The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot.
There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise.
Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster too.
And of course everybody knows the Google & Meta ad monsters.
The only question remaining is who is going to extract all those LLM ad dollars, how will that break out. Right now it's Gemini and GPT in the obvious lead, with Anthropic in third, and Meta & Grok nowhere to be found (permanent situation for those).
>The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be).
This seems like ... not the situation we are in. LLMs are great for coding now but their text generation capabilities aren't exactly capturing the masses or replacing their jobs yet. People are already tired of the deluge of fake content on the internet, it's not going to drive a second revolution in web ads.
The $20-200 LLM plans are all subsidized and aren't paying for themselves. Something has to give here.
> The $20-200 LLM plans are all subsidized and aren't paying for themselves. Something has to give here.
Whats interesting to me as well as much as companies are pushing AI adoption, i have started to hear AI token spend limits enforced across a few companies, so its not entirely clear that b2b can make them profitable yet either.
If all the models reach good enough, then low cost provider would win. Gemini seems like a safer bet since Google controls more of the stack / has more efficiencies / cross selling / etc.
It’s not like “best” has won any other b2b arms race in the past.
>If all the models reach good enough, then low cost provider would win. Gemini seems like a safer bet since Google controls more of the stack / has more efficiencies / cross selling / etc.
Gemini is the best deal too. For $20: you get multiple quotas per day across the products (web, CLI, antigravity, AI Studio) 2tb of cloud storage, and you can family share the plan.
I don't know Gemini's pricing model in detail, but in general pricing doesn't generalize well between personal/hobbyist and enterprise use. Consumer pricing of variable costs is a balancing act, and most Gemini users aren't going to be anywhere near the quota; a company of 1000 can't always buy for $20,000 what 1000 random users with $20 personal plans are theoretically capped at.
Ultimately though in the long run..
They invented the tech, have a large cashflow generating business subsidizing R&D as well as sales, with network effect of existing B2B relationships.
Further they have their own TPUs, datacenters, etc on which to run their models.
Plus existing data they've squirreled away over the preceding 30 years from books, web, etc.
Just seems like a lot of efficiencies if its going to come down to cost.
In large part because most companies have a set budget for IT spend. Thats how “normal” profitable companies operate outside this cash burning bonanza that’s going on.
And in that reality one can’t just magically spend a bunch more on some fancy new thing, especially when said fancy new thing isn’t retuning value. So “token limits” and cost controls on B2B is entirely expected here.
> especially when said fancy new thing isn’t retuning value
I think this is the key element. Either they can't measure the value, or it's far far lower than anyone wants to believe, or both.
I think the problem is less that it makes some coding tasks XX% faster, but that the end to end of a SWEs roles tasks is only improved by some much smaller Y%.
If a CTO sets $10k/year spend limits on $500k SWEs.. they must not believe any of the hype.
The problem is that AGI fantasy aside, CTOs at companies are expected to deliver results today and tomorrow. Better to let somebody else hold the bag and train models, then once it finally works as advertised you can ease on the brakes.
LLM usage will largely replace traditional search, and that's stage one. To be specific, search will be consumed by the LLMs, it'll be merely an aspect of what they do for the user, and that'll include handling the more intricate details of the search, refining the search, understanding the results of search, etc. The age of the typical user handling any of that is about to end. Search will more be a feature of Gemini in the not very distant future, rather than Gemini being bolted onto/into search.
Fuller integration into the user's life will bring ever more ad opportunities (and it doesn't matter if the HN base hates that notion, it's going to happen regardless). That'll happen over the next decade gradually.
Shopping, home management, tasks (taxes, accounting, lifestyle, reminders, homework, work work, 800 other things), travel (obvious), advice & general conversation (already there), search (being consumed now), gaming (next 3-5 years to start), full at-work integration (gradual spread across all industries, with more narrow expertise), digital world building (10-15+ years out for mass user adoption). And on the list goes. It's pretty much anything the user can or does touch in life.
> To be specific, search will be consumed by the LLMs, it'll be merely an aspect of what they do for the user, and that'll include handling the more intricate details of the search, refining the search, understanding the results of search, etc. The age of the typical user handling any of that is about to end.
We already have the tech for that, why hasn't it happened? People are revolted by the AI results in Google. AI isn't going to make people use their computers more. It's not opening up a new consumer market. This is just making each search infinitely more expensive.
