it's a good default because you really do get prompted incessantly without it. and since plenty of people are going to be using auto mode anyway, might as well make it as widely-used as possible so that you can focus on making auto mode safe.
does anyone have a data-backed reason as to why US market share has capped out around 10%? is it economics + lack of access to chinese EVs? range anxiety?
We have just about the cheapest gasoline in the developed world. Partly because we make it here, and partly because we refuse to raise taxes on it. (The federal tax was last raised in 1993. It has be 18 cents per gallon ever since.)
If gas were 2 to 4 times as expensive, as it is in much of Europe, there would be a lot more demand for electric cars.
It doesn't help that we exclude all of the new BEVs from China, which are considerably less expensive.
And there it is, we're keeping competition out of the states to protect our auto industry, instead of giving we consumers other options. I've rented cars in Aus/New Zealand, if I lived there I'd own an EV, hands down.
The only way to make our auto makers change is to "make" them change by competition. Consumers want this change, why else do we buy so many Japanese cars? (Beside the fact they are superior.)
EVs continue to be expensive in the US. But the trajectory is the opposite in the rest of the world due to the benefit of Chinese exports. In Brazil, for example, new car prices have a now a discount of up to $10K, all due to increased competition from China.
I’d guess a greater percent of car owners in the US are working class. A lot of cities car modal share is like 85% or higher which shows how much car ownership is democratized in the US compared to asia or eu, where ownership might be higher relative income and more able to afford new ev premium prices vs cheap used gas cars.
Another interpretation of the high modal share of cars in the US is that there are no viable alternatives to driving in many US cities. In Europe, public transport and biking are viable forms of transportation, so we're not forced into car ownership to participate in society (although the situation can definitely still be improved further). I believe this to be a more "democraticed" outcome than an inescapable 85% modal share for cars.
There are people in those cities that don’t have cars and might rely on bussing, biking, sourcing rides from others. That being said you can get cheap cars in the US really easily.
We're talking about new cars, which in the US the average price of is $50K. The working class tends to buy used cars, of which 3 times more than new cars are sold each year.
Doesn’t matter the price really. People will lease new cars for a couple hundred a month. Or finance them to about that monthly. No one is paying $50k day one. This makes it so people you wouldn’t expect to afford a 50k asset actually do have one, because they can afford to part with like $200/mo.
You brought up the working class as sensitive to price and now you say they aren't. That doesn't seem like a logically consistent position but maybe I'm not understanding what you are saying.
And range/charging infrastructure. The middle of the US is large and mostly rural. There's no charging infrastructure to speak of. But even the smallest towns at least have a gas station.
I agree distillation isn't illegal; I also think Moonshot/Kimi is very impressive. But the more interesting question is whether labs like Moonshot can be a real competitor to OpenAI/Anthropic. If you can only play catchup (however quickly you do that), then you're never going to be at the frontier - I think that's why distillation matters.
my assertion isn't that china isn't able to surpass western AI. I think it may well happen. I've been to china many times and am well aware of how ahead they are in many technological/societal areas.
at the same time, I don't buy the idea that distillation is unimportant in assessing what Chinese labs are capable of. If it wasn't, why did Kimi's release timing coincide so well with Fable's launch?
and if Anthropic hadn't released Fable, would we have Kimi today? If the answer is no, then I think that's still a very important point to consider.
Spot-on and you're asking the right questions. And the other problem in these comments is that folks seem to think if China pulls ahead we can't just distill their models, provided that distillation is a key part of "this". If it's such a great strategy we'll just use it too if we want to. Boom roasted.
For some reason folks seem to think that China can take action and then other countries can't also take action or respond to that action and it comes up again and again. China has hypersonic missiles! Pack it up boys time to go home. Nothing we can do. Dang shucks. China distilled American AI models, welp time to just close it all down and let's just write off those trillions of dollars and all the literal geniuses financing and building these things. Oh well China can just copy American models while we spend all the money! Ok we just stop developing models and we'll just copy their models. China will flood the market with their cheap products! Nope can't do anything like, oh, idk, not buy any of those products or just raise the prices on them in local markets. It's never-ending. I don't understand the lack of capacity to reason about other actors that takes commonly takes place. And that's just China, never mind other general issues.
> and if Anthropic hadn't released Fable, would we have Kimi today? If the answer is no, then I think that's still a very important point to consider.
That works both ways, competition and performance spur new developments. You don't think the American labs are looking at Chinese research on how to reduce compute per token?
So many of the breakthroughs and architecture that make LLMs powerful in general today came from China, especially ones related to sparsity and MoE that have made inference and training substantially cheaper.
Let's not forget how much people talked about "prompt engineering" before Deepseek mainstreamed the idea of thinking mode which is now universal
I think it depends on where you think we are on the S curve of intelligence growth. (Yes, I think it's an S curve, not an unbounded exponential). If you think we're near the peak than playing catch up (especially if you can play catch up quickly) is very rational.
