2025-01-29 20:56:46
A year ago I tried to understand how much power ChatGPT was using and if I should be outraged by it. Today I try it again.
2025-01-27 23:32:03
Ben Turner: Chinese Researchers Just Built an Open-Source Rival to ChatGPT in 2 Months. Silicon Valley Is Freaked Out.
Now, R1 has also surpassed ChatGPT's latest o1 model in many of the same tests. This impressive performance at a fraction of the cost of other models, its semi-open-source nature, and its training on significantly less graphics processing units (GPUs) has wowed AI experts and raised the specter of China's AI models surpassing their U.S. counterparts.
As I wrote just a few weeks ago:
I think this speaks to a bubble on the one hand as every executive is going to want to advocate for more investment now, but things like DeepSeek v3 also points towards radically cheaper training in the future.
The latest DeepSeek model was monumentally less energy intensive to train, massively less energy intensive to use, and performs at the same level as the best OpenAI and Anthropic have to offer consumer today. That’s pretty remarkable, and speaks to my continued feeling that LLMs are going to get past their power and cost problems they have today. Hell, using Ollama, I have been able to run that model locally on my M2 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM.
Now there are reasons not to want the Chinese-developed DeepSeek-R1 to be the go-to LLM, but I think its existence points to the days of $20+ per month subscriptions to use tools with LLM features are numbered. We’ll see, though.
2025-01-27 04:17:15
Katie Campione writing for Deadline with a very long headline: Broadcast Was “Surprisingly Resilient” in 2024 Amid Production Declines, but Streaming Still Leads the Pack; ‘Fool Me Once’ Led TV Last Year, Luminate Says
big IP franchises were still the best performing series on Disney+, and the solution becomes unclear. Percy Jackson and the Olympians was top dog on Disney+ last year with over 3B minutes viewed, and The Acolyte came in second place with 2.7B.
The so-called very unpopular show that no one watched, according to Star Wars YouTube at least, was the second most watched show on Disney+ in 2024, marginally behind the number one. Say what you will about the quality of the show, but the idea “nobody wants this” is clearly wrong.
2025-01-26 04:17:35
Casey Newton: Hands on With Operator — A Promising but Frustrating New Frontier for Artificial Intelligence
The experience revealed to me one of Operator’s key deficiencies: it can use a web browser, but it cannot use your web browser. This matters a lot, because your browser is already set up for you to use the web efficiently.
I think this is the problem The Browser Company thinks they can solve with whatever their next browser project is (RIP Arc), but now thinking about this after hearing Casey’s story, it seems clear to me that OpenAI is going to release a browser soon. Getting mainstream traction with a new web browser is near impossible, but if anyone in 2025 could do it, it’s OpenAI.
2025-01-25 06:00:43
A certain individual who owns a certain social media site spoke at a certain President's inauguration earlier this week and at one point gave a very distinctive salute. Now look, I'm not calling this billionaire a Nazi, and I'm not telling you whether I think he is or not, that's besides the point of this post.
This post is about the reaction to the salute. I can use my own two eyes, watch the video of this, and it's plain as day what this is. There are certain words and gestures that are so associated with terrible things that we as a people generally agree should never be done today. A Nazi salute is absolutely on the list.
But let's give this guy the absolute benefit of the doubt and say it was just a moment of exuberance and he accidentally made the gesture. Twice. Maybe he didn't even realize he'd done it until hours after when he saw photos and videos of himself doing it.
At this point the thing a normal person would do is say, "oh my god, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to make that horrific gesture. I was just excited and I made what felt like random gestures in the moment. I've heard that actual Nazis are overjoyed with seeing me do this and of course I think they're repugnant and I don't support them."
Instead, the defense from this person and their fans hasn't been that, it's more been, "look at how sensitive these libs are. It's funny! Why do you have to be so serious? Bet you did nazi that coming."
Listen, the gesture was terrible, and it was even worse if he meant it. What I find distressing about this guy and his fanatics is that he simply can never be the bad guy and he can never admit to doing anything wrong. The man threw a Nazi salute to a crowd (twice) and his reaction is that the people who think that's a bad thing are actually in the wrong.
Anyway, that's where we're at right now in the US: possibly the most powerful person in the country throws a Nazi salute and half of the population is trying to find reasons why the people who think this is bad are actually the baddies.
2025-01-24 21:08:12
John Siracusa is making a new Mac app and he’s been talking about the development process on ATP for the last few weeks. I got a kick out of his frustrations with using a payment system that delivered a confusing user experience he had no control over, and as a fan of and major booster of web technologies, this segment about him trying to render a long list (10k+ rows) of items in his UI that scrolled smoothly is very fun (slightly edited for brevity):
I’m banging my head against SwiftUU, AppKit, NSCollectionView, NSTableView, Lazy VStack, List…the performance is crap. I’m on a Mac Pro with 192gigs of RAM. I’m like “why can you not scroll a list?!”
[…]
But like I know this would work fine in a web page. I’m not asking too much, right? So I made a web page with 10,000 items, and right now this scrolls faster than the AppKit, the native Swift pure AppKit NSTableView on macOS 15.2 on a Mac Pro with 192 gigs of RAM. […] We're talking about like, “oh, web apps always feel worse, you can always tell it's a web app because it's not as good and it's not as smooth and snappy and this and that,” and web tech has had so much effort put into it that right now HTML and CSS are an amazingly performant engine for quickly and easily creating user interfaces that scroll like butter.
That’s right, a native UI component does not exist that gives John the performance he wants for this app, but HTML does it remarkably quickly. And of course, the cherry on top:
Oh, by the way, Chrome does it way better than Safari.
