more than a second. I’d Grok 3 is truly the first conversational AI, it could be a game changer.
I’m also curious how it compares to DeepSeek, if anyone knows more than I?
I feel a bit sad looking at that ranking's licensing column and it's all Proprietary except for the one Chinese model. It's as if we learned nothing from the last 40 years.
What we learned from the last 40 years is that proprietary wins.
Consumers migrated from closed source Windows desktops to closed source iOS phones.
Yes, a surprisingly large percentage of the world's infrastructure runs on Linux and other open source platforms, and that open source infrastructure is used to run... proprietary, closed source, walled garden web apps (I don't think it's an accident that the most successful open source projects are mainly infrastructure scaffolding and tools for other software developers, rather than products for non-technical users).
Much like how the credentialed expert will usually beat the autodidact, a group of highly organized professionals who are motivated by a big paycheck will usually beat a group of loosely organized volunteers who are motivated by passion for the project.
Want to run those numbers again and look at Android sales maybe?
I know the argument, I read Gates' letter. It's bullshit. Sure you can extract some value for a while, until you eventually get commodified enough that OSS eats your lunch, but if your goal is to actually make good software that serves the user's needs, you can't go proprietary. Because some authority always comes to breathe down your neck and force you to prevent the user from doing what they disapprove of.
The large majority of the cryptography that runs your daily life would not be possible if we ran things like IBM originally did. And by God there's a lot of money sloshing around making those advancements.
You got a point that it's easier to sell end users a labeled product. But AI ain't that. It's infrastructure.
You want AI models that are trojan horses against you, be my guest. I won't run that shit. And neither will a lot of people that are serious about information security. Maybe it'll take a few disasters before they realize, as we are apparently too dumb to learn this lesson the first time around, but they will eventually.
Android is weird.
The actual open-source parts of Android barely, if at all, work as an actual phone. Sure, it's running Linux under the covers so from that perspective it's open-source. Android builds on that with a very very bare UI and some of the plumbing. The thing is, any phone that is actually sold is running on not just the stock Android code, but an absolutely massive collection of proprietary code to deal with everything that makes the devices useful. Things like an app store, maps, messaging, running the physical phone hardware, making it pretty and usable.
I used to work at Amazon in their App Store. Amazon, with their Kindle tablets and the ill-conceived Fire Phone, run Android. But they forked off the open-source version because they didn't want to pay Google the licensing. Literally everything had to be reimplemented to get a device that works in any way. All of that is, of course, proprietary.
Of course, Amazon's effort to not have the licensing costs came with an absolute mountain of work. A building full of people doing all the custom code to get Android to something that is usable. Everything from a new app store, maps, push notifications, payment processing, the skins, everything. Ok, depending on the era, we either filled a building or a large chunk of one depending on which building we resided at. The hardware and base OS was handled by another group, Lab126, down in the Bay Area. And to top it off, since there's another app store, you have to get developers to submit their apps to that as well -- which was hard.
The tl;dr is that Android is the stone soup of OSS. It "works," but not in a way that is useful to end users.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what Amazon would have based their design on, if not Android? Yes much of it's generally-accepted functionality isn't open source -- I've seen Google claim this makes updates, including security updates, easier without relying on OEMs, which sadly makes sense, but also helps their moat.
Even if you chose something else, I doubt "write an OS from scratch" was in the cards, and I assume you'd end up with Linux or BSD as the base, with a very slight chance of some commercial embedded platform.
I'm far from where those decision-makers worked so take this with the appropriate-sized grain of salt.
Amazon, like most companies, is a profit-maximizing entity. The thing that separates them from most other companies is the types of decisions that people are allowed to make. The leadership principles they have, as much as I made fun of them while I was there, truly are a driving force on the inside.
Here's what I'm figuring happened. I have zero knowledge that it happened this way, but it tracks based on my time there. (seven years)
So, to have any hope of getting third-party apps on a startup platform, you only had Android to choose from. The thing is, we were hounding the third-party publishers to even engage with us. Even though we're one of the biggest companies in the world, and we're selling a large fraction of the Android tablets out there, no one even cared. Even if we could get a publisher to put something in our app store, they would ignore it and it would become wildly out of date typically.
And that's with Android. The publishing process was typically upload your APK and press a few buttons. And it was like pulling teeth to get that done.
I think even Amazon realized that, despite their size, asking devs to make new apps was a bridge too far.
Could Amazon have just stuck with a base Linux distribution and built something from that. Yes. Easily. Arguably easier than making an Android clone in many ways. Yes, it's "Android," but from so much of the public Play Store APIs needed to be reverse engineered and reimplemented.
And I'm 100% sure they would have used Linux. The institutional knowledge of Linux in there is astonishing -- especially when you start engaging the AWS folks.
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