I have first hand experience with this. It may look like a politically motivated move, but in the RF industry when you need something to pass, China is known to be much friendlier/lax than other labs.
For those who don't know, the point of these labs is to generate certified test results. The lab's job is to certify that the test was done correctly with calibrated test equipment. They then give you the results which you then give to the regulating body.
However, you are the one who knows your product and how it operates. You are present in the lab, in the room, doing the testing with them. This introduces a lot of grey area where a lab may or may not go along with what you say. Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands, and they know you probably have many other products that need certifying. It's mutually beneficial for them to be lax.
> Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands,
Are the engineering firms going to Chinese labs because of their rubber stamp approval or because the process is “tens of thousands” as opposed to “hundreds of thousands”?
It's cheaper and they are friendlier. They don't rubber stamp, the tests are still done, but if you are struggling to get over a .5dB hurdle they will "work with you" to snuff it out.
The tests can be 100+ parameters and every single one is a hard binary pass/fail. So a mouse fart over the line on one test and you are not compliant. Go home, re-engineer, hope you fixed the issue (it's basically impossible to test for without a full dedicated RF testing chamber), and pay for a whole new testing run.
This is where the Chinese labs come in to play, as upon seeing your .5dB issue, they may feel that maybe their antenna placement was slightly off, or maybe you say that actually the "center of noise" (a bs thing) on your product is 5cm away from the testing center point, and move it back from the antenna with a wink and a nod.
In western labs the people are just as friendly, but that antenna is definitely in the right spot, and your product goes in the same spot as everyone elses.
However you need to go to China to do all this. If you are big megacorp with huge resources, western labs are fine. If you are smaller and possibly will become insolvent if you cannot pass testing, China is the play.
If you are asking an LLM to cite it's sources you are wasting your time and degrading the quality of the response. LLMs have no inherent mechanism for "knowledge source tracking", because that isn't at all how they work. We're trying to get there with agentic stacks, but it's still too new.
For sparse knowledge tasks, where you know that the model can't possibly have much training because even humans themselves don't have much knowledge there, use it as a brainstorming partner, not as a source. Or put relevant papers in it's context to help you eval those papers in relation to your work. But it's just going to hurt itself in confusion trying to tie fuzzy ideas to sparse sources embedded in pages upon pages of mildly related google search results.
Tangential side story, but an interesting one none the less.
I was a food delivery driver back in the mid 00's to the mid teens. Early on, GPS was rare and expensive, so to do deliveries and do them effectively, you had to be able to read a map and mentally plan out efficient routes from the stochastic flow of orders coming out.
This acted as a natural filter, and "delivery driver" tended to be an interesting class of people, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of "lazy genius". Higher than average intelligence, lower than average motivation.
Then when smartphones exploded in the early 10's, the bar for delivering fell through the floor, and the job became swamped with people who would be best identified as "lazy unintelligent". Anyone who had a smartphone and not much life motivation was now looking to drive around delivering food for easy money.
Not saying the job was ever particularly glamorous, but it did have a natural mental barrier that tech tore down, and the result was exactly as one would predict. That being said, I'm not sure end users noticed much difference.
well, they think they don't. until their pii gets leaked all over the internet because whoops our s3 bucket was publicly accessible, or until the service goes down because whoops our llm deleted the prod db...
PII leaks are normalized now. Most people aren't even aware, or just shrug "oh well" and head to the app store to download the latest gacha game or whatever.
Holy crap, I only just saw your license agreement. Oh no. We've argued on here before, although this time we're in agreement. Please don't use this hidden license to dox me!
(It's an unenforceable joke, right? There's no way I'm bound by anything here other than maybe the site ToS.)
Many of of witnessed the technical literacy of the general population when we ran to show them ChatGPT 3.5, and they just kind of shrugged like "So? What are you showing me?"
This keeps coming up and I just want to point out that it's the result of one judge using the book rather than their brain to make a ruling.
Google asked (the appeals judge) why Apple was not a monopoly with the App store. The judge told Google it was because they cannot be anti-competitive if they have no competitors.
Google has a monopoly because of the internet's insistence on ad blocking, and outright indignant refusal to dare pay a greedy company for thinking they could ask for money for a "free" web service.
It's basically impossible to get off the ground competing against google when 30-40% of people are just freeloading your service, and 80-90% think the internet is an ethereal realm that everyone could have ad and subscription access to if we could only agree to starve these greedy middle men.
I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!).
For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies.
People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated.
I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG.
This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers).
We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet.
We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services.
The harsh reality is that conversion from "free" to paid is on the order of 1%. This is true for everything from patreon, to wikipedia, to kagi, to nebula, to home mailers for charity.
1% of the people pay, 60% watch ads, 39% are crusaders who conveniently are morally obligated to not pay or compensate for anything (but have their costs covered by the other two groups, who complain about ads/costs but somehow are blind to the dead weight they are dragging around).
Worst of all is that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out. YouTube creators talk about it in private, but they would never dare say anything on their channel. Ad blocking is practically a religion.
Do we need more than 1% conversion though? As long as the company is sustainable then that's sufficient to justify the company's existence. I think it says more about a lot of these services in that they're so shitty that they people will only use them if they're "free"; if Google or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok aren't good enough services to justify people paying for it, then maybe they shouldn't exist?
You can't use Kagi or Nebula without paying, so I don't really see how they're suffering from the free riders you keep insisting are some horrible epidemic. Almost by definition, if you're using Kagi or Nebula, you're already a conversion...are you saying a 1% conversion from advertising?
I have a collection of four hundred blu-rays and thousands of CDs. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime, I pay for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, and I don't use an ad blocker. I don't know if that falls into your criteria of "someone who can discuss this honestly", and of course I don't really have a means of "proving" this to you, but if you can assume I'm being truthful I don't think I'm speaking out of my ass here.