Every year I ask the latest version of Chat GPT a basic facts question about rugby results. It almost always gets it wrong - even when it does web search and cites sources. Wrong scores, hallucinated matches, wrong locations - just gob smacking amounts of wrongness.
The latest "Thinking" version gets it reliably right but spent about 3 minutes coming up with the answer that 10 seconds of googling answers.
So I don't believe we are currently in a situation where LLMs are an effective replacement for search engines.
Who is revolted? I use the AI Google results every day when asking for specific questions, I rarely visit the webpages before anymore. Also Google already injects ads into conversations in the form of Google Shopping affiliate links.
I understand the concern but it's frankly not my problem as a user, that is for the authors and corporations to figure out. No one would (or should) blame car buyers for putting horse and buggies out of business, they're merely participating in the market as a consumer not the producer.
More people going into insular communities like discord or creating micro sites. Like I said it's a self correcting problem, either it is fixed or it's not. It's not my problem.
You see it already with how many people use LLMs for everything these days. Google Gemini can also integrate with your other Google apps to personalize further, and Gemini already has product placement ads.
Do you have a concrete example I can reproduce? I searched for things like how to change the filter of X make and model and it seems correct, not sure if that's what you meant.
I'm not the person you replied to but I'm wondering which Google AI product you are referring to that you use for search which is so excellent that you need someone to find for you an example of it failing?
I think Google has several ai products with search features?
Which one in your experience "seems correct"?
I'm fascinated because I've never found any LLM to be particularly error free at search.
Google.com with the AI overview or whatever they call it now. It seems to source web page information for grounding so it's reasonably correct and doesn't hallucinate recently at least.
I played around with it and its better than it used to be but if you ask it something like
"Whats the name of the third book in the peripheral trilogy going to be" it just regurgitates some dumb reddit comment by someone who seems to be making things up.
There's no actual title that has been announced and the reddit post was not a reasonable bit of speculation.
The problem with these LLMs is they rarely say "the search results were not credible no response can be provided."
These days, Google AI overviews regularly add a qualifier to the effect of "... according to this comment on Reddit <link>"
That's basically a UX trick to entirely sidestep being held accountable for the results, but seems sufficient to notify the user about the provenance of the answer to adjust their grains of salt.
Google launched in 1998 and were running ads by 2000. Considering how much more access to adtech product talent there is for OAI a quarter of a century on, what explains their hesitation to pick that route and make billions? After all they had billions avaiable to acquire designer bauble maker Jony Ive's company.
The first AI company to cram their product full of ads will get roasted over the coals for it. My guess is they're all playing chicken and waiting to be the second to do it. I'd also guess that they're all already thinking about ways to introduce it that will generate the least backlash.
Google could do it in 2000 because their search was legitimately so much better, and also because their ads were comparatively more relevant and unobtrusive than modern ads. In comparison, LLMs are relatively similar in performance unless you're picky enough that you're probably already paying and thus wouldn't be in the ad-supported tier.
That said, I wonder if ads are even lucrative enough to move the needle relative to how much training costs are increasing with each generation.
Yep. Finally someone who knows how to think straight.
Google built up immense surplus and ate into it slowly.
OAI can't suddenly start cramming Ads as it fights to survive. Im sure they are employing questionable tactics to keep users hooked. Won't really work on a large enough user base to make the economics viable given the competition they face.
These exact words were said tens of thousands of times about Facebook (am old enough to remember those discussions :) ), “no way they can monetize on mobile” (this was the most fun).
rules are simple, if you have Xbn or XXXm users on your system, you will make big bank in ads eventually
At that time, Facebook provided a free service without any real competitors. The masses will switch to Meta AI or Gemini or Claude at the drop of an ad that annoys them enough.
Gemini, GPT and Claude will all have ads on the consumer side. They will go together in quasi lock-step into the ad future, because that money is gigantic and they're going to need it.
The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.
