Smartphone is required for everything there, yes. Signing up for services, authenticating yourself (e.g. when entering a train station), payment, social media, etc.
Computers used to be expensive and people had less money back then, so most of the country essentially just directly upgraded to smartphones. Many don't and never used to own a PC outside of work.
I think the endgame is a shift toward a platform of services that tightly bind users to a single LLM provider.
Right now, many small startups are essentially just thin wrappers around ChatGPT. Once it becomes clear which ideas and solutions gain real traction, providers like OpenAI/Anthropic can simply roll out those features natively removing any need for a third party.
In a sense, a lot of what happened with the mobile market. For example, there's no need for a QR scanner or document scanner app anymore, if your phone starts to offer it natively.
Does anyone else remember how we used to have flash light apps all over the playstore and how they quickly varnished once the feature was implement natively?
Almost everything in ios since ios1 has been a sort of in house copy of a jailbroken tweak. I feel like that is just how these huge companies actually innovate featuresets now. No one has agency to drive change from within, so they see what the community has built and is using and shamelessly copy it as it. Easier to sell to management that you should steal an already bright idea than to try and prove your own novel idea is worth pursuing.
This seems correct to me. I'm unusually appreciative of vertical integration (life-long Apple user, etc.), and I can already feel the vendor lock-in tightening. I have no need for anything other than my ChatGPT subscription, and adding other tools appears to offer marginal gain at double the cost.
This type of bundling appears to be one of the strongest forces in the economy today, and I think comes about consistently due to a confluence of efficiencies of scale, coordination, and second-order effects of prestige (being able to hire and pay large numbers of outlier high performing employees, etc.)
I've learned not to bet against it, except in niche areas.
>Zelensky implied Russia would invade the U.S. Do you think that’s likely?
He did not. What he did say is, that should Russia start to expand the war to other countries (as is very likely if Ukraine falls), these effects will be felt by the people in the US.
That statement is obviously true. The effects of the Ukraine war could also be felt, as it affected the economy across the globe.
Be concrete. Which countries and what effects? Berlin is less than 1,000 miles from Moscow. Why aren’t they spending 5% of GDP on defense if this is a real threat?
The rules aren’t that hard but actually applying it to code and honing it to consistently pull exactly what you want is in my experience the hardest part.
I quite liked ReadEra. Scans your phone for all epubs, allows grouping and organizing them, but most importantly, has a good looking, customizable reading interface.
I think they are best at information extraction/classification tasks, especially for complex tasks with little to no training data, and data synthesis tasks. However, you should always test if simpler models can already perform the task reasonably well to save money.
They underperform at anything that requires reasoning.
Just talking about the software-side of things:
I think they actually have been adding very neat features with the past few updates. Automatic image OCR, so you can copy/paste text, inserting text via camera, the transformer-based keyboard and such are small, but very useful features.
I much prefer that over Microsoft's way of adding a new UI that can do less than previous iterations, while also being less performant and tons of half-baked features like their newly-planned Copilot, still unfinished Android subsystem, worse search, etc.
Of course, neither approach is perfect, but I actually prefer system that change little on the surface and mainly adds small, but well-integrated features over time. Not saying Apple is perfect (there's tons that could be done regarding user freedom on iOS, backwards-compatibility and gaming), but neither are the competitioners.
Even you are still personifying the model. There is no motivation. An input sentence is multiplied by a series of weights and the resulting output vector transformed back into a text.
At the end of the day, it's a program like any other. There are no emotions or a consciousness.
That's why I put "motivation" in quotes. Also I was talking about training, where you compute a cost function and back propagate error. This is somewhat analogous to "motivation".
Most of the time I try it to use it, the website won't allow me to use the '+' in an email or will never send the verification mail to activate my account.
Computers used to be expensive and people had less money back then, so most of the country essentially just directly upgraded to smartphones. Many don't and never used to own a PC outside of work.