I’m not an AI engineer but it’s not hard to imagine why some bright talent would want to work at the most exciting AI companies in the US while also making 3-10x what they’d make in Europe.
Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.
See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).
And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
> I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate
Are they working remotely for US companies? In Canada that’s very much still the case everywhere you look
> Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
I assumed this discussion was about rejecting working for US companies who would be susceptible to the executive branch’s bullying, not whether you can you make a US tier salary off American companies while not living in America. If you’re doing that you might as well live in America among among the other talent and maximize your opportunities.
No, it’s a counterpoint on salaries… “Even the American companies” ie they wouldn’t have to open offices here, nor would they have to pay high salaries, to compete for talent if everyone they wanted was in the US or could be so easily attracted to move to the US. The point is clearly things aren’t so one-sided as people seem to think.
Translation: I didn't read this, so I don't know what it says and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I desperately need to post on the internet, so here's something I just made up…
The website blocks my ISP unfortunately, so I am not able to read it. Same thing when trying with a VPN as well. And the archive.ph link posted elsewhere in this thread is an endless captcha loop for me.
Around 1987 I mostly completed a Unix-like OS for the C-64 called MATRIX. I was probably around six weeks away from burning it to a PROM when I got a new girlfriend and completely lost interest in the project.
I don't remember too much about it, other than:
- Because Commodore drives had ludicrously long file names for the era, paths like /etc/dev/joy1 didn't need any weirdness.
- Password encryption? What's that?
- What we would call "metadata" today was stored in USR files.
- Directory listing was agonizingly slow. I remember commandeering tracks 16 and 17 for my own hair-brained directory structure in an effort to speed things up.
This is a great story, and you're further along than I ever got in 1987! I had a C64 back then, too, and was fascinated by it, but never attempted anything this ambitious. Girlfriends, too, got the best of me! Fast forward nearly 40 years, and I finally built my Unix-inspired shell for it, just with a very different kind of assistant helping with the assembly. :)
The directory speed problem is real. I sidestepped it entirely by keeping the filesystem RAM-resident (max 8 entries, heap at $6000), which makes LS instant but obviously volatile. Your track 16/17 commandeering approach is incredible and fascinating. MATRIX sounds amazing, and you should dig it up and finish it now! :)
Fun fact: "Government mule" isn't just an expression, it's a real thing. And the U.S. government, including the Forest Service, still employs teams of mules to carry things to places that can't be reached any other way.
"Fix up my packs. Load the 2 mules with 225# each. Take the 2 loads to trail camp at Lake Everett, Unload. Have lunch with the Trail cook. Haze mules & ride to 7 1/2 PM."
Horses are mentioned 2586 times. That'd be a whole study on how they're used in the back country. (Edit: horse number is inflated since part of the diary form at one point asks for "Horse Mileage". Will have to refine search).
If you go backpacking in the Sierra Nevada (or other mountains, surely) you may just run into a mule train carrying a trail maintenance crew and their gear.
It doesn't matter whether it sounds distinctive to you. What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement.
Just like it doesn't matter if you used a machine to duplicate a painting. It's still an infringement.
You can't publish a Harry Potter novel and then throw up your hands and say, "It wasn't me. The AI decided to name the characters Hargid and Hermione and Snape."
Google says it paid a voice actor. If it provides proof of that, good. But like with a lot of AI things, we're in new territory here.
Seems like there's a market for a tool that can compare an AI voice to a library of known famous voices so that companies like Google can tweak their machines to not sound too much like someone who can be harmed by a sound-alike.
> What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement.
Also not sufficient. There has to be some evidence they attempted to copy the voice rather than just found one that was eerily similar.
This comes up from time to time without AI either. Like its not good if a firm goes out to find someone with a voice similar to a famous person / voice actor…but its fine if they just randomly find one that sounds exactly the same and they say “oooh lets go with this one” and not “oooh perfect this sounds just like Dan LaFontaine!”
Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now.
You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you.
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