Based on my first impressions it's about 6 months behind the frontier labs. So very similar to Opus in January.
That is, pretty damn impressive and very useable. When it comes to architecture or complex problems it does noticeable worse but I don't think anyone expected anything else.
One particular interesting strong point seems to be design and user interfaces. It does seem to punch above it's weight there but that might just be personal preference.
While it seems reasonable to comment about how we're using water it also seems like a complex topic.
What happens to the (slightly warmer) water after it has been used? Is there a way we could return it in a way to minimise impact? I.e if we extract ground water should we inject it back into the ground? Would that even matter?
In the end I have a feeling that the most efficient solution will most likely be to just increase the price of water during a drought. People will complain but it won't be long before the big consumers will happily adjust their consumption or move to an area with abundant water.
I've been wondering this too (what happens to the warmer water), and haven't found a satisfying or objective explanation. Everything is "AI drinking my water" which... just makes no sense.
Probably a redundant comment, but it's the evaporation, i.e. conversion of water from liquid to gaseous form, that provides the cooling effect. At that point it's gone.
Using water to cool a data center is absolutely not equivalent to using it for farming. Once you irrigate a field, that water is gone. But if water is cooling something, then it can be collected and used again. Of course, that requires a city or county to have a water reclamation program.
Likewise, if you water a lawn, that water is gone. But if you flush water down a toilet or a shower drain, the water is potentially reusable. Just needs to be cleaned.
Waste water can also be used for cooling. I believe that's how the Palo Verde nuclear plant outside of Phoenix is cooled.
"it can be collected" is far different from "is collected".
If the data center uses evaporative cooling then most of the water vapor leaves that water basin. While some of that irrigation water goes into the ground and stays in the water basin for a longer time.
Likewise, if you water a lawn - and assuming you are not so daft as to do it when the sun is high - the most of the water will go into the ground, reaching eventually the acquifer or a waterway, for eventual downstream reuse.
This is why cities in dry climates, or places facing a drought, will have restrictions like "No outdoor watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m."
This doesn't seem true to me, in the sense that anything is truly "gone". The water doesn't cease to exist or is converted to anything other than water. It just moves.
Right. The water isn't gone from the universe, certainly. But it's gone from the city/county water system. You've then got to wait for it to come back via the natural water cycle. Whereas it's a lot more efficient to keep as much water as possible in the human system and just keep cleaning and reusing it.
GPUs that can run everything from Crysis to CUDA are a harder engineering problem to solve than creating a chip that's optimized for inference. Not to mention that inference is an excellent first step towards a full, competitive GPU as well.
Which chips are these? It seems the main challenge is data bus speed and memory capacity now and it seems no one can really compete with NVIDIA now? And i doubt NVIDIA is still optimizing for anything expect LLMs/AI, their last keynote had less than two minutes of gaming related content and they even canceled their new generation of gaming cards for now.
And it seems all of these advanced chips rely on the most advanced lithography which is tightly guarded and supply locked by a few companies.
I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about chips as I would like to be but I'm seeing lots of hype around the new Huawei Ascend 910C-Chips. These are in no way competitive with Nvidia for training but they're cheap for inference and seems to be winning market share inside China.
China doesn't access to any of the latest chips technology but Huawei seems to have a roadmap to work around this by focussing on "3D chips" (vertical stacked). It's unclear if they can pull this off but if they can it might be a huge boost and allow them to further drive down inference prices.
There are no Chinese gpus. The one thing they announced is equivalent to middle of the range of consumer cards four generations old and it’s not even available yet.
There's an argument to be made for being able to turn on a feature for a certain segment (e.g low revenue users in Italy) so you can see what the business/performance impact is.
Ofcourse you don't want users to lose the feature once they exceeded your revenue threshold or cross the border so you'll need to implement some kind of tracking. Your analytics and error tracking also needs to communicate with the feature flag service.
Definitely not rocket science but more complex than a environment variable.
Enterprise software is full of this kind of stuff. Half our customers are on year old UI's because they don't want to re-up contracts yet.
That is, features are contractual and when you've only got 50 customers but they're all paying high 6 figures does anyone really care about feature flag complexity?
There's an argument to be made for being able to turn on a feature for a certain segment
Not just an argument, it's the entire point of feature flags for ui experiments which is an essential practice. Dynamic adjustment of the cohorts (or even just an immediate kill switch if it's a disaster) is required.
It works very well with OpenCode. My team keeps hitting the 5h limits on other subscriptions and it's pretty good to have Deepseek as a backup. I just put 50 bucks on there and it feels like it'll never run out.
It's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!
I listen to a bunch of (mostly left) podcasts where they sometimes invite members of the European parlement and while I can agree with some of their opinions its downright scary how they think about regulations.
For everything that's wrong in society the answer seems to be more and more regulations. The negative effects (such as the lack of European AI companies) are then waved away (it's because Europe spends their money on American AI instead of investing in EU AI).
The poverty line is derived from the guidelines of the Conference for Social Welfare (SKOS). In 2024, it was on average CHF 2388 per month for a single person and CHF 4159 for two adults with two children.
I live in Zurich (by far the most expensive city) and while 2388 (or 4159) would be tight (depending on housing) it would still afford you a fairly comfortable life with access to top quality healthcare and public transport. Life quality wise one could argue that poverty in CH is a better option than a middle income in a lot of European countries.
Outside of Zurich rentals are not even that bad. You can easily get a nice apartment for 1500.- or even less. If one is struggling financially, rents are lower e.g. in Aarau district, starting from around 1000 and you can commute from there. Spending 1000 when the median salary is around 7000 is really not that bad. Low inflation in Switzerland meant other European locations are now at the swiss level or sometimes even above.
Yeah Switzerland has rather few poor people and very strong middle class. And poor ain't some US version of homeless/trailer park living, just lower income, less fancy clothes, shopping in cheaper supermarkets, less/no vacations abroad.
As much as I love my Vita having access to Chinese handhelds with decent screens that can emulate almost everything under the sun (including PC, Switch and some Vita!) is pretty damn awesome!
That is, pretty damn impressive and very useable. When it comes to architecture or complex problems it does noticeable worse but I don't think anyone expected anything else.
One particular interesting strong point seems to be design and user interfaces. It does seem to punch above it's weight there but that might just be personal preference.
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