hmmm i dont know. ancient artifacts sometimes highlight the technical and artistic possibilities of the time. In my opinion this tv represents very good consumer culture in the 80s as do amphitheaters in rome and greece their consumer culture.
Well, and once this kills the web then Google's AI no longer has a data source its AI can tap to answer questions about anything that happens afterward, so it kind of needs the web to at least limp along.
Google was for the Open Web since day 1 but their aggressive ad based business model kind of doomed the Open Web because a lot of people were also incentivized cause of Google to aggressively peruse ad revenue. I think the first degree of separation between websites should be which ones are commercial and which ones are non-commercial. Of course that doesn't mean that commercial websites are bad because essentially what you want is quality information and content but at least you know what you are getting into. E.g. if you are consuming content and information from non-commercial website you know that the owner of the website is not trying to sell you something via promoted content or via affiliate link or via something else. The main question is how do you support the Open Web? Is it ads, subscription, donations etc. Hobbyists are the champions of the Open Web because they produce quality information and content free of charge for the sake of helping people and because they love creating it.
Why is this an argument? First of all x many people using something doesn't necessarily mean something is good (network effects if not fake accounts) but also buying up competition is somehow seen as a positive?
That doesn't seem like much of a plan given their trailing position in the cloud space and the fact that Microsoft and AWS both have their own offerings.
Maybe Google is holding back it's far superior, truly sentient AI until other companies have broken the ice. Not long ago there was a Google AI engineer who rage quit over Google's treatment of sentienet AI.
I wonder if they're pulling the wall-mart model. Ruthlessly cut costs and sell at-or-below costs until your competitors go out of business, then ratchet up the prices once you have market dominance.
Probably not. Do they really believe they are going to knock OpenAI out of business, when the OpenAI models are better?
Instead I think they are going after the "Android model". Recognize they might not be able to dethrone the leader who invented the space. Define yourself in the marketplace as the cheaper alternative. "Less good but almost as good." In the end, they hope to be one of a small number of surviving members of an valuable oligopoly.
Gemini is substantially cheaper to run (in consumer prices, and likely internally as well) than OpenAI's models. You might wonder, what's the value in this, if the model isn't leading? But cheaper inference could potentially be a killer edge when you can scale test-time compute for reasoning. Scaling test-time compute is, after all, what makes o1 so powerful. And this new Gemini doesn't expose that capability at all to the user, so it's comparing apples and oranges anyway.
DeepMind researchers have never been primarily about LLMs, but RL. If DM's (and OAI's) theory is correct--that you can use test-time compute to generate better results, and train on that--this is potentially a substantial edge for Google.
Google still has an unbelievable training infrastructure advantage. The second they can figure out how to convert that directly to model performance without worrying about data (as the o1 blog post seemed to imply OAI had) they’ll be kings.
In Home Assistant you can use LLMs to control your Home with your voice. Gemini performs similar to the GPT models, and with the cost difference there is little reason to choose OpenAi
Using either frontier model for basic edge device problems is wasteful. Use something cheap. We're asking "is there a profitable niche between the best & runner-up models?" I believe so.
The latest Google Pixel phone (you know, the one that Google actually set the price for) appears to cost the exact same as the latest iPhone ($999 for pro, $799 for non-pro). And I would argue against the "less good" bit too.
I think this analysis is not in keeping with reality, and I doubt if that's their strategy.
> Probably not. Do they really believe they are going to knock OpenAI out of business, when the OpenAI models are better?
Would OpenAI even exist without Google publishing their research? The idea that Google is some kind of also-ran playing catch up here feels kind of wrong to me.
Sure OpenAI gave us the first productized chatbots, so in that sense they "invented the space," but it's not like Google were over there twiddling their thumbs - they just weren't exposing their models directly outside of Google.
I think we're past the point where any of these tech giants have some kind of moat (other than hardware, but you have to assume that Google is at least at parity with OpenAI/MS there).
There's lot of room to cut margins in the AI stack right now (see Nvidia's latest report); low prices are not an sure indication of predatory pricing. Which company do you think is most likely to have the lowest training and inference costs between Anthropic, OpenAI and Google? My bet goes to the one designing,producing and using their own TPUs.
