If the fee is covering all the investments required to make it convenient, we're socializing the risk taken by customers who buy from sketchy merchants or lose their card. That insurance system is a net positive for consumers, but they don't know they are paying for it.
Any crafts project. Craft discussions often devolve into what is the best shed or how to arrange your workspace.
I have finally set a personal rule: at least 50% of my time must be spend working on the projects I'm interested in, and not the workspace. If I make/buy a tool for a specific project that is okay, but only if I use it on the project - until it is used for that project it counts against the general budget.
Agree. Switching models with a keypress is for developer coding.
Jev and this decisions api are mostly useful for inference at scale in a workload where cost and latency matter… and that’s where evals become crucial. Could coding tools use it? Sure, but that’s probably a special case.
Hopefully not. If your model of what happened here is "well, they did a study, and that resolved the question", you know less now than you did before you heard about the study.
You said “I would expect…” and posited something that sounds reasonable but might not be true. Questioning a hunch seems like a good reason to look at data.
Does one paper ever resolve a question fully, beyond doubt? Rarely.
Maybe the AI can help them not quit in their first two years, when they realize what the job really entails. It’s a profession powered by idealism but the long-timers often have the cynicism of former idealists. Not always! But it’s a tough gig that attracts dreamers.
Reading about the book that inspired this, written by an artist who closely studied the styles of others— that’s impressive.
Reading an AI-generated site about some AI model that shits out some fake Bill Evans on command—that’s not. Any moron with enough tokens can do it. Congratulations.
I think the last sentence of your comment is the most exciting thing about this whole article!
There are at least three enormous gulfs here:
First, just understanding music and even jazz as a prerequisite to being able to do this.
Second, being able to do this using machines instead of a piano itself, which is unaffordable for a lot of people.
Third, the capturing of the je ne sais quoi of musical style, which is almost impossible to articulate.
So for me bringing this all together, it allows you to capture an improved understanding of different styles without needing to invest a huge amount of time because you can feed the same input into multiple style models and see how it diverges. That's a control which can't usually be obtained!
As a technical feat, what AI research allows across domains is a remarkable thing.
> First, just understanding music and even jazz as a prerequisite to being able to do this.
Do you have to understand music to train an ai to do this? You can be a fan without understanding music. You can be motivated and have an ear for what Cedar Walton sounds like without knowing anything about what harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary he had or didn’t have.
> Second, being able to do this using machines instead of a piano itself, which is unaffordable for a lot of people.
What? You can get a piano or a keyboard for a couple hundred dollars.
Unless you mean actually training and being good at the piano being unaffordable, no, that's just lack of skills and/or will to train to become good at it. Anyone can afford to buy an instrument and become good at it if they cared.
I'm sure no actual musician is actually impressed by this slop, and as the GP comment says the actual book written by a human to whose experience I can relate to and be inspired by is really impressive.
My philosophy is based on anti-jinxing. If you say “I sure hope I don’t lose my phone,” you will surely lose your phone and soon. That’s how jinxing works.
But if you can say “I don’t care if I lose my phone,” you will not lose your phone. Because the anti-jinx knows you won’t be unduly annoyed and therefore prevents it from happening.
Some professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
Not exactly. If this was the sole goal then there wouldn’t be a museum at all.
The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.
The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.
And in natural history museums their primary purpose isn't to show little Jimmy a T. rex skeleton but to preserve the fossils and other specimens for scientific research.
A lot of them have the majority of their collections offsite in warehouses. The "museum" is a sort of front office meant for visitors, but visitors only ever see a tiny fraction of the collection.
"A museum" is already a lot more than visitors can see. As stated they generally only show a tiny fraction of their collections and besides that many museums employ dozens of full time researchers who use the collections to do analyses and publish papers. It is as prestigious to be faculty at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, or the Smithsonian in DC as it is at a major university. But without visitors it is hard to bring in money either directly or indirectly.
This is not even rare or just in niche professions - this is everywhere, and perhaps even the default if not actively fought. I always found it dishonourable myopic.
Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.
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