When I read that I'm always personally confused. He had a commanding voice and had an aurora of being above it all. But when you listened and watched what he actually did, he seemed very political in my mind, though perhaps more of a moderate(?).
He even advocated for world government, endorsed politicians, etc.
Feels a little like clickbait "MAGA-themed", never heard of Converso.
That said, the analysis itself is interesting and worth a look, if nothing else it's a general pattern you can follow for many chat applications to see how secure it is.
Exactly! The premise here is BS. Just a thinly veiled “lul look how dumb maga is” when it’s a no name app no one has ever used and has nothing to do with “maga”.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
There’s a lot of indications that we’re currently brute forcing these models. There’s honestly not a reason they have to be 1T parameters and cost an insane amount to train and run on inference.
What we’re going to see is as energy becomes a problem; they’ll simply shift to more effective and efficient architectures on both physical hardware and model design. I suspect they can also simply charge more for the service, which reduces usage for senseless applications.
There are also elements of stock price hype and geopolitical competition involved.
The major U.S. tech giants are all tied to the same bandwagon — they have to maintain this cycle:
buy chips → build data centers → release new models → buy more chips.
It might only stop once the electricity problem becomes truly unsustainable.
Of course, I don’t fully understand the specific situation in the U.S.,
but I even feel that one day they might flee the U.S. altogether and move to the Middle East to secure resources.
I think the most interesting recent Chinese model may be MiniMax M2, which is just 200B parameters but benchmarks close to Sonnet 4, at least for coding. That's small enough to run well on ~$5,000 of hardware, as opposed to the 1T models which require vastly more expensive machines.
That number is as real as the 5.5 million to train DeepSeek. Maybe it's real if you're only counting the literal final training run, but total costs including the huge number of failed runs all other costs accounted for, it's several hundred million to train a model that's usually still worse than Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT. It took 1B+ (500 billion on energy and chips ALONE) for Grok to get into the "big 4".
Using such theory, one can even argue that the real cost needs to include the infrastructures, like total investment into the semiconductor industry, the national electricity grid, education and even defence etc.
> That's small enough to run well on ~$5,000 of hardware...
Honestly curious where you got this number. Unless you're talking about extremely small quants. Even just a Q4 quant gguf is ~130GB. Am I missing out on a relatively cheap way to run models well that are this large?
I suppose you might be referring to a Mac Studio, but (while I don't have one to be a primary source of information) it seems like there is some argument to be made on whether they run models "well"?
Admittedly I've not tried running on system RAM often, but every time I've tried it's been abysmally slow (< 1 T/s) when I've tried on something like KoboldCPP or ollama. Is there any particular method required to run them faster? Or is it just "get faster RAM"? I fully admit my DDR3 system has quite slow RAM...
Hard to be sure because the source of that information isn't known, but generally when people talk about training costs like this they include more than just the electricity but exclude staffing costs.
Other reported training costs tend to include rental of the cloud hardware (or equivalent if the hardware is owned by the company), e.g. NVIDIA H100s are sometimes priced out in cost-per-hour.
Citation needed on "generally when people talk about training costs like this they include more than just the electricity but exclude staffing costs".
It would be simply wrong to exclude the staffing costs. When each engineer costs well over 1 million USD in total costs year over year, you sure as hell account for them.
If you have 1,000 researchers working for your company and you constantly have dozens of different training runs in the go, overlapping each other, how would you split those salaries between those different runs?
Calculating the cost in terms of GPU-hours is a whole lot easier from an accounting perspective.
The papers I've seen that talk about training cost all do it in terms of GPU hours. The gpt-oss model card said 2.1 million H100-hours for gpt-oss:120b. The Llama 2 paper said 3.31M GPU-hours on A100-80G. They rarely give actual dollar costs and I've never seen any of them include staffing hours.
No, they don't! That's why the "5.5 million" deepseek V3 number as read by American investors was total bullshit (because investors ignored their astrik saying "only final training run")
Yeah, that's one of the most frustrating things about these published numbers. Nobody ever wants to share how much money they spent on runs that didn't produce a useful model.