With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.
amazing this is even a debate, we have now decades of this across everything that reaches enough users, it is a certainty as much that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. as probably many people here on HN I am designated computer-fixer for all my family so any family gathering I have to look at someone's computer about something. years ago I started checking whether browser(s) anything ad-blocking in place and I am 0 for million by now. while HN crowd might be theoretically pushing back on ads (even with like "I won't use this if there are ads" nonsense) general public is so used to ads that I sometimes feel it is welcomed change when some new service etc gets ads. I remember the first time I saw an ad on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter and I were like "no f'ing way!!!" and my wife was like "oh, ____ is on sale this weekend, cool!" :)
It's tempting to look at trends and assume there must be a rule behind them, but it's also intellectually lazy. Please do the hard work of justifying your stance like GGP did.
it is a simple stance - if you have a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people ad monetization strategy will be found cause there are people a lot smarter than you and me that will get it done. here’s intellectual challenge - find a business with comparable number of users to openai which is not swimming in ad revenue - one will do
A counterpoint is that there are many products with significant usage that fail or never attempt advertising monetization. They just increase the cost of the product.
I thought we were talking about search or social media companies failing to capitalize on advertising which I haven't seen. OpenAI is much closer to Google than it is to Office.
I could see that argument, but the economics of the two are so different. I just don't see how using an LLM can be sustainable for search, but could see it as an enterprise model.
What do you mean not sustainable for search? OpenAI is eating Google's lunch forcing them to put in LLMs on Google. I personally don't use traditional search anymore, it's all through LLMs. Meanwhile everyone hates Microsoft Office LLMs.
> Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster too.
You can say the same about AWS and then prove the b2b case instead of ad case as well
AWS is legitimately a giant and it should be considered in enterprise broadly. It's infrastructure more than enterprise software of course, which is where Anthropic is at. Anthropic is not trying to host the world's databases and services (at present anyway). Anthropic will however help you write software to compete with Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, et al.
Google's ad business remains far larger and more profitable than AWS. And the advertising segment is drastically larger than the segment AWS is in. Just Google + Meta = nearing $600 billion in ad sales. Amazon will soon have their own $100 billion in ad sales.
I guess the question is how many more $100B of ad sales slots are available, aside from just stealing share from incumbents (who already took it from traditional media channels over last 20 years).
At some point someone needs to add value to the real economy, not just take an ad tax off the top.
I don't think advertising is entirely a zero-sum game (there is real value to everyone for steveBK123 to learn of a product that actually solves a real need or saves money, etc) - but it has to be something akin to it - the economy can't support five hundred trillion dollars in advertising spend.
absolutely not the case. there isn’t a single nerve in human brains that goes “oh imma tolerate ads cause this shit’s free but if I pay a few bucks no way” - if the product you use has utility to you, you will tolerate ads provided no other acceptable alternative. not to tell you something you don’t already know but anthropic is getting ads, eventually, it is a given. so while today you may have an alternative (arguably better even if no ads in the equation) at some point you won’t have an alternative (other than running local) and you’ll tolerate ads. the thing with LLM ads is that companies can make $$$$ from “ads” you don’t see, i.e. I can (not now but in the future) companies to push my product, e.g. claude is setting up architecture and proposes upstash (which I own and am paying anthropic a lot of money) instead of any competitor. or even more silently adding dependencies on my NPM library which has free and commercial offering…
Their ~$50 million total Alibaba investment turned into ~$70 billion. As of two years ago they were still liquidating out of it.
January 26, 2024 - "Japanese investment holding firm SoftBank Group Corp has largely cleared its ownership in e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, concluding one of the most successful deals in China's internet industry and a holding that spanned about 23 years."
"SoftBank, which invested US$20 million into Alibaba when it was still a start-up in 2000, said in a corporate filing on Thursday that it was set to book a gain of 1.26 trillion yen (US$8.5 billion) - about 425 times the value of its initial outlay - for the Tokyo-based firm's 2024 financial year after divesting its [remaining] shares via subsidiary Skybridge."
"As of two years ago they were still liquidating out of it"
I get that people are scared of investing in China. But if I still made single stock investments, I would seriously consider BABA, it seems well positioned.
The deep state is any agent of meaningful power/influence that works for the government or is very closely entangled with the government, and that retains some or all of their power/influence from one admin to the next.
That includes for example powerful figures in the Pentagon or intelligence agencies that remain from one admin to the next. These people all have agendas of their own, and they network as people do. Dick Cheney was a deep state figure across a couple of decades, often working in the shadows. So was Rumsfeld. So was Kissinger across a few decades during his prime power/influence years. They all had long-term agendas, their ideas about the world, and extremely deep connections throughout the Federal Government.
It's not a mysterious conspiracy. It's just people with power/influence pursuing outcomes that they'd like to see happen, and working with other like-minded people to get there.
