"I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries."
This reads like his objection is not on "autocratic", but on "adversaries". Autocratic friends & family are cool with him. A clear wink to a certain administration with autocratic tendencies.
Corporate statements like these get written very carefully. You can be certain that not a single word in these sentences has been placed there without considering what they do imply and what they omit.
I thought this was ambiguously worded in a beautiful way. At the moment, one could say that some autocratic adversaries of the United States and other democracies currently lead the government of the United States.
The US is already autocratic when it comes to people in many other countries, where the US government didn't like their democratically elected governments and decided to pick a new one for them instead.
China has been competing with India for decades for the most-polluted cities crown, and only slightly ranks below the US and Russia in CO2 emissions per capita. It's also the only large country where its emissions have been growing over the last decade. Where does the idea come from that China somehow puts less pressure on the environment? Less than what, exactly?
By slightly ranks below you mean ~50-60% per capital.
>China somehow puts less pressure on the environment
PRC renewables at staggering scale.
Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to MORE than annual global consumption of oil. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. That's fucking obscene amount of carbon sink, and frankly at full productionm annual PRC solar + wind can on paper displace 100% of oil, 100% of lng, and good % of coal (again annual utilization) once storage figured out.
This BTW functionally makes PRC emission negative, by massive margin, arguably the only country who is.
It's only retarded emission accounting rules that says PRC should be penalized for manufacturing renewables, but buyers credited AND fossil producers like US not penalized for extraction, which US has only increased.
Also, unlike US and Russia, China has green transition as an official policy. There are additional savings from total electrification. (I think they also care more about longterm and being closer to the equator and the sea, they better understand the consequences of global warming.)
That makes your argument a true scotsman, though. Western liberal ideals are the supreme ones, you're just not doing it right!
Much has been said about the purported superiority of western values, but as we've all seen the USA was very quick to get rid of even the slightest notion of these values when Trump promised them some money and a dominant vibe.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
No, my argument was that western liberal ideals are good. The commenter chimed in that some states which have historically held the mantle of western liberalism are losing their grip on it.
There's nothing contradictory or circular in both of those claims.
If someone were to present to me a better caretaker of western liberal ideals than the US and ask whether I would prefer AI empower them, the answer would be: yes.
And in fact, that is precisely what I am arguing. It is good that Anthropic, which so far has demonstrated closer adherence to western liberal ideals than the current US government, is pushing back on the current US government.
I also think it is good that Anthropic stands in opposition to China, which also does not embody western liberal ideals.
western liberal democracies tend to use "autocratic" as an epithet (though, i guess, there are fewer countries that marker is used against for which it's false now than ~50 years ago). for the first sentence, "the opposite" of western liberal ideas will yield 10 answers from 9 people :-)
France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2].
Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction.
It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word processor.
Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.
Not sure if you've worked in an office recently, but on google workspace I (we) use very regularly:
- Group Editing - this ones hard to get right
- Reviewing Tools
- Automated document generation
- Embedding of data-backed images from 3rd party tools
Looking at my wife who works in government, they use it even more heavily, with a lot of complicated formatting, numbering, standards etc going into each document, plus OneDrive collaborative features on top of that.
I suspect office-user people are where most of the features get used. Agreed, most people only use 15% of the features, but which 15% that is likely changes quickly person to person.
It doesn't need to be "most". "Some" or even "a few" can be enough to make a hell of a mess if those few have created documents that are key to the business in one way or another (proposals, end-user documentation, etc). And there are the other components to the suite like Powerpoint, Excel, and Project to consider.
So then act now, because the best time to act was yesterday, and the longer you wait the worse the mess and pain becomes. Not acting at all is not an option.
What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!
We all acknowledge the AI slop posts. The question is what fraction of the comments under the posts is also AI slop. And how long until we see AI-targetted ads, to manifest the Dead Internet Theory in its fullest.
> To me, if you look closely at (social media) influencers, they are nothing more than people who were popular in high school and managed to extend it for a few years with the use of social media.
That's a very superficial similarity. It's one thing for a kid wishing to be popular in their extended social circle, and a very different thing a young adult being convinced that they can "grind" their way to influencer fame and money.
The young adult may never have heard of or considered the extreme survivorship bias in the stories of successful influencers.
You make a good point. And what is wrong with kids wanting to become an actor? It seems fine to me. Most actors never make it big. They work a side hustle (waitor/waitress, etc.), then try-out for various roles. I have a brother who was a musician and artist for many years. He worked a variety of temp jobs in a big city ("office work") to fund his music/art lifestyle.
"I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries."
This reads like his objection is not on "autocratic", but on "adversaries". Autocratic friends & family are cool with him. A clear wink to a certain administration with autocratic tendencies.
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