"Commoditizing your complement" is a convenient market phenomenon when it happens, but it's not a hard rule that everything that should be a commodity lands in the window of incentives that result in this strategy being the self-serving optimum for a company. Usage of "should" here can be interpreted as "would be most beneficial to the largest number of people in terms of cumulative productivity" or "not having this be commoditized leads to terrible incentives that harm a lot of people." There's no guarantee at all that it ends up being most profitable to individual market actors to attempt to commodify LLM compute, and in fact they seem more interested in securing legal moats and protected monopolies. You may think that reality will force this to fail via open source model releases from China or the like, but consider the world in which the US officially bans import and usage of all but specifically licensed and approved LLMs. The most powerful companies and people here seem broadly aligned on wanting that, so it's not implausible. Sure, you as an individual could illegally import and run an unsanctioned LLM yourself, but most people won't do that, and attempts to scale it would be beaten down with the force of law. The companies who strike deals will get 99+% of business and profit handsomely, no need to ever let their golden goose be commodified. It's a strictly better strategy if your government is dysfunctional enough to let it happen.
> but consider the world in which the US officially bans import and usage of all but specifically licensed and approved LLMs.
Then the US will fall behind China and, more importantly, from the rest of the countries in the world who refuse to lobotomize themselves in the manner you described.
There are also other cultural and political risks which, although delayed, may easily grow into something apocalyptic. Rich people building bunkers isn't just a fad, the outcome they envision isn't fiction, it might actually be a part of the plan, and while this is concerning it does make everything simpler.
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
There is an unbelievable amount of e waste created because OEMs locked the software down and stopped updating it. I have an android tablet which is functionally working but effectively useless.
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
I currently have Fable set on cleaning up the work of smaller models to bring my code up to standards I'd feel comfortable developing on manually. Y'know, for when they decide I don't get to use it anymore.
Even the aspirational use cases you're talking about basically are just "digital secretary." There's a massive problem with that even if the models end up being capable in the future. The value of a secretary is that you know them, they know you, and you trust them to do things right. There are stakes if they don't. No company can provide that as a service at scale for everyone without it being a disaster. Not because it's not technically possible, but because of the incentives. That much power over the details of so many people's lives is irresistible; there will be persistent temptation to use it. The presence of that possibility makes the secretary impossible to trust.
The vast majority of people never even asked for a personal assistant, because that isn’t something normal people have or do need in the first place. They aren’t so occupied/privileged/posh to need someone to do the trivial tasks of daily life for them.
This whole venue of technology is an exercise in ivory tower construction completely disconnected from ordinary people.
They never asked for one becase they never imagined being able to afford one.
The amount of administration organizing a normal household takes I suspect most would be glad to leave to someon/something they trust and that can be held accountable.
Today that someone needs to be a person (imo). But who knows, a startup may be plotting accountable digital assistans as we speak.
I would want someone who could physically work in my house, performing the chores/daily tasks I don't want to.
I have zero use for AI. What's it going to do? Read the 3 emails about bills I get?
Certainly someone out there has a use for this functionality, but when you say "household admin tasks" the last thing I think about are /digital/ admin tasks.
I think theres some real use cases in the household department. I would love an AI that I just tell my nutrition goals (I want to eat X calories, Y protein, Z fiber, hit all vitamins) and it just generates a full meal plan for me each day. Like, I go to the store and it made the complete shopping list for me. And automatically updates the rest of the day if I tell it I skipped a meal or ate a snack.
I get where you're coming from but at least for me you appear to be looking to automate away the interesting bits while being left with the tedious ones. What I want is the opposite to what you're asking for - let me dump a rough meal plan into whatever thing is doing this giving an overview of what meals I want to cook this week and then have it go place an order with the supermarket for delivery of the necessary ingredients taking into account what I've got in the house already.
People with eating disorder do not want to think about it, they cant stop thinking about it. They create all kinds of systems for themselves, but mind cant stop - and restrictions grow.
Pretty sure unaccountability is a desired feature of management decisions in most organisations.
That quote has an unexpressed precondition to the effect of "In order for an organisation to be objectively well run..." or "In order for an organisation to equitably benefit all stakeholders at all levels..." etc
Giving normal people something that has only been available to rich people is a staple of technological innovation. The problem in this case with Siri isn’t that people don’t want an assistant. It’s that it doesn’t actually work yet.