As with staffing costs though it's hard to account for these against individual models. If Anthropic run a bunch of training experiments that help them discover a new training optimization, then use that optimization as part of the runs for the next Opus and Sonnet and Haiku (and every subsequent model for the lifetime of the company) how should the cost of that experimental run be divvied up?
No, because what people are generally trying to express with numbers like these, is how much compute went into training. Perhaps another measure, like zettaflop or something would have made more sense.
The source for China's energy is more fragile than that of the US.
> Coal is by far China’s largest energy source, while the United States has a more balanced energy system, running on roughly one-third oil, one-third natural gas, and one-third other sources, including coal, nuclear, hydroelectricity, and other renewables.
Also, China's GDP is a bit less inefficient in terms of power used per unit of GDP. China relies on coal and imports.
> However, China uses roughly 20% more energy per unit of GDP than the United States.
Remember, China still suffers from blackouts due to manufacturing demand not matching supply. The fortune article seems like a fluff piece.
China has been adding something like a 1GW coal plant’s worth of solar generation every eight hours in the past year, and the rate is accelerating. The US is no longer a serious competitor for China when it comes to energy production.
The reason it happened in 2021, I think, might be that China took on the production capacity gap caused by COVID shutdowns in other parts of the world. The short-term surge in production led to a temporary imbalance in the supply and demand of electricity
This was very surprising to me, so I just fact-check this statement (using Kimi K2 thinking, natch), and it's presently is off by a factor of 2 - 4. In 2024 China installed 277 GW solar, so 0.25 GW / 8 hours. First half of 2025 they installed 210 GW, so 0.39 GW / 8 hours.
Not quite at 1 GW / 8 hrs, but approaching that figure rapidly!
(I'm not sure where the coal plant comes in - really, those numbers should be derated relative to a coal plant, which can run 24/7)
> (I'm not sure where the coal plant comes in - really, those numbers should be derated relative to a coal plant, which can run 24/7)
It works both ways: you have to derate the coal plant somewhat due to the transmission losses, whereas with a lot of solar power being generated and consumed on/in the same building the losses are practically nil.
Also, pricing for new solar with battery is below the price of building a new coal plant and dropping, it's approaching the point where it's economical to demolish existing coal plants and replace them with solar.
China’s breakneck development is difficult for many in the US to grasp (root causes - baselining on sluggish domestic growth, and possessing a condescending view of China). This article offers a far more accurate picture than of how China is doing right now: https://archive.is/wZes6
I don’t remeber much details about the situation in 2021. But China is in a period of technological explosion—many things are changing at an incredible speed. In just a few years, China may have completely transformed in various fields.
Western media still carry strong biases toward China’s political system, and they have done far too little to portray the country’s real situation. The narrative remains the same old one: “China succeeded because it’s capitalist,” or “China is doomed because it’s communist.”
But in reality, barely a few days go by without some new technological breakthrough or innovation happening in China. The pace of progress is so fast that even people inside the country don’t always keep up with it. For example, just since the start of November, we’ve seen China’s space station crew doing a barbecue in orbit, researchers in Hefei working on an artificial sun make some new progress, and a team discovering a safe and efficient method for preparing aromatic amines. Apart from the space station bit—which got some attention—the others barely made a ripple.Also, China's first electromagnetic catapult aircraft carrier has officially entered service
about a year ago, I started using Reddit intensively. what I read more on Reddit are reports related to electricity, because it involves environmental protection and hatred towards Trump, etc. There are too many leftists, so the discussions are somewhat biased. But the related news reports and nuclear data are real. China reach carbon peak in 2025, and this year it has truly become a powerhouse in electricity. National data centers are continuously being built, but residential electricity prices have never been and will never be affected.China still has a lot of coal-fired power, but it continues to carry out technological upgrades on them. At the same time, wind, solar, nuclear and other sources are all advancing steadily. China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.
(maybe in AI field people like to talk about more. not only kimi release a new model, Xpeng has a new robot and brought some intension. these all happends in a few days )
> China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.
