robust culture of data protection because of lots to lose

here's why i don't think that holds water:

i no longer believe a company of alphabet's size cannot weather a "controversy" around surreptitious data collection. too many people accept this possibility as a matter of course.

beyond PR, alphabet, like every other company at or near its size:

    * has obviously bribed the current administration
    * they can afford a relative slap on the wrist should any financial penalty be imposed
    * and of course, NSA letters continue to allow the federal government to receive whatever data they wish to ask for

The point is that the cost of the road infrastructure isn't accounted for, not to mention the externality of having a half a million cars on the road to move 750k people. Rideshare is slipstreaming in the subsidized flow of cars.

Superior architectures will leak pretty quickly via engineers. Withholding your best models doesn't work unless you have no competition.

> Superior architectures will leak pretty quickly via engineers.

I agree with the outcome of your premise (i.e., openness), but for different reasons:

First, isn't it the case that these bleeding edge 'newfangled' LLMs are basically variations on the same core ideas from "Attention Is All You Need" from 2017? [1]. Different scale, but still the same basic architecture. Even the "MoE" innovation keeps the Transformer attention stack while replacing or augmenting the dense feed-forward/MLP part with routed expert blocks.

And, I would argue that Engineers aren't working on new architectures. That would be Researchers, working on

  State-space models/Mamba (CMU/Princeton ecosystem), 
  Diffusion Language Models (Inception Labs), 
  Long-convolution architectures/Hyena (Stanford etc.), 
  RWKV/Recurrent LLMs (open-source community), 
  Memory-augmented architectures (Google Research/DeepMind?), 
  World models/spatial intelligence (LeCun/Fei-Fei Li/DeepMind), 
  Symbolic/neurosymbolic alternatives, 
  Thousand brains (Numenta).

That research is still open, so the outcome that you propose (openness) is likely to come to pass. Researchers/Scientists gotta publish, otherwise it's not science (to quote LeCun [2])

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

[2] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795589846771147018

> Withholding your best models doesn't work unless you have no competition.

It could also work if you DO have competition but your compute capacity is overbooked anyway, so releasing the better model doesn't actually make you that much more money (except for raising prices for the same amount of compute, which would give limited gains).

This is pretty much the situation Anthropic is in today.

That just means that Anthropic is fucked unless they get more capacity.

google literally had two divisions doing ai research. It is (was) risk averse and had its hand forced by the runaway success of oai.

nobody has ever claimed that apple makes great cloud software, but all of their walled garden gate-keeping aside, they’re still the last bastion of mainstream local-first computing

Yeah, sure. How do I sync my iCloud photos to my local NAS on linux? A: use a third-party app, they don't build their own.

How do I build an app for my iPhone locally and run it without ever connecting to their servers? I can do that for my phone running linux or for my phone running android, but on iOS I have to get signed by their servers to run code I wrote.

Linux respects my freedom to have my data exist locally, to build and run open source apps, and to modify the code on the devices I run.

Apple does not. They don't let me use their ecosystem from Linux, they do not let me patch the iOS kernel and run a modified version on the devices I run, I can't even access the source code for the macOS kernel.

Apple's filesystem abstraction and lack of something like android "intents" also makes it wildly difficult to do "local-first" computing where files are shared between apps cleanly.

You missed the "mainstream" qualifier from the parent. I am afraid nothing you described here could be considered mainstream, although I'd like to see these things becoming mainstream.

I can see there are a lot of T&C for their claim on "Apple makes great software."

Is the claim in the thread with us?

Quality issues are a different vertical within the space of software/user misalignment. The sort of issue the author talks about is more like the malware of the 90-00s era: the software deliberately does something to screw the user.

presumably they were abused as line cooks or whatever and once they make sous chefs they become abusers. Similar dynamics exist in jail, in fraternities, etc.

maybe in the game of promising ludicrous things. There's no realistic plan to put compute in space.

It’s sitting at ~29 forward/trailing p/e which means that it’s likely to drop 30% if there’s a correction and even more if there’s a broader economic thing going on that causes ad spend to go down.

That's still less than a lot of other tech companies. And "15 is the natural long-run P/E" is just a rule of thumb, not some kind of iron law.

Something under-appreciated: If you pretend a company is paying out 100% of profits as dividends (which it theoretically potentially could, and is useful as a financial modelling tool), then the inverse of P/E, E/P, is an interest rate on the price of the stock.

Ideal P/Es thus shouldn't be flat, they should be tracking long-term bond rates. This isn't an empirical observation, just a theoretical one of what "ideal" should be. But one should rationally expect P/Es to go up when interest rates drop.

It is disappointing to me that even Shiller doesn't really consider this much.