> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.
And that's how it should be.
(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)
Can you give more color on local partners? I don't think you mean Uber, like I think it was or maybe still is in Austin, but maybe that's what you mean.
And, yeah, them charging more makes sense strictly on quality of experience so a price premium makes sense, but if there is margin to be eroded and these other providers roll out more broadly the prices will end up coming down.
One other thing I found interesting here and you and others might as well... I couldn't help but give feedback about my happiness with the service overall, but my reluctance at the current pricing and I specifically said I don't need to receive a reply to my request (Waymo asks if you want someone to reply when you give feedback and I said "no"). But sure enough they replied and the gist of it was we're sorry we're not a good fit for you now because of the price and hope you'll give us another chance down the road.
I'm not sure what I expected them to say, but at this still-early hour I would've expected more nuance in reply. Would've been better for them to not reply at all given the tone of the reply they sent.
For a post to make such a big deal about sovereignty it is a bit misleading to not mention that the company is slated to be merged with Cohere, a Canadian company.
And that is a good thing - no need to hide it. Given the growing cost of keeping up, these few non-US, non-Chinese companies really need to do more sharing of efforts and costs.
Canada too is very much in need of sovereign AI options, but funding that on its own would be pretty much a waste of money. Would love to see this new German Canadian company cooperate with Mistral too, or maybe one of the Korean AI companies.
Given that "sovereign" these days implicitly means independence from USA and China, and Canada being spiritually in the same boat as the EU, it's pretty spot on?
The costs of "keeping up" aren't really growing, on the contrary.
Hey there, I worked on Kolibri pre-training data. Agree with the point that non-US/non-Chinese labs need to pool effort. The merger with Cohere is public, nothing to hide and I'm also excited about it personally.
Yes, in fact the military has a system in place to make sure that they only that they only use alternate suppliers and on Anthropic AI, They do this by placing a designation on Anthropic AI that it is a risk to the supply chain, which forces purchasers to use other suppliers.
I don't think this is how preferred suppliers have typically worked through the supply chain risk considering the US has definitely had preferred suppliers before and has not historically used this against a US company that was not on the list and the power of such a designation extends far past the military into all parts of the government. I'm pretty sure this has more traditionally been relegated to simple requirements or specifications.
Most of these models, both open and closed, are now so over tuned to agentic and coding tasks that they no longer work well for general purpose. Kimi K3 is an exception to that – maybe you need that larger size todo well on a broader range of tasks.
I've read it since 1995 and I vividly remember them enthusiastically stanning Bjorn Lomborg's denialism. That's when I learned that the Economist is actually the world's first manifestation of a phenomenon now associated with ChatGPT: immaculately-phrased ideological assertions that are presented as common sense that all good, clever, right-thinking people already know.
Like ChatGPT, the findings are delivered with polish and confidence, and like ChatGPT, you would not like what's in the sausage, were you to understand its provenance.
It's devastatingly effective on a certain kind of man.
This is unintentionally hilarious, but also very recent: Economist for most of its publication history banned naming authors. You knew them only as The Economist.
Meanwhile, physicists are not known for their great views on other matters. A physicist talking about climate change is sus, no matter what their pedigree.
It's almost as if expertise is localized by domain!
Orthogonal to any current arc of Oxford, he's a graduate from the 1970s, elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, and a Royal Society Research Professor.
Is attacking the man because of an institute the best you can do, rather than address the content of his writing?
FWiW I too like The Goodies, Monty Python, and wouldn't mind seeing The Forever War given a film treatment by a good director ... just not a fan of ankle deep casual dismissal by association - it's not this chap's fault the UK keeps electing the wrong sort of toff.
Yes! This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit the past few weeks. We are going in this direction at work and I think graph storage is a natural way to think about this.
For my own edification, what is the goal of SPARQL compared to normal SQL or if you live in predicate-land, Prolog or Datalog?
The semantic web tools never seemed to have their breakout moment and seem to run in parallel to "mainstream" history of relational and logic programming, but I've never really understood why.
I started thinking more deeply about how I would actually do this today and it won't be as straight forward as I initially thought. Will keep it on the radar and see if I can figure out a clean way to implement. Great suggestions!
I was with you until there. Qwen and the OpenAI models are great, aggressive agents, but they’re not as good as the anthropic models for human interaction. They just don’t have the subtlety, understanding, or attention to detail.
Claude 4.5/4.6 - absolutely agree. Fable 5? From my (limited) testing, also reasonable to interact with.
Opus 4.7/4.8/5? Absolutely smug and antagonistic and preachy. I'm constantly fighting with it to stop fighting me and accept that I occasionally know better. It's really frustrating to spend so many tokens of such an expensive model arguing with it.
yeah, it's honestly amazing just how badly anthropic managed to screw up something in claude after 4.6. its night and day, and every time I see claude doing something stupid, i instantly realize I was accidentally on Opus 5
Really? I've heard so many other people complain about this recently. And maybe it's possible that it's the prompt style even. But interesting that it's not across the board.
Pretty much! It's not dynamic memory hotplug or resizing, just dynamic billing. Usage is based on the actual RSS used by the app so you can think of the VM's defined size as just a limit, for both CPU and RAM. This means you don't have to spend time profiling and right-sizing instances to optimize costs, just make your application fast and efficient and don't worry about it!
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