The innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.
Exactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum technology then maybe this article would have a point. But they were building stuff for the military and for space, and there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in better vacuum cleaners.
Well it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.
Hardware is not like software. A general purpose humanoid cleaning robot will be superior to a robot vacuum but it will always cost an order of magnitude more. This is different from software where the cost exponentially decreases and you can do the computer in the cloud.
I'm not sure advancements in AI and advancements in vacuum cleaners are at similar stages in terms of R&D. I'd be very wary of trying to apply lessons from one to the other.
They had pretty drastic price cuts on Opus 4.5. It's possible they're now selling inference at a loss to gain market share, or at least that their margins are much lower. Dario claims that all their previous models were profitable (even after accounting for research costs), but it's unclear that there's a path to keeping their previous margins and expanding revenue as fast or faster than their costs (each model has been substantially more expensive than the previous model).
It wouldn't surprise me if they found ways to reduce the cost of serving Opus 4.5. All of the model vendors have been consistently finding new optimizations over the last few years.
Well how much of it is correlation vs causation. Does the next generation of model unlock another 10x usage? Or was Claude 3 "good enough" that it got traction from early adopters and Claude 4 is "good enough" that it's getting a lot of mid/late adopters using it for this generation? Presumably competitors get better and at cheaper prices (Anthropic charges a premium per token currently) as well.
It's more like the patient needs some fixed amount of food each day and it doesn't make a lot of sense to create lots more food than they need on the hopes that someday they'll want to eat more than they can.
If the argument is that everyone should focus on the arts at the expense of everything else, it's hard to imagine that's an ideal outcome relative to alternatives. If we're not arguing that everyone should focus 100% on the arts (no other degrees should be available), then it's a matter of degree and certainly some outcomes might end up with more people pursuing the arts than what society needs.
It's much more conservative in the scope of task it will attempt and it's much slower. You need to fire and forget several parallel tasks because you'll be waiting 10+ minutes before you get anything you can review and give feedback on.
If it's not astroturfing, the people who are so vocal about it act in a way that's nearly indistinguishable from it. I keep looking for concrete examples of use cases that show it's better, and everything seems to point back to "everyone is talking about it" or anecdotal examples that don't even provide any details about the problem that Gemini did well on and that other models all failed at.
If I give you hundreds millions of dollars for just making a clone of something that exists (an LLM) and hype the shit out of it, how far would you go?
I read an interesting article recently about Thiel's, Musk's and Sacks' common career paths, views and ambitions.
One point that stuck out for me was how all three of them had spent a significant part of their childhood in Apartheid-era South Africa, as part of the white ruling class (so learned of Apartheid as a good thing or even had family that belonged to the ruling class). This is well-known for Musk, but I think less so for Thiel and Sacks.
Seems to me that gives their ultra-libertarian, "anti-woke", pro-inequality views another context.
This kind of proves the point? Presumably your mother didn't buy the latest phone for "continuity" or camera improvements. The features and additional hardware improvements might be noticeable after being used, but are they driving sales to people who aren't tech enthusiasts?
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