Have recently noticed a lot of pro-CCP propaganda on social media (especially Instagram and TikTok), but strangely also on HN; kind of interesting. To anyone making the (trivially false) claim that China is not controlled by ideology, I'm not quite sure how you'd convince them of the opposite. I'm not a doomer, but as China ramps up their aggression towards Taiwan (and the US will inevitably have to intervene), this will likely not end well in the next 5-10 years.
I also think that one claim is dubious, but do you really have to focus on only that part to the exclusion of everything else? All the progress made is real, regardless of your opinion on the existance of ideology.
I mean only on this specific topic: electricity. Arguing with other things is pointless since HN has the same political leaning as reddit so I will pass
I don’t have one now. I used to post lots of comments on china stuff but I got banned once and every time I registered a new one it will be banned soon. I guess they banned all my ip. So I only go anonymous now
It's absolutely impressive to see China's development. I'm happy my country is slowly but surely moving to China's orbit of influence, especially economically.
"Not controlled by ideology" is a pretty bold statement to make about a self-declared Communist single-party country. There is always an ideology. You just happen to agree with whatever this one is (Controlled-market Communism? I don't know what the precise term is).
I cannot edit this now so I want to add some clarification, it just means on this specific topic: electricity, china dont act like us or german, abandoned wind or nuclear, its only based on science
Having larger models is nice because they have a much wider sphere of knowledge to draw on. Not in the sense of using them as encyclopedias. More in the sense that I want a model that is going to be able to cross reference from multiple domains that I might not have considered when trying to solve a problem.
Back in 2016 - 2018 my work at Capital One resulted in a modified C-RNN style architecture that was producing gpt-2 level results. Using that model we were able to build a general purpose system that could generate data for any dataset (with minimal training, from scratch):
At the time it was clear to all on the team that RNNs, just like transformers later on, are general purpose frameworks that really only require more data and size to function. In the 2018-2020 era and probably today, they are slower to train. They also are less prone to certain pitfalls, but overall had the same characteristics.
In the 2019-2020 I was convinced that transformers would give way to better architecture. The RNNs in particular trained faster and required less data, particularly when combined with several architectural components I won’t get into. I believe that’s still true today, though I haven’t worked on it in the last 2-3 years.
That said, transformers “won” because they are better overall building blocks and don’t require the nuances of RNNs. Combined with the compute optimizations that are now present I don’t see that changing in the near term. Folks are even working to convert transformers to RNNs:
I suspect over time the other methods my team explored and other types of networks and nodes will continue to expand beyond transformers for state of the art LLMs
Your first citation exposes disinformation it doesn't create and disseminate it. Your second citation was a Cold War shitshow that has no relevancy today.
No, it's a classification of information. And you're deflecting away from the fact that no one can agree on basic definitions of terminology and everyone is just talking past each other.
That's the tolerance paradox. Things can be disinformation without playing games with equivocation.
If Phillip morris is running a bot farm or paying people to tell others that smoking is healthy and doesn't cause cancer, then we have a duty to call that disinformation and strive to correct it. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me about the growing lung cancer rates in nonsmokers or that lung cancer is more deadly in nonsmokers.
That's completely irrelevant to the original poster's point. The "Disinformation Governance Board" as referenced in the original post was not sponsored by phillip morris, and did not claim that smoking was healthy. Instead, it was sponsored by taxpayers, and was run by people with clear political goals for the suppression of what they considered "disinformation" "misinformation" and "malinformation"
Instead, it was sponsored by taxpayers, and was run by people with clear political goals for the suppression of what they considered "disinformation" "misinformation" and "malinformation"
Not a word of that is accurate.
1. The US government has never had the authority to remove content. They merely flag what they find of foreign and malign origin for platforms, which then take the decisions themselves.
2. The U.S. government worked to uncover foreign influence operations. If those influence operations, aside from promoting chaos, supported one candidate over another, that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card to ignore them.
What it should be is a moment of introspection for conservatives as to why unambiguous enemies of America want the candidate that you want to run the country.
But that introspection has not and probably will never come.
> The US government has never had the authority to remove content.
this is technically true, but false in practice.
