I don't even know that I would call it slowing down so much as constraining/focusing innovation.
There's three basic paths for a company hit by this ruling to comply:
1. Stop showing users generated content.
2. Figure out how to generate the content with more quotes and attribution to source websites, to regain the protection offered to search engines.
3. Figure out the hallucination problem, so that every statement in machine generated content is true, or at least defensible.
If this ruling forces companies to put more money into #3, whereas now they're coasting on good enough, I'd say it was speeding up innovation.
There was already a ton of collective incentive for #3, I don't think the companies are choosing to "coast on good-enough."
Rather, they are stuck unable to do that much better, unwilling to admit (especially in a way that might spook shareholders) that it's a hallucination-machine all the way down. They're playing for time and market-share while hoping some unspecified and inherently-unpredictable new discovery arrives which will be compatible with their existing infrastructure and investments.
> If this ruling forces companies to put more money into #3, whereas now they're coasting on good enough, I'd say it was speeding up innovation.
The thing is, no one has the slightest idea how to stop hallucinations.
The models are fundamentally "hallucinatory" at core - they generate what is _probable to follow the string thus far in its training corpus_, modulo RLHF and friends.
Notice that nothing there has any rigorous relationship to truth.
Sure, the companies could start pumping money into pure research on what models other than transformers might yield something that can reason rigorously, but at that point you're talking about finding a way to throw out LLMs entirely in favor of a less-pathologically-broken model, like Gary Marcus keeps complaining people should be doing.
The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time;
The architects, who take the prototypes and take the time to build it correctly;
And the gardeners, who maintain the built system for the next 10-30 years, fixing bugs, making incremental improvements to speed or resource usage, and updating dependencies so that it continues to function on modern machines.
The crazy thing is that there are a ton of developers with different tastes who would love to fill each of the roles, but not many companies that are able to manage all three types without pushing everyone into one bucket.
Ha, I'm a gardener then, on my 15th year of maintenance. So halfway there according to you. Slowly, very slowly, fixing the thousands of bugs the rockstar left behind 15 years ago.
It's easy to look at a newly made garden, its flowers all freshly planted and its paths all neatly laid out, and think it finished, but once you see one that's been carefully maintained for decades and how its plants have matured and grown together and how the steps have been worn by human feet, it's clear the project is merely off to a good start.
This comment made me imagine what would the guy maintaining my first deployed project at my first company thinks about me. Never had this thought ever cross my mind.
Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other public paperwork provides enough information for an unrelated company -- either having acquired the patent rights, or after the patent period ends -- to reconstruct the processes with less investment then the original research.
If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.
> If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.
Only if that skeleton crew had deep deep pockets. If Anthropic closed their doors tomorrow because the market collectively saw that AI was not profitable and so open sourced everything, there wouldn't be any money to train Opus 5.0... it would then have to fall on governments to put money into the hat (which I can't see happening unless it was Europe)
Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.
Eh, you're off by an order of magnitude or so on both ends.
The iPhone 17 has like 8 gb, the Pixel 10 12.
The original iPhone was 128mb, and the iPhone 6 from 2016-2018 was around 1gb; that puts the iPhone at around 8x RAM per decade, and puts us at 128gb in our pockets at around 2036 or so.
(Incidentally, the big news in phone RAM is that a lot of new phones are dropping back to 4gb because of RAM shortages.)
I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.
AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.
I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.
Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.
And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.
If you're telling them all that and not wasting their time, that's fine.
But if you just ask them the question and don't tell them what you've found or where you got stuck, you're asking them to stop doing what they're doing and spend all that same time you just spent working on your problem.
The good one(s) acted like their job was providing the service of housing. They had a budget and paid themselves a salary, and if there was money left in the repair budget at the end of the year they used it for improvements to the properties.
The bad ones treated it as an investment. My rent money went into their own pocket, and any expenses -- repairs, taxes, mortgage payments -- had to come out of their own pockets, and they did their best to not pay for any of them.
My wife and I have a few rental properties that I manage. They are investments, chosen based on return on investment and equity (ROI/ROE). Maintenance costs were factored into those calculations. We take care of repairs not because our job is "providing the service of housing", but because we are honest and would not sign a lease (or any contract) in bad faith. When the lease says the property includes appliances, then we ensure broken appliances are fixed or replaced promptly. If/when we can't make a reasonable ROE on a rental property, we don't cut corners to squeeze a bit more profit out of it, we sell it and invest the money elsewhere.
Sounds like two different ways of saying the same thing. Each is planning on certain expected return which will have allocated costs for maintenance accounted for as part of the agreement to provide the housing service (which is what the contract will describe in detail).
There's three basic paths for a company hit by this ruling to comply:
If this ruling forces companies to put more money into #3, whereas now they're coasting on good enough, I'd say it was speeding up innovation.reply