This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Plenty of people have explained it. The race for AI is seen as existential between the U.S. and China. If Intel is owned and operated by a Chinese CEO, that's a major security risk. Therefore Trump and his team took extreme measures to make sure Intel was loyal to the U.S.
I'm not saying it will work or won't have other knock-on effects, but that was the straightforward justification.
I don't think Intel is relevant in the current AI race.
They're not nVidia (and not even Intel's own foundry, lol), but the ARC models are encouraging. A bit better for inference in raw specs than an nVidia 4060, mostly hampered by poor software support that's quickly improving, and that the chips themselves are just coming from whatever spare time is available on a mostly-saturated TSMC line.
If Intel can get the software support figured out, and get their own foundry up and running, they'll have a pretty major impact on the market. But while the former isn't a huge leap of faith, the latter has got a lot of question marks on whether they're even going to try for it.
EDIT: While less central, there are some industry components to the CPU side that matter a bit, with AMX doing well enough that AMD felt they had to kinda smear it, and I think there's some KV cache stuff they're ahead on Intel around. Less important for training and especially the 500B+ parameter space that modern LLMs have moved into, but there's a lot of strategically relevant spaces well below that range.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link