Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported.

World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone.

Sounds reasonable.

That being said, I am willing to believe that an LLM could be part of an AGI. It might well be an efficient way to incorporate a lot of knowledge about the world. Wikipedia helps provide me with a lot of knowledge, for example, though I don’t have a direct brain link to it. It’s just that I don’t expect an AGI to be an LLM.

EDIT: Also, IIRC from past reading, Meta has separate groups aimed at near-term commercial products (and I can very much believe that there might be plenty of room for LLMs here) and aimed advanced AI. It’s not clear to me from the article whether he just wants more focus on advanced AI or whether he disagrees with an LLM focus in their afvanced AI group.

I do think that if you’re a company building a lot of parallel compute capacity now, that to make a return on that, you need to take advantage of existing or quite near-future stuff, even if it’s not AGI. Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

https://datacentremagazine.com/news/why-is-meta-investing-600bn-in-ai-data-centres

Meta reveals US$600bn plan to build AI data centres, expand energy projects and fund local programmes through 2028

Took down Framework’s website, which I was using.

It’s back up now.

Just keep in mind that the long run trend for storage prices is pretty strongly downwards; that’s a log-scale graph.

The cases of old ones are on eBay, as I mention in another comment.

And it looks like someone has made ATX mounting kits.

https://thelaserhive.com/product/mac-pro-atx-kit-with-psu-mount/

Good point!

I admit I’m using my 1,1 as an extra seat in the office, but it’s form of use.

And I bought it back in 2006

Looks like non-functional 2006 Mac Pros are on eBay for $60. Cheaper than an office chair!

IIRC from past reading, they ramped up capacity during a prior shortage like a decade back or something and then ate a bunch of losses when the shortage ended.

Hmm.

Looks like there might have been a more-recent glut than that:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-q2-profit-plunges-95-chip-glut-persists-2023-07-27/

Samsung to extend production cuts after $7 billion chip loss in first half

July 27, 2023 12:18 AM PDT Updated July 27, 2023

SEOUL, July 27 (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics said the worst is over for the global memory chip market but announced plans to extend production cuts because a demand recovery is largely constrained to high-end chips used in artificial intelligence. The move underscores the unprecedented semiconductor downturn that led the South Korean firm to incur a record 8.9 trillion won ($7 billion) operating loss from its bread-and-butter chip business in the first six months of this year.

So just over two years ago they were coming out of a money-losing period.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-makers-have-no-plans-to-increase-production-despite-crushing-ram-shortages-modest-2026-increase-predicted-as-dram-makers-hedge-their-ai-bets

Memory makers have no plans to increase RAM production despite crushing memory shortages — ‘modest’ 2026 increase predicted as DRAM makers hedge their AI bets

No relief in sight for RAM buyers.

but Project Prometheus has already hired 100 employees, poaching several from firms like OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta, according to the Times.

I think that one problem with all this spending is that there are only so many people with relevant experience in the area. If wages are high enough, the market will send more over time, but that isn’t instantaneous.

Home-instance-agnostic link:

[email protected]

Reading these comments, I have to say that a number of users of this community have very strong views on batteries.

Like, I would not have expected as many people to get upset as did in a discussion over batteries.

You do if you want it to connect to the thing you’re playing on.

Unless you’re ok with a shitty Bluetooth connection. But I’m guessing few people comparatively are using that, at least as their primary use case.

Okay, but I think that that kind of misses the broader context. This only came up as a hypothetical for how one could discharge a controller. If you’re playing on a wired connection, then the console is charging thr controller and the issue never comes up in the first place.

the Lunar Lake option is a high perf single core CPU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lake

According to this, all Lunar Lake CPUs have 4 performance and 4 economy cores; none have a single core.

I will carry around a huge power bank before I buy a laptop with soldered RAM.

I carry a ~300 Wh power bank with my laptop.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D62PMB3R

They also have a less-elaborate, smaller, lighter, less-expensive ~200 Wh model that’s probably more actually-practical:

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Portable-Generator-Traveling-Emergencies/dp/B0D62P85ZR

Note that you can’t take anything over 100 Wh on a flight in the US. I also have a 100 Wh power bank that I keep around for flights.

What that means to someone is up to them. Some users on here do not like the US at all, for example, and they might be delighted to be using a Serbian company instead of a US company. That’s not my position, but I’ve no doubt that it’s a perspective for some. I have mentioned Kagi in the past favorably, and simply want people to understand, as best as I can, what using Kagi entails.

EDIT: For users who might be in the US, though, and not familiar with the political structure in Europe today, while Serbia is in Europe, it is not — presently — in the EU, and isn’t subject to the kind of data privacy laws or legal/judicial regimen that one might expect of companies in the EU.

That’s fair – it necessarily extends trust, and at the least you’d want them to be liable for false advertising.

I did go digging directly as a result of your comment, and I did find that it looks like Kagi operates at least in part, if not in whole, from Serbia. They have a San Francisco mailing address…but it’s just basically a mailbox.

For me, at least, that’s a concern; I’ve posted here on the matter to make others aware. I don’t know if it’d be enough to stop me from using them, but it certainly does make me reconsider how much weight I’d be willing to place on statements the company makes about its privacy policy, and what their practical legal liability is if they’re making inaccurate statements about their privacy practices.

I’ve had a couple of devices over the years that require one to unscrew a screw to open a cover to replace batteries. It’s not that common, but I’ve certainly had them floating around.

In fact…I think that my analog multimeter does that, with a 9V battery.

goes to look

Yeah, Phillip’s head screw. Though you only really need power on that thing for continuity testing, and some people might never even need to power it.

They have a no-log, no-profile policy, which is why I use them.

Can anyone here convince me it’s worth the price?

Depends on what you want from them and your financial situation.

For me, yeah, it is. I want to pay a service fee and not deal with ads or someone logging, profiling, and trying to figure out how to monetize my searches. For me, the $10/mo for unlimited searches tier is what I want. I’m principally concerned about privacy.

I don’t really take much advantage of most of the extra stuff they do other than the Threadiverse (they call it “Fediverse Forums”) search lens and sometimes their Usenet search engine. Maybe this effort to suppress AI-generated spam websites will be nice, but have to see what happens, as I expect that the SEO crowd creating spam websites will also aim to adapt if it becomes sufficiently impactful to their bottom line.

If one of their extra features particularly fits your use case (say, the ability to fiddle with website priorities or blacklist or pin them in your search results) that might be valuable to you, but I can’t speak as to that. I’ve seen people on here say that they really like that, but I don’t use that functionality. Or the ability to easily download images in results from their image search if you’re on mobile and are hitting something like pinterest, which is obnoxious on Google Images. Search bangs. Depends on what features you use and what each is worth to you.