It's like y2k. Yeah, there isn't much of a problem currently. We're patching before it becomes a problem. That's not Bot Who Cried Wolf*, that's responsible security. You don't have to wait for a YouTube tutorial on how to do it before it's something to urgently patch.
*My phone autocorrected to that and I'm keeping it.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
Isaac Newton wrote more about the occult and alchemy than he did about physics. Pythagoras most likely learned the secrets of triangles from Egyptian mystery cults, and formed his own cult afterward. The Nazis simultaneously pursued war advantage via improved technology and a deep delve into the occult.
The separation between the scientific and the mystical world is a very modern concept, and not everyone buys in, especially when they go down a rabbit hole. Science and philosophy have ridden in the same cart for a long time, long enough that America's oldest scientific organization is called the American Philosophical Society, because its name predates the word "Science" and the idea of that separation.
This isn't an accident. Yes, there has been a oil-and-gas boom (fracking, mostly), but it is a great place to do business, so many other non-petro industries have been furiously expanding there in the last 25 years.
Well, they're also terrible at spending state resources despite high taxes (outside of income tax). One of, if not the worst, public education systems in the country. Pretty bad urban planning, too. Decent food and music tho
This. I think people in California (like me) have trouble seeing the things Texas does well because of partisanship. It's bad for California not to see when another state does a thing better.
California's biggest problems are mostly along the lines of "too many people want to live here."
I have plenty of complaints about California governance, many of them conservative coded. But if California is a failed state, it's a failed state that much of the world aspires to be.
I have family in California so I've visited often. It's got beautiful geography, and very pleasant weather most of the time (at least in the areas people have chosen to live: few people voluntarily choose to live in the desert areas). I don't have much personal experience with California's government other than second-hand reports, usually from people leaving the state so you can imagine those reports tend negative. But I suspect that if California's government were better, there would be even more overcrowding problems, i.e. that bad government is actually helping the state (in a small, entirely backwards, way) by keeping many more people from wanting to move there.
I stick with OpenCode Zen (only US providers) and Together.ai (hosting themselves). As interesting as new Chinese models are when they're first released, I wait til they are open source and on US providers.
*My phone autocorrected to that and I'm keeping it.
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