There is this building where guys wearing masks wheel you into a room behind locked doors at dawn and then use drugs to knock you out. They then take sharp knives and cut you open and rummage around your insides, sometimes taking organs out. Blood goes everywhere. The footage is gory. When they're done with you it may takes you weeks to recover.
The rest of just call his "surgery at a hospital".
My point is that you've just described in nefarious terms the "civil service" or the "administrative state". Every government department is full of career civil servants who will go through many administrations. Only the very top officials in any department are political appointees. We're talking the secretary, their deputies and some positions under those.
Government simply cannot function without career civil servants who end up becoming subject matter experts in what they're administering.
Or, you know, you can nerfariously say "deep state".
In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.
A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.
Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.
> In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.
Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.
The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.
If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.
> A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven
What you're describing is a federal employee. The kind that takes a massive pay cut, and loses out on paycheck stability (due to government shutdowns), because they at least start out earnestly attempting to improve the system.
How they define "improving the system" varies by ideology, but career civil servants, in wanting to follow their definition of improving the system, are ideologically driven.
What you're describing is still just "A collection of civil servants that aren't disillusioned and dead inside"
I'm sorry but no. "Deep state" is nothing more than enemy within propaganda to justify a purge of government departments to replace them with ideologues and to further concentrate power in the hands of the so-called "unitary executive".
The point of my comment is that Republicans have this habit of describing perfectly ordinary and normal things in nefarious tones to make them sound sinister. The real problem is people are so gullible in falling for it.
The deep state, for example, would tell a president that if you bomb Iran and kill its autocratic leader, the country might close the Strait of Hormuz. And that naval escorts through the strait will only get sailors killed.
Trump ran on vanquishing the deep state because all he cares about is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the country, the Constitution, or objective fact.
I think the distinction between the one that you're describing and the one that the person you're replying to is describing is crime.
People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneye were part of a criminal conspiracy to rob the America people and destabilize the US to make it ripe for further hijacking.
That's the deepstate -- it's everything you mentioned above + a criminal conspiracy mindset.
Calling it "civil service" instead of "deep state" does not make it any better. We don't have either in the Constitution so whatever you call it, it has to be removed from power.
And then what? The spoils system? Rampant incompetence?
And, we have to get rid of it because it's not in the Constitution? You know what else isn't in the Constitution? DHS. The IRS. ICE. An enormous number of other agencies.
The Constitution gives very little guidance on the Executive Branch, other than the President and Vice President. That does not mean that hiring people in federal agencies is unconstitutional! It just means that the Constitution is silent on the topic, neither requiring nor prohibiting very much.
Then back to the system defined in the Constitution, it gives enough guidance. If you think the President is not enough for the Executive - amend the Constitution, used to be enough for ~200 years though.
The Constitution does not define a civil service system. You seem to interpret that as saying that any system is unconstitutional until the Constitution is amended to define one. That is... let's just call it "very much a minority interpretation".
We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.
The Constitution defines just three branches of power, if the "civil service system" has a power and is not one of the branches then it unconstitutional by common sense and elementary logic. And this "civil servant system" evidentially has power and is not a part of either of the three branches (which are all enumerated in the Constitution) ergo it's an unconstitutional junta.
>We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.
Did not you participate in the mass crying out on this very site when DOGE had been firing the "civil servants"?
The constitution says the president must "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". That means hiring people to enforce the laws, that's the civil servant system.
That means the whole Executive branch is the president and if he can delegate his power to some other people he also should be able to revoke the delegation and fire those people, which is not the case now. The president is semi-successful in firing these "servants" and some judges insist that it's illegal.
How is it stupid? If I truly believed in such constitutional purity I would have no problems saying a simple yes or no to it. For example sometimes I am accused of hating a particular religion, I gladly say I am not a fan of any religion and name a few to make it clear.
Again, its a simple question. Just answer yes or no. Do you or do you not believe in the dissolution of those agencies per your interpretation of the constitution?
There are many things that are not in the Constitution: the USAF, computers, antibiotics, sea cruises, cars, steak, etc. Not being in the Constitution does not make them unconstitutional. Hope this helps.
As for dissolution of those agencies, my answer is: no. You have to ask a question before demanding an answer.
Why not? You literally said "We don't have either in the Constitution so whatever you call it, it has to be removed from power.". What's different about ICE and DHS but not about governments having civil services? Or the other things you listed?