Then accept the equilibrium of Google being the god of the internet.
If people refuse to pay, refuse to view ads, and are happy to let the suckers like you (and me) carry the cost, then no one should be complaining about the impenetrable giants who reign over us. The internet can reap what it sowed. I'm burning 3GB a month loading ads on my phone so others can view ad free? Maybe I should petition the IRS to let me write it off as a charitable donation.
The story of Vid.me is excellent here, because they were actually on track to dethrone youtube. The hype was real and they genuinely were getting positive traction. Did youtube fight back? Did google sound the alarm? Was there any effort to keep creators on yt? No, no, and no. Why?
Because Google knew Vid.me would run out of runway, and that at heart, the users were just there for the free lunch. Vid.me went bankrupt and never made even a dollar from their "fans".
But there are companies that charge money and manage to be successful, as I stated.
Even before the internet most businesses failed. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for dumb reasons. Before people expected everything to be free. Pointing to a company that you liked failing doesn't really prove anything; there's always a billion variables that can contribute to corporate failures and saying "LOL PEOPLE WON'T PAY FOR THINGS AD BLOCK BAD I HAVE TO PAY BANDWIDTH" doesn't really say anything.
Just because you can find some companies that charged money and failed doesn't change my point at all. Netflix has become successful enough to be in the running to buy Warner Bros. Netflix is an internet-first company that doesn't do anything for free and yet it's getting to a point where it's able to buy a very large legacy media company. It has been competing with free YouTube content and ThePirateBay.
I don't see at all how this proves that I need to "accept the equilibrium of Google".
>it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out
It's generally not possible to have an honest conversation about something when one side sees the other's honest response as "going absolutely insane" :-)
No, Google had significant power over "who gets to buy and at what price" long before ad blocking caught on. Don't blame ad blockers for sabotaging your plan to get rich.
Anthropic wanted the ability to verify compliance whereas OAI and Google are fine with "trust us". Which is how it always is, and always has been.
For better or worse, the government is the one who audits, and has it's own internal systems for self audits. So no one except them tells them what they can or cannot do. The government would never put itself in a position where civilians died because Amodei didn't like the vibe of the case being worked.
In a way it's wild that people are upset that the government didn't put a billionaire megacorp CEO in the drivers seat of intelligence.
The only reason this blew up at all was because of the insane overreach by the DoW after anthropic voiced their concern.
It was well within anthropic right to do so, as it was part of their contract.
And it would've been very understandable that the DoW balked at that, though the real issue would be the incompetence how the contract was able to get through with that in it. But with that contact in place, the only sensible action would've been to terminate the contract and move on. Frankly, nobody would've cared.
But the DoW felt it just had to go further... And their chosen action was just an insane overreach - hence the controversy.
The goal of the cartel was to stabilize prices right in the sweet spot to keep the world addicted. Too low and players start losing money, too high and people switch away from oil, too much volatility, and people switch away from oil.
Only the non-competitive ones. That's how competition works.
OPEC would be deemed an illegal anti-consumer price fixing scheme under the laws of any country with even the most basic of anti-trust laws, if not for the fact that its entirely composed of sovereign countries not subject to any law but their own.
If the price is too low and fields stop being exploited because they're unprofitable, you reduce the volume produced each day. That means there's scarcity with a low price, and you're back at trying to switch en energy source because you just can't get oil.
That moves prices upward, because people are willing to pay more, but increasing production is not like turning the faucet in your home. It takes time. This is the instability of oil production that OPEC tries to prevent, to keep the world hooked on readily available just cheap enough oil.
In a free market "scarcity with a low price" is a contradiction. If there's scarcity the prices will be high, not low. And nobody's going to be reducing production if the prices are high.
> instability of oil production that OPEC tries to prevent
First of all, if the goal is to prevent instability OPEC is doing a terrible job. Secondly, a cartel is not needed to prevent price instability, as demonstrated by the hundreds of other commodity markets around the world which are not controlled by cartels engaging in price fixing schemes.
As with any cartel, the purpose of OPEC is to maximize profits for its members, artificially fixing the price of oil at a level higher than what it would otherwise be in a free market not controlled by a cartel. Price stability is a side effect of that, not the goal.
> First of all, if the goal is to prevent instability OPEC is doing a terrible job.
I mentioned this upthread, the instability OPEC is trying to prevent is civil unrest from not being able to fund their social programs and governments. They need a price that puts them in the black and the rest of the world will pay. If it was a free market the fracking boom would still be raging and oil would be $30/bbl. Many gulf nations would fall apart if oil was at that price for a long period of time hence the price manipulation. (I'm not sure how they got the frackers to ease up, some say many of the frackers were bought out by OPEC members and their wells capped but that's just conspiracy afaik)
> The goal of the cartel was to stabilize prices right in the sweet spot to keep the world addicted.
If the price of oil remains low the gulf governments can't fund their social programs and risk instability. That may not be the only reason for OPEC but it's a major one.
When fracking really took off the writing was on the wall and I think many OPEC nations have since taken serious measures to shield themselves from price drops. This is probably why the UAE can now feasibly leave OPEC. I thought the fracking boom was the end of OPEC but they managed to hang on.
Basically hallucinations are false external things, and delusions false internal things. You hallucinate a pink elephant, you delude yourself into thinking trump won 2020.
For those who don't know, the point of these labs is to generate certified test results. The lab's job is to certify that the test was done correctly with calibrated test equipment. They then give you the results which you then give to the regulating body.
However, you are the one who knows your product and how it operates. You are present in the lab, in the room, doing the testing with them. This introduces a lot of grey area where a lab may or may not go along with what you say. Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands, and they know you probably have many other products that need certifying. It's mutually beneficial for them to be lax.
reply