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Yes, modulo only that "what people like enough to keep going through the adverts" isn't exactly the same as "what they click on in a thumbnail", and the latter combines with "did these ads convince someone to get the paid ad free experience" is what YT optimises for.

> I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really.

I think this is a matter of perspective about what counts as "cutting corners".

I think they look like you describe only because they have limited competence; this is on the basis that when I asked one to make a fusion reactor simulator (to see if it could) by using open source plasma physics libraries which it had itself suggested at the start of this process (e.g. WarpX), it didn't take the "lazy" option of actually using those libraries, it tried to write its own plasma physics simulation from scratch "as a fallback if we can't install the libraries".

As it was not sufficiently competent, the resulting "simulator" was hilariously wildly unphysical.

Would have been much better if it had been lazy.

To your deeper point: I agree. In this case it made so much of a mess that there was no point trying to rescue it; as it was done from scratch, throwing it away and starting again was fine*, but if this had been pushing commits that got interleaved with real work on the main branch of an existing project it would have been a serious issue.

* or in my case, not even bothering to start again. Like I said, this was done to see if it could.


> He's not thick, he's (at best) reckless.

Reckless definitely.

"Thick" is presently unclear: a lot of money and an existing competent team can hide a lot of damage upstairs; and it's not implausible that he has done that damage, even just because he is known to have sleeping difficulties[0], and sleeping difficulties are known to correlate with IQ impairment, and that's aside any questions about ketamine (between the war on drugs and AI SEO, I have no idea what that stuff really does).

[0] https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tweets-sleep


TBH, this is also my experience with humans.

Spent about 18-24 months with E.ON trying to convince them that the street they'd sent the bills to didn't exist. Eventually had to contact the Ombudsman.

And E.ON don't even have the worst reputation for customer service in their domain.


Probably easier to ask Claude how it did this than to ask us. I find most threads like this get lost in churn, rather than getting replies.

(I may have replied, but I have no idea either, VMs aren't by field of expertise though).


> No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.

France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.

The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.


>France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.

Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.

> The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.

What I meant is that every time HN or elsewhere talks about Europe being behind the US in terms of tech there is mention of the need for a "European Silicon Valley". But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.

The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.[1] Berlin and Paris would be happy to designate, say, the Strasbourg-Stuttgart axis as the "EU technology hub", with corresponding EU funding, but other member states aren't going to be happy.

[1] And further to the long wrangling over Alsace-Lorraine, but that's neither here nor there


> Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.

Same reasons (plural) it also hasn't happened a second time anywhere else in the USA.

The list is long, and economics is full of anti-inductive loops.

> But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.

The EU as an institution is tiny in comparison to its member states, total budget only €192.8 billion: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2026-euro...

> The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.

While true, that's like saying the US can trace its origins back to some cold salty tea: it misses quite a lot of both the good and the bad.


> Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.

So have twenty-three Superfund sites —- land from 1970s businesses that the federal government had to take over because nobody else could or would fix the uncosted externality.

The most in any single county.

An increasingly useful, very vivid metaphor.


Normal in history. Change often isn't binary. Consider for example: the exact date of the end of the British empire is several possible dates between "the independence of Ireland in the immediate aftermath of WW1" and "it still hasn't".

> reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do

Hateful, sure, though just like all those on the right who say the first word of "hate crime" is redundant, I'd argue home-grown hate's just as dangerous as imported.

But "unskilled" immigration? When the topic is AI? If this stuff works as advertised, *nobody's skills matter any more*. If it doesn't at least render many of our skills obsolete, why build it? If you make an AI which can't automate anything, how is this not a waste of money?

Even without that, I've not seen anyone who knows about Baumol's cost disease opine either way about migration, high or low skilled.


By ownership perhaps.

Founded in the UK, then bought by Google, it still has its HQ in London.


It is a good example that what Europe lacks is capital. And there is an rich get richer phenomenon where wealth flows to the USA, and successful European companies gets sold (and many talented Europeans ends up working for American companies). In many ways the dynamic is one of a colony.

The more I learn about modern economics, the less I feel I know. Right now, the sense I have is that the flow of money from Europe to the USA is more like using the US as a flag of convenience than a material loss of wealth, especially given how many "American" companies have European offices filled with European staff and how much money is made selling space for ads from European companies to European users.

Does it matter?

If they develop the "next big thing" and the next US administration decides its for US citizens only, nothing has changed.


Does it matter in which countries the offices with the staff who develop some of these models are? I think so, for a number of reasons too long to go into.

Re "US citizens only", the question I'd have right now for all the AI companies is: can any new better-or-as-good-as Fable AI model actually be released?

If not, stop development of better models. That's the single most expensive thing any of them are doing.

Export controls on software is somewhere between "hard" and "impossible", so "US citizens only" means something between "nobody" and "perhaps some government agents", but the latter don't pay enough to justify the cost.


> Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?

Perhaps. While I'm more impressed by AI than I think you are, I do also say on occasion that recent developments in AI feels much like the 90s rapid development of computer graphics, in the sense we're overly impressed by what we see only to discard it quickly when the next improvement arrives: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26

If the US government declares no model ≥ Fable can be released, that could make it completely pointless for anyone in the USA to work towards superior models, which may cause rapid catching up, or may cause the investment bubble to pop and all the money to go away.

Or it may cause all the investment to go to not-USA. China's one possibility, EU is another. No idea which would be least-distasteful to the people currently eager to invest in AI.


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