If t hat's bad how do you feel about ICE and DHS or any other agency contracting private companies? They are even less accountable then. Why don't you support banning government agencies from hiring private companies?
I feel you want to talk about ICE and DHS instead of the topic at hand, the Deep State/"civil service". I feel the government contracting private companies is fine, the government is accountable so are the private companies. I don't support banning government agencies from hiring private companies because I don't see how the country would benefit from have government making everything it uses in the course of executing its duties.
>the comment you replied to literally said "Not being in the Constitution does not make them unconstitutional."
Then why make stupid statements in the first place. I am not a telepath. Thats absolutely not what your original comment said. Why make such stupid comments in the first place and then later lie and say "No I didn't mean that".
"We don't have either in the Constitution so whatever you call it, it has to be removed from power."
Dude you're hilarious, you're one to call someone having cognitive impairment when you are literally saying something and the exact opposite of the same thing and then somehow being unable to see the obvious question already in AnimalMuppet's and my first comment to you. Get yourself checked man.
I don't necessarily disagree with the existence of ICE and DHS but you do, and then you said you don't, somehow.
And if you feel the Civil Service Act or any other act violates the constitution, nobody's stopping you from arranging for a lawsuit against it. Go do that and come back.
Look up General Wesley Clark's seven countries in five years YouTube video. This was the plan all along, Trump has nothing fundamental to do with it, he was just willing to pull the trigger.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and lastly Iran
They saw the opportunity with Iran weakened, their proxies were knocked down, and Israel was fully mobilized.
The single most interesting thing that will come out of the Iran war, is it's giving the go-ahead signal for China. I don't mean morally specifically, I mean practically: China is plainly seeing the US can't sustain a long campaign what-so-ever. The US has burned through ~850 Tomahawks in weeks, 20-25% of its stock. Again an opponent that wasn't that hard to knock down in terms of air to ground / ground to air, and strategic targets.
While the US can demolish high value targets all day long (assuming it can find them), it won't be able to sustain volume. And this is against a dramatically outmatched opponent (in terms of air + navy + intel, not boots on the ground).
China will build a hundred cruise missiles per day and truck them in from factories far away from the coast. The US can build 10-20. China's cruise missiles won't be as good, and they won't need to be. And that's the absolute least of what China will hyper produce in a mobilization to a war manufacturing stance. The US should just wave the flag before the first shots are fired re Taiwan given what we're seeing in Iran, it's over before it ever begins.
The US can't control the Straight of Hormuz properly, without taking losses (which it clearly doesn't want to do). That's a trivial task compared to trying to keep China from controlling the waters near Taiwan. The US won't be able to even get close to Taiwan is what this is demonstrating. China can stand-off the US easily.
The US is showing China and the world that it has zero chance at stopping a takeover of Taiwan.
China should be looking at this Iran mess and moving as fast as it can to launch their invasion. The US isn't ready, and won't be.
The US could put up a big fight at a full war mobilization, given some time to spin up. That scenario will not occur with regard to Taiwan. China has the green light.
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edit:
There was a story about the early days of the invasion into Iraq by the US, after 9/11. It was about the US soldiers rolling into Iraqi towns, cities. They thought the US soldiers were maybe superhuman, or at least had extraordinarily advanced technology. An Iraqi boy wondered if the US soldiers could see through buildings with their helmets and goggles. After all they dispatched Saddam from power so quickly, seemingly so easily - one can understand the wonder.
Then they figured out the US soldiers were just meatbags like any other soldiers. That IEDs killed them just the same, and sniper rounds, and so on.
One of the very large benefits to rarely using your capabilities as a military superpower, is so that your enemies are unsure of just what you're capable of if pushed. And if you're lucky enough to put on a staggering outcome - as in the first Gulf War - in which Russia got to see their hardware decimated by vastly superior US weapons, then you should rest on that perception as long as possible. Iraq and Afghanistan substantially weakened the perception of US military domination (just a Vietnam did before that, for a generation). Iran doesn't show the US to be weak per se, rather, it shows the limits of its present endurance capabilities among other things. And that's what China needs to know.
And of course this happens to major powers from time to time throughout history. Russia goes into Ukraine and gets humiliated, its capabilities at the point of launching that war, were revealed to be embarrassingly mediocre compared to what was thought to exist. Or the USSR and Afghanistan before that.
