I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.

This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven't been able to find applications.

We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they're not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.

On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don't really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).

So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I'm sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.

Edit: the potential application that people are most hopeful about is lidar; if, in the future, lidar gets integrated into consumer electronic devices like cellphones, then photonic crystal lasers will probably prove their usefulness.

Liability. Imagine an AI girlfriend who slowly earns your affection, then at some point manipulates you into sending bitcoins to a prespecified wallet set up by the model maker. Because models are black boxes, there is no way to verify by direct inspection that an AI hasn't been trained with an ulterior agenda (the "execute order 66" problem).

China is using subsidies to accelerate the green transition, exactly like the US is doing with the "Inflation Reduction Act" and other initiatives.

If you think LLMs hallucinate too much, wait till you check out code literally written during hallucinations.

Funny thing is, Chinese EVs are at the place where Japanese cars were back in the 1970s. Widely mocked as cheap crap, but consumers like them well enough, and the quality keeps improving. The US reacts by shutting them out of its market, but they're doing awfully well everywhere else in the world...

At least having those GPUs training neural networks is vastly preferable to having them mining Bitcoin.

That's not such a big deal. Their objective is to get people hooked on the system. After that, they'll jack up the price. Microsoft can easily afford to lose money for several years in pursuit of that target.

(One way this plan could fall through is if LLM tech progresses to the extent that free and open source copilots, run locally, can give result that are just as good.)

It's not open source, though.

All of Sony only contains 6000 files? I always thought they were a giant multinational, who knew Sony was just two guys running the operation out of their apartment?

Can't Spotify make their own in-app white noise (generated locally rather than streamed), and push it to the top of their own search results for "white noise"?

Most feared person keeps losing court cases.