Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
Mini diggers are cheap to rent for a few days on a job and you can shift absolutely tons more in a single day than a labourer can do in a whole week.
If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.
I agree, should have mentioned that it must help productivity too. I was just surprised to see it on even the smallest building sites, like a 2 story house, where I thought the bother wouldn't be worth it.
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.
I wouldn't consider that to be not owning the engine. It seems to me that the airline does own the plane and the engines on it, and this is more of a usage-based support/maintenance/repair subscription service provided by the engine manufacturer. If you suddenly didn't want it for some reason, I don't think RR could or would force you to take off the engines and ship it back to them. They just wouldn't provide you with the support and service that you stopped paying for.
In the end the result is pretty similar as these engines are useless without regular maintenance and the engine manufacturer likely does not give the knowledge away to do it without them.
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
I know some companies that at a high level want to "organize the world's information" or "build the future of human connection", yet have done innumerable cruel and harmful things to society (at least in my opinion).
It's can't customise the response to the person asking the question in quite the way putting a massively expensive compute behind each user interaction.
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
The usa.gov site is a good start, but it’s not really comprehensive, and I’m not sure it can be.
A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:
* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?
* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?
* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?
* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?
Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.
Type "affordable housing", click "Contact your nearest public housing agency (PHA)"
It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:
Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.
So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.
Because Americans are notoriously and demonstrably bad at understanding the architecture of their own government, including the layer-cake nature of authority and responsibility delegation.
Gov.uk is basically a pre-LLM america.gov that was done beautifully well. And you're guaranteed to not get hallucinated answers too. Searching and indexing works on it beautifully, as do the many functions you can carry out from the web itself instead of visiting a govt office in person.
canada.ca is the Canadian government's equivalent, as far as a web 1.0-style portal/index into many other sites and resources.
Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.
Being part of and accelerating the ad-driven internet, drinking up water for data centers, not filtering out scam apps and websites from its results and store, intrusive collection of private information, etc etc.
Why is this downvoted? Google is responsible for every literally malicious ad attempting to harm people that they display.
There is a big difference between "these ads have flashing lights and take up half the screen and are annoying" and "this ad is attempting to defraud you".
You can support the incredible things Google have achieved over the last couple of decades ... while also acknowledging the absolute shit shows they've been involved with.
I don't think they're saying that America.gov is necessarily cruel and harmful― I read it as a reminder that holding lofty ideals (as exemplified by Google and Facebook) doesn't necessarily preclude wrongdoing; the risks posed by presenting unedited LLM output as "from America.gov" are worth consideration imo
One must consider the possibility that the goal is unattainable without the harm.
A terrorist finds it much easier to execute on insidious plans if the world's information on vulnerabilities and weapons are organized at their fingertips, for example.
There's certainly a spectrum (and the spectrum is already recognized: Google flat bans certain categories of information from being searchable via its tools to the best of their ability).
But you've sort of hit the nail on the head: there are consequences to building these things, and consequences to not doing that.
Up-thread is, I think, making the fine point that the bad can certainly outweigh the good (you'll note a distinct lack of "Google but for CSAM," at least outside the dark web, and that's I think because the good/harm tradeoff there is self-evident). My intent was just to put down a reminder counterweight that the good without the harm is likely also impossible.
Google makes errors of judgment. They also make straight-up unforced errors (breaking their 10-year commitment to the Chromebook platform, at their scale, is just burning credibility at a quantity that I cannot imagine is going to save them enough money to justify it unless their intent is to exit the educational space completely; 10 years isn't a random number, it's the kind of number that gives educational institutions the confidence that an investment in platform is long-term, and breaking that commitment factors into the calculus of those institutions trusting Google for any and all future purchases).
It's great that you recognize that as your opinion.
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
You missed the point they were trying to make: a company’s mission statement says they want to help humanity at a high level, but it turns out they’re doing more harm to it. We can’t control being born or nature. Humans control the companies in question that are doing the harm. You wrote a nothing burger. Almost like an AI slopping out text for the sake of noise.