But normal people have entirely different problems than rich people do! The amount of administrative overhead that would warrant a personal assistant is just vastly lower - most normal people:
- don't travel frequently,
- don't have so many complex inquiries that require someone to research,
- don't have super complicated taxes to file,
- don't go eating out in fancy restaurants that require special skills to get reservations in,
- don't have so many meetings to attend,
- don't receive hundreds of emails per day,
- don't work on multiple projects at the same time,
- don't organise festivities and social gatherings all the time.
Yeah, there probably are some things that could be simplified by delegating to someone, but they don't justify a human PA at all; and out of the remaining tasks, most are not really digital in nature: Going for groceries, doing chores, child and elderly care, interacting with other people, and so on. Digital assistants can't help you with any of these.
The one thing that would be useful - a kind of "chief of staff" that monitors your entire digital life and prioritises your every next step - is the antithesis to Siri and the like, which are merely reactive to your requests, not proactive in figuring out what needs your attention next. Let alone that that would be a total privacy nightmare, and a prime candidate for mass manipulation at scale.
Like you said, the non-digital things are where people need assistance most. Fold my laundry, clean my house, clean my car, make me dinner. At an affordable cost. I don't need you to book my trip to an all inclusive resort that I go on once a year at most.
We're at this place where AI/LLMs is truly incredible technology, but the futuristic vision of robot assistants doing things for you at an attainable cost isn't there yet - so a lot of companies/startups are trying to force feed purely digital consumer AI products (assistants/agents) that no one wants.
In the US, every time I file my taxes, I wonder what % of people don't meet the cognitive barrier to successfully file. I suspect a large portion of people offload tax filing to a service or accountant for numerous reasons, which is basically a personal assistant.
Personally, I'd more interested in Reminders actually being able to sync lists properly and not delayed or reshuffling items while I'm typing before they would work on a personal assistant. Reminders (like Siri) has become the favorite joke of the family by now.
They don't even seem to get the basics right, why would I want another layer on top?
it's an interesting question if any of the AI companies would be willing to step up and absorb the risk ie: to give the AI agent a "stake".
eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me. It would sort of just come down to buying premium travel insurance for everyone that uses it. And insurance for anything else they do. It has to be one of two things - they either believe the risks are worth it (so then there should be a financial model that can absorb the cost of insurance to do it), or in fact, the risks are too great. At some point, if they keep offering the tech on a "use at your own risk" basis, they are implicitly communicating that they themselves think the risks are too great - so YOU shouldn't trust it either.
> eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me
That would be nice, but it's the wrong angle. The reason people like real secretaries is not because somebody is compensated when things go wrong. It's because things don't go wrong. I don't use this thing if I need to fear things go wrong, even if I'd be compensated.
Maybe it would provide the right incentives for the companies though.
Surely, if the compensation was high enough, you'd be like, "Sure, I'm happy with that outcome." And then, if the AI company thinks they have a low enough failure rate that the expected cost of paying out the compensation still lets them make a profit, then they could make that promise to all customers.
Though a compensation that high sounds like it would invite fraud, where the customer would be glad to have something go "wrong" and get a fat check. Not sure if that's a solvable problem.
they are literally burning billions of dollars and can presumably keep doing this for a while. Taking a trivial amount of additional financial liability to launder their reputation wouldn't meaningfully improve things.
These use cases will just be built as "open source" (openclawd) or even custom one off application in the future. I've been building apps to run the tedious parts of my life recently. Meal planning, personal finance, bills, tax organization... Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build a app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon. Yes the code is shit and it wouldn't scale... But it doesn't need to
I don't see any mention of "the market" anywhere in this thread. I'm just talking about the ability for a motivated user to solve real problems with these tools. Right now these solutions are available to software developers but over time it will become approachable to more users
A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.
Really? Europe looks primed to follow the US, just a few steps behind. They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation, and are even ahead of us on cultural decline with respect to mass surveillance being used to actively police speech. What moves have they been making that you think indicate an upward trend? How are they going to recover from stagnation and demographic collapse?