China's biggest hurdle that they cannot manufacture is experience. They have virtually zero. How much of China's military command is a crony boys club full of people who never had to militarily prove anything? Just "win" at their own made up war games?
The real problem I see is the one child policy. If China decides to go to war and say they have 1000 deaths. How many bloodline die? I feel like there would be a hesitation to fight on the Chinese side if they were to take any losses.
It is one of the reasons I don’t believe China would take on Taiwan.
Well no. This will be the same as in the other countries : when you're poor and sufficiently brainwashed you go to war to "defend" your country, no question asked.
While true, China still has around 100,000,000 men between the ages of 20 and 35. Even a millions deaths would be tolerable, which itself seems crazy for an invasion of Taiwan.
The upside is that taking down Taiwan will be really hard. Fairly sure a lot of it is mountainous and forested and I think the strait is quite perilous.
So China might cripple Taiwan but invading it risks being their Vietnam.
That doesn't mean a war won't happen, people make stupid decisions all the time.
The biggest thing protecting Taiwan right now is that the US keeps getting worse and worse. Why invade today when it'll be even easier next year? The current leadership of China has essentially committed to invading Taiwan but can stall by postponing. That's a tactic that won't work forever. The hope was it could last long enough for a leadership changeover in China, but at the rate the US is degrading, that seems like faint hope.
on the other hand the us interventions have betrayed that chinese radars e.g. don't "work as advertised", to the point that there have been purges at chinese military industrial manufacturers. on top of the recent purges in the military hierarchy, it seems like action against Taiwan is delayed for a few years.
conversely the US brass now has a fire lit under its ass due to low ammo stockpiles and and excuse to replenish them faster, develop anti drone tech faster etc.
imagine not having the current embarrassment in iran -- the generals would be complacent, and should a conflict arise over taiwan, they would not be ready.
of course, but point being: status quo was it wasn't happening, and the trajectory wasn't good.
Another example: Someone will have egg on face for leaving AWACs out on a tarmac (exactly dumb thing that we made fun of russia for doing) and so that seems unlikely to happen, if for no other reason than doctrinally, for the next minimum half decade or so.
If China switches to war time economy, they can produce very easily 1M Shahed like drones every month. Plus many millions of FPV/AI controlled drones. Plus massive number of missiles, including hyper sonic and supersonic. They can kill everyone in Taiwan with just drones and missiles if they decide to commit to it.
But given the advances that China has had in EVs, drones, solar, batteries, wind turbines, AI, nuclear energy, smartphones and other advanced industries IMHO it doesn't make sense for them to start a war right now. Better to keep growing their industry and exports and take over Taiwan sometime later.
China is not going to militarily take over Taiwan. The most likely outcome now is a "three state" China where it joins the fold voluntarily and becomes a puppet state of China. Given the way the world has gone, it's the only rational choice.
I am not sure why you are being downvoted. People here are acting like Taiwan is made of white-anglosaxon people; whereas if you were to visit, it’s way more Chinese and less Western than Hong Kong even after its degradation.
Most people in Taiwan want to be independent but given a choice between a Gaza scenario and soft-rule from the CCP, they’ll pick the latter.
They've all avoided loading up their LLMs with ads to this point. That is going to change dramatically over the next 2-3 years. All of them will be loaded with ads, and Google will partake as expected given their ad network & capabilities in that realm. They'll match GPT's ad roll-out.
LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters (eg having a discussion with GPT about a medical issue, or a work related matter).
This is the first or second inning in the LLM rollout. It'll take 15-20 more years for full integration of AI agents into the life of the typical person.
The claw experiments for example can just barely be considered alpha stage. They're early AI garbage unfit for the average person to utilize safely. That new world hasn't gotten near the typical person yet.
The compute requirements to get to full integration of AI agents into the life of the average person - billions of them - is far beyond 10x where we're at now.
> LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters
This is an argument in favor of demand having leveled off.
Only if nothing changes. Right now, people are running agent frameworks like OpenClaw on their own hardware or a VPS and the frameworks are often single person projects. This results in all sorts of problems but you can pick an easy solution from history which is to create a walled garden service for running these agents where you can provide security and standardization. If that platform also allows trusted services to integrate then they can provide end to end security guarantees. They also benefit from improvements to the models themselves making them more difficult to subvert. Creating something that is secure enough for the average person to entrust their credit card to is not an impossible task.
