Different kinds of projects of course but I'm kind of surprised to find that among small computers suitable for running home assistant and a thread network via a USB radio, the Pi 4 and 5 seem to be the only affordable ones that can run fanless without major tinkering. I need the device to be completely silent and it's turning into a much bigger project than I had anticipated. Apparently Pis still have a place even when not needing any GPIO.
I've been trying to find an answer to that, too. The best I've got right now is this:
Moat-like things going for them:
- access to the US government (for huge inflated government contracts as a source of free capital, having the competition banned, having their products legally mandated, getting other preferential treatment, having foreign governments bullied into granting similar advantages)
Too unsustainable, too fragile, too small:
- Strong brands: Brand loyalty seems like a pretty insignificant factor in AI right now
- Semi-exclusive hardware access, RAM buyouts: Unsustainable even in the short term
- Lock-in effects: Their models aren't very stable across versions, or very unique, and switching providers is about as easy as it can be in a highly competitive market.
- Exclusive technology that is important, advanced and hard to replicate to a degree that would materially set them apart and justify potentially much higher cost. Maybe I'm missing something here, but a lot of the claims they make to that end fall apart even on light scrutiny (due to things like test sets that are small, hand-picked and clearly overfitted on, or broad general claims that cannot be substantiated). I'm getting the feeling they don't have anything that materially sets them apart at all, but that's seems impossible to measure in any meaningful way, so who knows, they might have something here.
The skull needs to be encrusted with the specific rare gem that can only be used in temples to the deity of death. That'll be impossible to misunderstand.
Giving out control of such things to LLMs is already complete madness, so once the first pleasure bot powered by Grok has dismembered a few thousand users, they'll get sophisticated safety mechanisms.
Though like as not you're still going to be right, after all, Stuxnet happened.
I don't relate to it myself, but I see it in people around me. It appears that's something that may not be limited to but is very prevalent in adults with very high functioning autism.
We're not that far into this new era and I already see people go back to hand-writing the important bits and manually designing their architecture because it turns out that unless you have them spit out yet another boring web app, they aren't very good engineers at all, their errors and bad decisions are very hard to predict and accumulate over time, and the resulting mess becomes unmaintainable at some point, and it appears all the harness engineering in the world can only stave that off somewhat, not prevent it from happening. So perhaps IT won't become a monoculture of agent prompters after all.
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