Lugh

joined 2 years ago
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This data is courtesy of Dan Shapiro.

As there are only so many people and hours in the day, the market for human attention is finite. Hollywood is spending more money to make TV and movies, but its market share is declining. People, especially younger people, are far more likely to watch videos on the internet made by small creators. Needless to say, the small content creators' costs are vastly cheaper. AI is rapidly making them cheaper still.

And it's not just that small creators using AI-generation will displace Hollywood's existing efforts; they are likely to create new artforms that will displace the old screen/broadcast formats of TV shows & movies too. AI-gen artforms, as yet uninvented, may be real-time rendered, personalized for individuals, hyper-niche, etc, etc

This is all part of a surprising trend with AI, its tendency towards decentralization. Some dommerist nightmares see all powerful corporations in the future, but as with open-source AI & robotics equalling the Big Tech efforts, the trend seems more for AI's power to be dispersed.

 

Rumbling away throughout 2024 was EU threats to take action against Twitter/X for abandoning fact-checking. The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) is clear on its requirements - so that conflict will escalate. If X won't change, presumably ultimately it will be banned from the EU.

Meta have decided they'd rather keep EU market access. Today they announced the removal of fact-checking, but only for Americans. Europeans can still benefit from the higher standards the Digital Services Act guarantees.

The next 10 years will see the power of mis/disinformation accelerate with AI. Meta itself seems to be embracing this trend by purposefully integrating fake AI profiles into its networks. From now on it looks like the main battle-ground to deal with this is going to be the EU.

 

It's hard to keep count of all the humanoid robots in development, but there seems to be about 20 different models. However, Samsung has more manufacturing heft than most, so its entry may be more significant.

It's announced a majority stake in Korean firm Rainbow Robotics, which was first spun off from a Korean academic institution. Rainbow have been around for a while, and their flagship humanoid model is the RB-Y1. It's wheeled, which marks it out from others, but that might be an advantage, as it simplifies the engineering of movement and locomotion. In terms of tasks and work with its arms it looks as capable as any other in development, and ahead of many.

Robot training in 2025 just got easier - the two leading training models are now open-sourced. This will level the playing field, but also give advantages to people like Samsung. Their expertise is in selling commercial products - maybe that is the breakthrough humanoid robotics needs now?

 

"Companies will have three months from when the guidance is finalised to carry out risk assessments and make relevant changes to safeguard users.........."Platforms are supposed to remove illegal content like promoting or facilitating suicide, self-harm, and child sexual abuse."

This is already impacting futurology.today - one of the Mods is British, and because of this law doesn't feel comfortable continuing. As they have back-end expertise with hosting, if they go, we may have to shut down the whole site.

How easy is it to block British IP addresses? Would that be enough to circumvent any legal issues, if no one else involved in running the site is British and it is hosted somewhere else in the world?

[–] Lugh 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

I am aware that they have a state insurer in Florida. They are going to need it. I can't see a single private insurance company wanting to touch anything to do with rebuilding in areas affected by this. They know climate change is getting worse, and this is only going to happen soon again.

[–] Lugh 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

You circumvented their TOS, by using an alt account to evade a ban on a subreddit. That's why they banned you from Reddit itself.

[–] Lugh 1 points 8 months ago

There are a few other new heavy lift rockets in development around the world. Some people think Spacex's Starship will make them obsolete, but it doesn't seem like it will be ready anytime soon.

[–] Lugh 2 points 8 months ago

If someone can build robotic systems that are entirely made up of 3D printed components, that seems very possible.

[–] Lugh 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A lot like Uber, in other words. But replicating a ride-hailing network with a 14-year head start will be no easy feat, especially considering the scale Uber has achieved.

I don't get the logic here. If you have The fleet of robotaxis, it seems the software to run them it's the easy part. Loads of competitors to Uber have equally good software. The bottle neck here is the supply of robo-taxis. The journalist writing this has also ignored the fact cheap Chinese cars will probably be what will dominate this space ultimately.

[–] Lugh -3 points 8 months ago

I've been familiar with his ideas for years, even though intellectually I could see they were true, emotionally I always felt they were science-fiction. Now this is starting to look like science-fact.

[–] Lugh 20 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Like Covid, it seems humans have to wait until disaster is right on their doorstep, before they pull themselves together to do something about it.

[–] Lugh -4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

For anyone familiar with the ideas behind what Ray Kurzweil called 'The Singularity', this looks awfully like it's first baby steps.

For those that don't know, the idea is that when AI gets the ability to improve itself, it will begin to become exponentially more powerful. As each step will make it even better, at designing the next generation of chips to make it more powerful.

[–] Lugh 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The model family is "a new suite of state-of-the-art multimodal models trained solely with next-token prediction," BAAI writes. "By tokenizing images, text, and videos into a discrete space, we train a single transformer from scratch on a mixture of multimodal sequences".

Every single time it looks like closed Big Tech AI systems might steal a lead, open source is never far behind snapping at their heels. Now it seems it's the same story with multi-modal AI.

[–] Lugh 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I wonder what number of these will be robo-taxis in the next 18 months? Uber recently partnered with BYD to introduce 100,000 robo-taxis in Abu Dhabi and Singapore. When it gets to those kind of numbers in the US the wider public will really start to notice the driving job losses. Some day the shoe is going to drop, and people will realize all human driving jobs are on the way out forever.

[–] Lugh 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is the UK contemplating tariffs on Chinese EVs?, if not that will be one of the few advantages of Brexit, as the EU has just agreed to mandate them.

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