I know this isn't exactly a scientific test, but I had a local Qwen 3.6 27B model implement a fairly sizable feature today. There were a couple of bugs, mostly around me not giving sufficient specifications, but they were ironed out quickly when I pointed it out. I was able to ask the model to create instructions so next time it doesn't fall into the same pitfalls, and it did a great job. 27B local model! (And it was super fast too).
I ran Fable 5 as a code review and it didn't really have any significant corrections.
I guess my point here is that, for most work the frontier models are probably overkill anyway, and improving on overkill in a way that raises prices significantly is probably not a winning strategy.
The only place I can think of where the super high powered models are "required" is if you want to do a ridiculous token burn like GasTown where you just have it run un-monitored on very long tasks. To me though, that's an experiment, not a real workflow. And the way these labs are like "oh we made this (broken) thing in a week using just agents!" always also follows with "and it cost $100,000+ in tokens!". Like, ok, I get it if you're doing research but that's the salary of an entire person.. that can actually learn and improve.
> But the more interesting question is whether labs like Moonshot can be a real competitor to OpenAI/Anthropic.
The answer depends on whether you think the AI researchers at Chinese labs are (or can be) as smart, motivated, and as good at math as those working at US labs - a not-insignificant proportion of whom are Chinese nationals.
don't think it's a societal problem; it's just a direct result of capitalism. and while capitalism causes all sorts of huge problems, it might also be the best of the options we've got
Recently I had the realization that a lot of people see economy as something completely decoupled from society. Capitalism is both completely unrelated with people and the result of people's innate desires. The UBS discussions are a funny one for me. Capitalism is supposedly the best way to manage limited resources, but we would still need it in a supposed utopia where recourses are in abundance. I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.
> I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.
You want the technical, mathematical, reason for that? The short version is that for society as a whole, prices are information. How many fields should be filled with grain plants? How many with flowers? How many factories should make cars? Phones? Tv furniture? How much fuel goes to heating? How much to transporting old people to the hospital and back?
I hope that can explain, if "society" gets that information more than a tiny bit wrong ... very bad things will happen. VERY bad things. People will die, lots of them, and quickly, if you get it wrong.
I hope it also makes it clear that for society as a whole, money isn't a "real" limit. Rather it's a tool that makes the actual limits clear. If we make 50% more bread, how do we make that not affect how many heart surgeries can be done?
Capitalism has many advantages, the strongest of which, in my opinion, is that it simply imposes a cost on lying. You can lie about production, about prices, but it'll cost you. It is resilient against the bane of so many other systems: it is extremely resilient against people trying to sabotage it, because everyone has an incentive to undo or bypass sabotage. In other systems like communism or slavery the people doing work have an extreme incentive to lie, and the only break on that is violence against workers. But the state fundamentally has no idea if you're lying or not, so that violence will be mostly random. It can't be directed against the people actually causing problems in society.
Thanks for taking the time to answer, I really appreciate that. About the pricing, isn't that the same as managing scarce resources? In a supposed AGI utopia, why would society still need it? To be clear, I get your point. I'm not against capitalism, I just don't get why it would be needed when resources are unconstrained
Gridmatic | Product engineer + data engineer | 175-235k + equity | Cupertino, CA (hybrid)
Hi HN! We’re an energy + AI startup that applies modern deep learning and optimization to improve the use of renewables and grid-scale batteries to deliver cheap, clean energy to commercial/industrial customers. We also do energy trading and battery optimization.
Roles:
- Data engineer: we're hiring our first data eng! Looking for a startup-minded SWE to work on both ingest and transformation of datasets that power our best-in-class ML models for energy forecasting.
- Product engineer: our energy sales have been growing rapidly and we want to 10x it from here, which involves building a lot of tooling to make sales more automated. This tends to be backend/data heavy, but will also have some frontend (NextJS/React/Typescript).
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What sticks out to me most is that humanity consistently fails to weed these creatures out and regulate society. It's a bug in our social software; we seem to like these broken people rather than recognize that they're a liability.
This isn’t a bug. It’s the driving force of our capitalist society. We are not trying to weed them out. We are trying to encourage them. It’s pretty simple, when they get rich, so do all their investors.
I don't know if it's guaranteed to work, but the strategy is real. I know Notion won vs. competitors in the space because they focused on consumer first, and consumers then brought Notion into their workplaces.
I am amused that you think IT is going to respond to an unmanaged LLM tool that operates outside of the LLM policies all serious enterprises have set up by now and say 'wow, that is cool and maybe we should buy in to this!'
What is going to happen is that the emplyee who tries to sneak OpenAI into our org is going to have two meetings set up by the end of the day, one with IT to ensure the whatever tool they installed is burned out with fire and one with HR to ensure they know the company policy and acknowledge that another fuck-up like this is a firing offense.
Isn't that exactly how the iPhone won though? As another commenter said, once the cool gadget becomes a must have for executives, IT will be told to find a way to make it work.
I think Prisma does type-safe ORM really well on the typescript side, and was sad it doesn't seem to be super supported in python. This feels sort of similar and makes a lot of sense!
