New post format: a weekly rollup of links, comments on those links, activity updates and attempts at humor. The intention is quicker hits in addition to the less frequent big posts and more timely hammering on my favorite themes. This is my primary hangout until the contours of the post-Twitter world become clear. Be sure to subscribe below and to the right to receive all my output via email.
Note that my poor, overtaxed server struggles to serve up all the images to email users at the same time, so if you don’t see images, be sure to click through. Server upgrade in the works.
(Yet Another) European Regulation Too Far? OpenAI Edition
The day will come when, instead of accommodating increasingly surreal and uninformed bureaucratic edicts, companies may just decline to serve Europe or provide a neutered product.
“OpenAI chief Sam Altman has warned that Brussels’ efforts to regulate artificial intelligence could lead the maker of ChatGPT to pull its services from the EU”
Previous: A European Regulation Too Far?
(Yet Another) European Regulation Too Far? Meta Edition
The day will come when, instead of accommodating increasingly surreal and uninformed bureaucratic edicts, companies may just decline to serve Europe or provide a neutered product.
Forget Wartime or Peacetime CEO, Ask If US or European CEO
Sundar laying it on thick for the EU.
Previous: The Google Pivot Away from “AI-Safety First”
Do Not Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Chapter 149
Previous: Do Not Take a Dependency on Elon Musk
Be Very Afraid
I’m not sure if it bodes auspiciously or disastrously for Google, but their corpus includes 6,600 tokens from this blog (which is, admittedly, like half a post). While only 0.00004% of the dataset, it suggests their results will be overly adverb prone and suffer from (too many) parenthetical comments. The OpenAI corpus is untainted.
CAPEX Rules Everything Around Me: Dublin Edition
Microsoft shared some fun cloud CAPEX stats:
…we’ll now bring live more than 120 datacenters this calendar year alone. That’s one new datacenter every three days.
Now, our Azure region in Dublin is made up of many, many datacenters like this one, and in total size, is already over a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, and it already has two million square feet of datacenter floor space that’s already live, that you can deploy your workloads in today. And to put two million square feet in perspective, that’s the equivalent of 35 football stadiums in size, all just in one region inside Dublin.
And Dublin is less than 3% of our total datacenter footprint around the world today.
Previous: CAPEX
CAPEX Rules Everything Around Me: BritGPT Edition
British politicians want to build some data centers:
Keir Starmer should pledge £11bn towards building “BritGPT” and a national artificial intelligence (AI) cloud in the next Labour manifesto or risk the UK falling ever further into dependence on American tech companies, an affiliated thinktank has said.
“Building up to make a new cloud region,” the sort of investment a company such as Amazon or Google makes to launch their services, “costs in the region of £10bn.
Seeing Post Facto Red Flags Ex Ante
Q: Why do you suck as a ceo?
A: I’m too broadly good at a number of things, so I tend to step in rather than focus cause I’m a full stack kind of ceo, whereas I should just be focused on the most important things and entrust people more.