I have no idea if this is dumping or not. At Microsoft/Google scale, what does it cost to serve a million LLM tokens?
Tough to disentangle the capex vs opex costs for them. If they did not have so many other revenue streams, potentially dicey as there are probably still many untapped performance optimizations.
Housing supply is inelastic due to the time it takes to permit and built.
Housing demand is more elastic than you suspect. People have income on a curve, and at a certain point of price/quality will move further out and commute or move to a lower cost of living city entirely.
The NYT recently did a piece on how the tendrils of the housing crisis have made it out to places like Kalamazoo, MI that are not really traditionally high COL cities with booming economies. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/business/economy/housing-...
We are running out of cheap places to live in. Remote work has mostly pushed the crisis to other places without a corresponding pressure release in the high COL areas.
I can't read the article because of the paywall, but Kalamazoo is unique due to the Kalamazoo Promise, where college tuition (in the state of MI) is paid for if you attend Kalamazoo Public Schools. For me that was $60k of tuition I didn't have to take out loans for. Housing/grocery prices have gone up there but not nearly as dramatically as other places.
Our rents in Florida have doubled for unique reasons. My loved ones in VA, DE, MD, KY, NC and MI are seeing rents over 50% higher for reasons unique to each area.
> People have income on a curve, and at a certain point of price/quality will move further out and commute or move to a lower cost of living city entirely.
This doesn't describe the major renter class who has few workable options to choose from. They take whatever they can get.
Once they manage a place to live, they're likely trapped there because they don't have a wad of cash on hand (required to move).
That's average renter difficulty. It can get far worse.
In 2021, the few rentals available here got 400 applications/day. We beat out 50 applicants for one that was advertised for 2 hours (offered 6mos up front).
We beat long odds and barely avoided homelessness (even tho we had good employment history + money in the bank).
Many, many others were less lucky. Every rent-by-the-week hotel filled up, typically with people exhausting their savings.
People also start to take on roommates or become roommates. People in general want a place of their own. However as rent goes up they will start to be willing to rent the upper bunk in a bedroom, and people who do have a place to live start to become willing to rent out part of their bedroom just to afford the rent. For most this is the last option they will take (homeless might be better if they can find a place to sleep the night outside)
In NYC, the typical non-negotiable broker's fee for a not-disintegrating apartment ranges from 10-15%. That's on top of a security deposit and all the other costs associated with moving. It's a cartel that can only be broken by collective political action.
Things are slowly moving in that direction, only because the pressure has been so high for so long. It almost boiled over during COVID in some neighborhoods. There are still works of "Abolish Rent" graffiti left over from that time.
Meanwhile, I know many people in NYC who spend ~60% of their post-tax income on rented housing.
Nobody is happy about it or thinks it's a good idea, but living further out is not perceived as a legitimate option because of the fear of being severed either socially or career-wise.
Whether that's a rational fear or not, it's a reality that allows housing prices to outpace wage gains every year. As somebody who used to think housing demand is fairly elastic: housing demand is much less elastic than you'd suspect.
The 60% of income on rented housing for people whose income would make them otherwise solidly middle class (to me, this definition includes ownership of real estate) is new.
Something else that's new: the prevalence of managing NYC properties through family trusts from a great distance while its members are domiciled and functionally unemployed in tax-shelter states. Hmm, I wonder if there's any explanatory power to that correlation?
If your rental is $2400, and it sits on the market for 2 months, you lost potentially lost $4800. It would take a huge rent increase to justify that.
It's one thing if the software is helping landlords jack up prices to the market rate. It's quite another to convince them to collude against their best interests.
It is a different unit every month though as renters are moving out all the time. This isn't about 1 unit that is empty or not. It is about 100+ units where it can be 89,90, or 91 empty - if the other units that are not rented pay enough higher rent because the empty is not on the market you are better off.
If all units are being rented there is no collusion as the market clearing price is being charged. Collusion requires taking supply off the market in order to raise prices.
It is not possible to raise prices without lowering supply if the seller is already trying to maximize profit. Sure the seller could be undercutting the market but that has nothing to do with collusion. Apartments rent in an auction, each fills for the most anyone will rent it for. In order to raise prices landlords need to increase the competition for each unit.
