Lugh

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submitted 4 months ago by Lugh to c/futurology
 

As the US pivots to aligning itself with Russia, and threatening two NATO members with invasion, the NATO alliance seems all but dead. Russia is openly threatening the Baltic states and Moldova, not to mention the hybrid war it has been attacking Europe with for years.

All this has forced action. The EU has announced an €800 billion fund to urgently rearm Europe. Separately the Germans are planning to spend €1 trillion on a military and infrastructure build-up. Meanwhile, the owner of SpaceX and Starlink is coming to be seen as a public enemy in Europe. Twitter/X may be banned, and alternatives to Starlink are being sought for Ukraine.

Europe has been taking a leisurely pace to develop a reusable rocket. ESA has two separate plans in development, but neither with urgent deadlines. Will this soon change? Germany recently announced ambitious plans for a spaceplane that can take off from regular runways. Its 2028 delivery date seemed very ambitious. If it is part of a new German military, might it happen on time?

[–] Lugh 9 points 7 months ago

Australia is a paradox in the renewables transition. It is already at 35% for renewable electricity, and has targeted 82% for 2030. Yet it's still a major exporter of coal. Australia exported $127.4 billion worth of coal in 2022-23, and its economy is highly dependent on mining of all types.

It doesn't have much homegrown manufacturing and is committed to eliminating tariffs on Chinese imports. This means of Western countries it might be among the quickest to abandon ICE cars, as it will have access to all the super-cheap Chinese EV's. Especially as it's rolling out infrastructure like this.

[–] Lugh 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I still see even the more advanced AIs make simple errors on facts all the time....

[–] Lugh 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

True. It's what keeps me optimistic. If we can get through the decay of the old world intact, there's a world of post-scarcity plenty ahead.

[–] Lugh 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I find they are good for creative tasks. Picture and music generation, but also ideas - say, give me 10 possible character names for a devious butler in a 1930s murder mystery novel.

But yes, terrible for facts, even rudimentary ones. I get so many errors with this approach its effectively useless.

However, I can see on narrower training data, say genetics, this might be less of a problem.

[–] Lugh 1 points 7 months ago

There's a few ways they say it may help, this one seems the main one.

We foresee a future in which LLMs serve as forward-looking generative models of the scientific literature. LLMs can be part of larger systems that assist researchers in determining the best experiment to conduct next. One key step towards achieving this vision is demonstrating that LLMs can identify likely results. For this reason, BrainBench involved a binary choice between two possible results. LLMs excelled at this task, which brings us closer to systems that are practically useful. In the future, rather than simply selecting the most likely result for a study, LLMs can generate a set of possible results and judge how likely each is. Scientists may interactively use these future systems to guide the design of their experiments.

[–] Lugh 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It’s only open source if the training data is and it probably isn’t, is it?

I don't know, though DeepSeek talk of theirs being "fully" open-source.

Part of the advantage of doing this (apart from helping bleed your rivals dry) is to get the benefit of others working on your model. So it makes sense to maximise openness and access.

[–] Lugh 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I lived in Hong Kong for a few years. It has superlative public transport, and the (human) taxis were reasonably priced. However, as its so densely populated, I can only see cars getting so much traction. After a certain point the traffic jams are unavoidable.

[–] Lugh 3 points 7 months ago

I don't know the specifics. What seems more relevant to me is that lots of automakers around the world are getting to Level 4 by various, mostly similar ways.

Once you have Level 4 you have a viable robotaxi business model. Even if you stick to geo-fenced areas, and mapped routes, that covers 80%+ of urban taxi journeys.

The same holds true for buses and public transit. I'm very interested to see how efforts like this Level 4 mini-shuttle bus in France progress.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/10/26/this-self-driving-shuttle-transports-people-in-rural-france-is-it-the-future-of-mobility

When robotaxis & mass transit like these are common, how many people will still want private cars?

[–] Lugh 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Base fares start as low as 4 yuan (around 55 cents), compared with 18 yuan (around $2.48) for a taxi driven by a human

China is already the global leader in 21st century energy - dominating renewables, batteries, and EVs. Now it's poised to lead in robotic vehicles too.

Its robotaxis cost $30k, Waymo, who's been in the robotaxi game longer costs $150k. Combine this with the fact Baidu can offer fares that are just 20% of a human driver in China and still make money and you can see how the global demand for such vehicles could be in the hundreds of millions. Tariffs in Europe and America may slow things there, but it won't be the case for much of the rest of the world. Cheap Chinese robotaxis, with fares a fraction of today's human-driven journeys, will be ubiquitous all over the planet in the 2030s.

[–] Lugh 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

We rarely hear of the Chinese space program in western media, but it keeps doing interesting things. A recent launch tested an inflatable module for their space station. That was an idea that once seemed promising for the ISS, via Bigelow Aerospace, but never seemed to go anywhere.

This cargo mini-shuttle concept isn't new either. Thirty years ago an ESA version called Hermes got to the advanced planning stage before being scrapped. Some people have doubts that space planes, even launched with reusable rockets, are all that efficient, so it will be interesting to see how this fares.

[–] Lugh 3 points 7 months ago

I wonder what the monthly totals will be next year. When will it hit the 1 million mark, then 10 million?

[–] Lugh 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The problem for all the investor funded AIs, is that data centers are huge costs. They're burning through billions of dollars every month. That makes sense if one of two of them emerge as dominant players who own most of the market share for future AI businesses.

If they all keep under-cutting each other by using open-source. It's more likely companies like OpenAI will crash and burn first.

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