>The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks.
This doesnt track at all with my experience. Everybody is using it everywhere.
Moreover people are using them for daily life tasks even when it is not an appropriate use of LLMs - e.g. getting medical advice as you referred to or writing emails which are clearly pissing off their coworkers.
In this respect I see it as akin to radium - a new technology that got a little too fashionable for its own good when it first emerged and which will likely have many use cases scaled back.
In my experience people vastly overestimate the competence of doctors. Getting medical advice from LLMs could be life saving.
Personally I experienced this when a specialized doctor believed a drug interaction to be the opposite, thinking A hinders the absorption of B, when actually it hinders the clearance, tripling concentration of B.
Without AI, I would have been clueless about this and could not have spotted the mistake. I don't know if it would truly have been critical, but it did shake my confidence in doctors.
Id be careful stating this is an inappropriate use of LLMs. Im semi tapped in to the medical literature community and there is a lot of serious discussion and research going into the usage of LLMs for medical advice and most of it is showing that LLMs are barely worse than doctors, and much much cheaper/more convenient. They definitely arent ready to completely replace doctors, but it seems they can provide competent medical advice in a pinch. Look out for the literature on this in the coming year, its only the last few months that researchers seem to be taking LLMs seriously.
I am surprised that people are surprised by this finding, and support your position.
Anecdotally, doctors get things wrong quite frequently. Almost everybody has a bad medical diagnosis/advice story. The amount of reference material that a doctor needs to know off-hand and the data that they are given to make a diagnosis makes it a really difficult job. They also seldom have the ability to know whether their diagnosis/treatment worked, so have a limited ability to 'learn' from outcomes. (I did some work for cancer research and one of the most difficult problems was trying to get 'end of treatment' data because the end of treatment was often an unknown, to the researchers, death).
The ability to have a 'prompt' that includes lab data is likely to be better than the opinions of a doctor that only has one person's professional experience, limited ability to interpret 'prompts', and needing map it to an in-memory conditions database.
Well the thing is that it often isnt worse than a doctor's, thats the point of the research here. I get that sounds crazy, just watch out for the coming literature I guess.
A significant portion of americans detest the medical industry and deeply dislike going to the doctor so I dont even think the product needs to be very good to disrupt the way the system works, just different and accessible is likely enough. Funnily enough, restaurants where the food is bad but the portions are big are actually decently popular. Priorities can vary so widely that many people are unable to even comprehend the priorities a significant number of people truly hold.
I like that this comment is below, and posted after, an example where somebody had to pay extra money to clear up a misdiagnosis of stage 4 cancer by the “barely worse” software
There are many examples of doctors misdiagnosing a wide variety of things, which is largely the point here. People think of doctors as infallible when that is not even close to true.
Im certainly not saying fire all the radiologists, just advising an open mind when the actual literature starts saying that LLMs are as good as doctors in some areas.
There are many examples of people into homeopathy, chinese medicine and even witchcraft using an identical (not similar, identical) argument to the one you just used to push it.
No one in our Auto shop is using AI. One of the new diagnostic tools was demo'd with AI, and none of us were having it. It's about as accurate as Googling your symptoms.
My mother had an AI powered lung scan that came back with Stage 4 Cancer. The Oncologist got called in (for a fee!) to tell us it was just early stage COPD.
They don't understand esoteric areas of computer science very well at all.
I had a mistake in which a large back-up file deletion event happened during a robocopy. 600gb of files got 'deleted' (file headers toast etc). Trying to get the LLMs to understand the hunt parameters, what to focus on, what not to focus on - none of them could reasonably come close to doing file content recovery properly. I needed to build a custom solution because the available industry options couldn't do what was required and the LLMs were useless for that (including the latest versions of Claude, Gemini and GPT). They just went around in circles, capped by their apparently weak knowledge of file recovery as a field. That is, creativity was their limitation.
Shotgunning it is an entirely valid approach to solving something. If AI proves to be particularly great at that approach, given the improvement runway that still remains, that's fantastic.
There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise.
Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster too.
And of course everybody knows the Google & Meta ad monsters.
The only question remaining is who is going to extract all those LLM ad dollars, how will that break out. Right now it's Gemini and GPT in the obvious lead, with Anthropic in third, and Meta & Grok nowhere to be found (permanent situation for those).
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