Europe seems to be backtracking on some of their far-right flirtations after seeing the idiocracy in the US. Orban was voted out in Hungary after decades in power. Meloni in Italy is often described as far right but her party also strongly supports the EU, NATO and Ukraine.
France is quite likely to put the far-right in power next year, don't get your hopes up. I wish it wouldn't happen but a lot of people seem like they will not vote in a runoff between a far-right candidate and a left-wing (too left for the regular right) or right-wing (too right-wing for the left) candidate. It's absurd but not much one can do about it...
Mass deportation of who? The far right governments of most EU countries just play on basic fear tactics, none of them will ever do anything remotely close to your mass deportation fantasies. The most hardcore things they'll do is apply the laws which already exists regarding foreign people committing crimes and people illegally entering, and even that isn't given
Just look at the post brexit UK or Meloni's Italy...
Trump, at the end of the day, deported about as many people as Obama. He just made a huge song and dance about it. (And blew the military budget of Saudi Arabia while doing it to boot.)
> They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation
No amounts of deportations meaningfully affect the demographics. They can at most slow down the new immigration. For all his bluster, Trump deported barely more people than the long-term average in 2025.
But more importantly, the "far right" in Europe is far less crazy than in the US, and they support re-establishing local industry.
> police speech
Europe has never had absolutely free speech like the US. It's by design.
I see, thanks for confirming that you're just an ignorant troll. Your post history confirmed that once more. It does make me curious. Where do you drink your Kool-Aid that gives you these "opinions"?
- Computers can do as much work as they want to automatically, so long as none of it touches a network boundary.
- Any time a computer wants to touch the network it must be explicitly initiated by a human action.
Sort of like how in browsers capturing the mouse or entering fullscreen mode requires a trusted user action and isn't something a page can do unilaterally, but broader. This also means that the extent of the network communication must be made explicit and clear with no chance of misunderstanding by the user. If what you're doing is genuinely complex beyond your ability to communicate to your target user then you shouldn't be doing it on the behalf of that user. Note that this only really applies to mass consumer products, not something built/deployed internally.
I feel like if a hard boundary is not set around this we will end up in a Panopticon. Set aside governments actively pushing for it, it seems a simple profit motive in a digital era yields this outcome. Maybe nuanced rules would produce better outcomes in theory, but humans don't seem great at sticking to nuanced and fiddly rules when there's strong incentive to bend them beyond recognition.
Yes that would be great. Right now, there are many applications that use pinned certificates to communicate to servers meaning there is literally no way to see the data your own device is sending/receiving from the internet. It's an insane thing that should be banned.
There is one way, you can modify the app or the OS to change which certificate is pinned, ignore all certificate failures, lie about the certificate in use, log encryption keys, or not even ask the app whether it likes the certificate.
I don't think that's it. Armed resistance is not realistic, and is probably actively counterproductive compared even to unarmed but violent resistance to occupation. This is because you're not going to "win" in a military sense, it's a battle for hearts and minds, and optically protestors firing at State forces is really really bad.
I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against mass deportations they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an economic miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.
In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.
Not sure why you seem to think people would need to resist the government rather than, more simply, the relatively small number of billionaires who purchase and pervert it.
I don't know what you're suggesting. How would widespread gun ownership help with the government being subverted by oligarchs? Vigilante justice? Wouldn't change anything for the better. More paranoid billionaires would just start running things from private compounds and transit between in private jets and armored convoys. That's not a far step from what many do now, and would be extremely powerful social pretext for authoritarian crackdown.
I think the part that's the issue is the one where they mandate age verification. They're going to try that either way, the worst thing this could do is get people accustomed to the idea, but in practice the operating system they use already asked their age.
It's the State's responsibility once something affects enough people. That's why a law like this makes sense but should exempt OSes under some number of users. It's not great that we have such a harsh divide between "do whatever you want so long as not too many people are bothered" and "alright now the people have spoken and it's a State/national law," but it's the system we have and better than the people only getting a say with their wallets.
This conversation makes me wonder if age verification at the system level could be considered an externality for its cost to society as a whole, and the solution be to collect tax from any commercial sale of a desktop OS that doesn't implement a defined open standard. If there is any money raised it could be used for eg. education pieces on harm and harm reduction
Maybe it doesn't work in this case, but I think you both make great points. Just feel like there must be a way of bridging this gap
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