Recently I've been using AI for some stuff that service providers don't want it to be used for (specifically: medical diagnosis). I found that Grok (4.1) is superior to most of the others when it comes to this, because it doesn't go out of its way to support my own hypotheses.
I believe that syncophancy and guardrails will be major differentiators between LLM services, and the ones with less of those will always have a fan base.
I'm using Gemini in general, but Grok too. That's because sometimes Gemini Thinking is too slow, but Fast can get confused a lot. Grok strikes a nice balance between being quite smart (not Gemini 3 Pro level, but close) and very fast.
For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
> I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
Well he did change Google fundamentally. Imagine being so dense you're fumbling to a competitor built on a technology that you innovated .
That being said, I'm still long Google because they're the tortoise. And this is one of those races where slow and steady might actually win. And while I was a strong critic of Pichai on a lot of fronts (just check my past comments!), he still must be given due credit for his measured approach and for navigating Google through some of the roughest regulatory environments, and for leaving Google relatively unscathed.
My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.
Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.
This is exactly how sound studios do mixing. They don't just use top-end monitors -- they generally also listen on low-end speakers that color sound in a way that's representative to what people have at home (hello, Yamaha NS-10).
People used to buy NS-10s because they knew professional studios used them. They were then underwhelmed when they sounded worse than the hifi speakers they had at home.
Many audio engineers live by the mantra "if it sounds good on NS-10s, it'll sound good on anything".
It'd be moving touchstone is the problems, speakers in the consumer space don't evolve as fast as computing tech in the user space.
You could get somewhat close by looking at what was a middle of the road consumer laptop from Dell/HP/Lenovo 5 years ago and buying one of those though.
I think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.
It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of those'.
In my experience you still have to provide an awful lot of "evidence". I guess the advsntage of AWS/GCP/Cloud is that they are so ubiquitous you could literally ask an LLM to generate fake evidence to speed up the process.
> I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure
Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and so on.
> I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage
The storage template is nothing like managing your photos within the app, moving them to different, more specific, folders. All it does is allow a type of folder structure on the main drive where the upload directories are, but if you have a more specific file structure, it doesn't allow you to manage this.
Does this make Immich effectively function like Photoview? My current Immich by default stores my uploads in an `uploads/<UUID>/<bunch of random two character folders>` structure. This was a huge disappointment after moving from Photoview.
Example: if user IDs are not random but eg Bigserial (autoincremented) and they're exposed through some API, then API clients can infer the creation time of said users in the system. Now if my system is storing eg health data for a large population, then it'll be easy to guess the age of the user. Etc. This is not a security problem, this is an information governance problem. But it's a problem. Now if you say that I should not expose these IDs - fine, but then whatever I expose is essentially an ID anyway.
I really don’t think using primary keys publicly is ever good, just because UUID4 has allowed people to smash junk into the URL doesn’t mean it’s good for the web or the users over a slug or a cleaner ID.
I definitely don't think so. You're seeing companies who have a lot of publicity on the internet. There are tons of very successful SMBs who have no real idea of what to do with AI, and they're not jumping on it at all. They're at risk.
I believe that syncophancy and guardrails will be major differentiators between LLM services, and the ones with less of those will always have a fan base.
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