That's not really the impression I get from Anthropic, but if you have the links to back it up, I'm always willing to change my mind.
Compared to bizes like Oracle, Microsoft, or Facebook, I felt that Anthropic was more interested in progress (not to the neglect of business―AI training is expensive at the end of the day), but maybe I've just not seen what you've seen.
Ever calculate the cost of a computer in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation? Training is unfathomably expensive right now. What if a bunch of universities pooled their money? Or a bunch of nations pooled their money? Breakthroughs will eventually happen, optimization will occur, etc.
People questioned whether there could ever be a viable open source operating system, yet Linux has been a viable option for a desktop environment for decades now, and that's not to mention its ubiquitous use as a server or phone OS.
Yes, but have you seen what's happened to hardware improvements over the past 20 years?
From the 1960s to the mid-2000s, every 10 years you'd have a big enough improvement in computing power that you could basically throw out the old computers and replace them with two new ones that were each massive improvements for the same cost (this varied, of course, from hyperbole to massive understatement). We achieved this by shrinking transistors, so we could fit more onto the die. With that, we could dramatically increase clock speeds and the amount of RAM we could cram into a machine
But then we hit the wall of physics. Things haven't stopped improving since ~2015, but they've slowed down so, so much. We've made transistors so small that there's very little more improvement we can get by continuing down that path—they're already seeing serious quantum tunneling effects that need to be adjusted for.
We can no longer assume that we can just powerscale our way out of any computation-cost problem. And breakthroughs, by their very nature, cannot be relied upon—we have no guarantee that there's even a possible way to improve our silicon to scale the way we did before, let alone that it'll be something achievable this decade, or that it'll be cost-effective.
The bottleneck right now isn't making hardware more powerful, it's manufacturing it fast enough. Hardware right now is expensive because of scarcity, and those with a monopoly on it have no incentive to change that.
The Chinese would love to produce AI hardware much cheaper, but are blocked from doing so because US sanctions stop a Dutch company from selling them the machines capable of doing so. Coincidentally the companies with a monopoly happen to be in the US.
I think it also requires someone who knows just enough to be able to navigate between those ideas that will set you back and those which will propel you forward. At the end of the day, you still need some human filter.
In Japanese, you can get some visual puns depending on the writing system employed. That's harder to do in alphabetic language. The use of italics, bold, and underline font styles also extend the Latin alphabet.
You don't list contact info on your profile page to contact you with, but I'd love someone (other than Fable/a bot) to work on this with, and you're clearly a like minded individual, so reach out
I periodically see some misinformation here and elsewhere about writing systems, so I thought it opportune to post Omniglot. This old site (online since 1998) has just about all of the writing systems of the world, including most of constructed ones. Great site, very thorough, with sample sentences to boot.
"but probably not": Actually, probably so. The scholars who favor the indigenous explanation are a small minority outside of India. It's possible it was independent, but very, very doubtful, and none can explain the enormous gap in time between the Indus script and later Brahmic scripts.
What does it matter if some scholars are from outside of India? All I am seeing are conclusions from unstated assumptions that appear to be drawn from a bias.
My conclusions are coming directly from the Wikipedia articles that I linked to. If I am that wrong then edit the Wikipedia articles.
The Wikipedia articles say the majority of scholars believe it's based on Aramaic, while a minority of people (primarily non-linguistic-specialists in India) disagree. I think you're the one drawing from bias.
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