I believe the word was already in use to denote a malfunction of any sort of machine or device. As such this was a bug (insect) that caused a bug (glitch); it was punny already in 1947.
neat part of history, but i dont think that's what that says.
the last sentence starts with "Originating with Thomas Edison in the 1800s, the term “bug” is still used [...]", and there would be no reason to use the word "actual" in the sentence "First _actual_ case of bug being found" if it was the origin of the term.
"The use of “bug” to describe a flaw in the design or operation of a technical system dates back to Thomas Edison. He coined the phrase 140 years ago to describe technical problems during the process of innovation."
the moth seems to be a popular misconception, though, given that the article starts with "Ask someone to identify the first computer bug, and he or she might mention computer programmer Grace Hopper and the dead moth found in a relay of Harvard University’s Mark II electromechanical computer in 1947"
If highly trained folks in the military that are literally choosing targets to bomb are succumbing to hallucinated AI slop, then what hope do the rest of us (e.g. students doing homework, a corporate analyst, a local journalist) have... dark times ahead
They are probably trained on AI as much as the rest of us... It takes a few burns to tune your hallucination detection senses. The problem is their mistakes can have a bigger consequence than sloppy code, looking stupid in a meeting, or bugs in software. I've noticed the hallucinations are becoming kind of subtle too... things like a code reviewer makes up a bunch of edge cases or problems that don't really exist.
I understand that. But I am specifically questioning if it was used to actually commit a war crime which is what the school attack was identified as by the U.N.
I hope we'll find out the details of AI's potential involvement when the current administration gets called into the International Criminal Court to stand trial for their war crimes. I don't expect that to happen, but I'll keep hoping that it will.
The citizens are accountable to the extent that they have power over what their government is doing and support their actions. In the US the average citizen has effectively zero influence on the actions of their government and the overwhelming majority disapprove of the current administration and its actions.
The hype has significant real-world consequences such as nonsensical amounts of funding and valuations that could crash the world economy at some point. Until there some "check" on this system, i think the anti-hype is quite valid.
A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well.
Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade.
I think the real IKEA problem is global homogeneity (there seems to be a MALM dresser whatever home i'm in around the world), but that doesnt mean we are collectively living with a low standard.
Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look.
Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels.
Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough compromise, as I found out when looking for e.g. a TV sideboard.
The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).
For chests of drawers and bookcases they have one configurable wood product.
All the storage solutions for the living room are tiny and almost all of them are made of unstained pine.
For wardrobes they have two products, one of which is open and looks bad and the other’s tiny.
There are no wood equivalents to Pax, Platsa or Besta, the Ikea workhorses with a modern design.
And even if they existed, I don’t think people would rush to buy them. Solid wood’s not what Ikea’s known for and would cost too much for their target market.
I’m not saying they’re bad - I own several of their products, and while I’m overall pleased with them, I don’t love them. The compromises and cost-cutting design choices are always there if you know what to look for.
None of my Ikea furniture brings me joy or makes me want to touch it. It’s functional and looks decent to good.
Hollow panels are too light, not robust enough and essentially unrepairable. One could buy some Ikea pieces and cut them / adapt them in irder to upgrade them. These panels make that impossible.
Shall we get rid of the FAA and the FDA then? Lets just have all pfizer employees make ethics their own responsibility.
What your describing is the specific case of a company so paralyzed by short-term thinking that they see regulation as a burden. Some maturity in the organization would allow reframing this to be less antagonistic.
Crucially, the FAA is not a part of United Airlines, and the FDA is not a part of Pfizer. If there weren't any FDA, then the safety group in Pfizer would be a lot weaker.
Its funny because "Shall we get rid of the FAA and the FDA then?" ... matches exactly with the current situation of the FDA and Points 3 > 5 ... The systematic nerfing of the FDA and other organizations their power.
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
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