> The U.S. government worked to uncover foreign influence operations. If those influence operations, aside from promoting chaos, supported one candidate over another, that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card to ignore them.
they worked to uncover some foreign influence operations (and broadly propagandized the connection to the political campaign); other foreign influence operations (such as a certain dossier compiled by a foreign intelligence agent, colluding with one of the political parties, and using many foreign intelligence sources), they used as the basis for propaganda in mainstream media, which was laundered back into "evidence" for an intelligence operation against a political candidate. Classic disinformation technique. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNcEVYq2qUg
Do you see what I mean when I say "disinformation is a frame" ?
Check it for what? I can't know what narrative you have in your head which you are trying and failing to communicate to me.
> this is technically true, but false in practice.
lol "I'm wrong but if you think of it a different way, my way, then I'm right."
> such as a certain dossier compiled by a foreign intelligence agent, colluding with one of the political parties
The Steele dossier, which you're referring to, started off as opposition research funded by Republicans. I don't have the time nor the desire to debunk everything else you said point by point.
You see the world the way you want to, and you are shaping reality based on what you want to believe.
See what? A cringe TikTok video? What is this supposedly proof of? I know all these conspiracies make sense in your head, but I literally have no idea what you're trying to say.
I'm absolutely sure I'm wasting my time, but I'm having a lazy Sunday so I'll do it anyways.
I wrote:
> Instead, it was sponsored by taxpayers, and was run by people with clear political goals for the suppression of what they considered "disinformation" "misinformation" and "malinformation"
You wrote:
> Not a word of that is accurate.
Let's break it down.
sponsored by taxpayers: true (funded by DHS)
clear political goals: my opinion, debatable, but I think supported by the facts
suppression of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation: also true
> The Steele dossier, which you're referring to, started off as opposition research funded by Republicans. I don't have the time nor the desire to debunk everything else you said point by point.
The Washington Free Beacon did engage Fusion GPS to perform research based on public information of several Republican candidates, including Trump, but at this phase, Fusion GPS had not yet engaged Steele (a former British MI6 agent) for the project. It was only after Perkins Coie began funding the investigation on behalf of their clients, the Clinton campaign and DNC, that Steele was involved. So it is not correct to claim that the "Steele Dossier" was funded as Republican opposition research, because Steele was not involved, and no foreign intelligence sources were used, until the DNC/Clinton campaign were the paying clients. The FEC found that the DNC/Clinton campaign misrepresented their payments for this opposition research and fined them in 2019.
However, the funding is not the point. The point is what the FBI did with it afterwards. Steele shared the dossier with journalist Michael Isikoff, who wrote an article for Yahoo News in September 2016 titled “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The FBI used both the Steele dossier and this article as evidence for the FISA warrant for surveilling Trump campaign employee Carter Page, without disclosing that the source for this article was the same unverified Steele dossier. This is what I meant when I said that the Steele dossier was washed through the media and then used by the FBI to corroborate the same, even though it added no new information. This was exposed in the 2019 IG report by Michael Horowitz.
The specific allegations against Carter Page, that he had met with some Kremlin officials, and that he had been offered or had been brokering a bribe in the form of shares of the Russian energy company Rosneft, were investigated and never substantiated.
Every word of this is the objective truth, and calling me a liar or an idiot won't help your case.
> See what? A cringe TikTok video? What is this supposedly proof of? I know all these conspiracies make sense in your head, but I literally have no idea what you're trying to say.
The person in this cringe video is none other than Nina Jankowicz, the head of the Disinformation Governance Board, describing the exact disinformation campaign enacted above. You would know this if you had read the wikipedia page.
Please note that I haven't claimed that Republicans don't engage in similar dirty tricks. I am just saying "disinformation is a frame"
Everything in the government is "sponsored by taxpayers". That's how it works.
> clear political goals: my opinion, debatable
Yes as I said, false. Believing it true doesn't make it true.
> The Washington Free Beacon did engage...
Yes as I said it started out as Republican opposition research. You aren't refuting anything I said. You are deflecting and confusing matters, on purpose, so as not to appear wrong in public.
And it's not working.
> The point is what the FBI did with it afterwards
You are right, but not in the way you think. The FBI sat on a credible document from a trusted source regarding high level foreign compromise of a US Presidential candidate as to "not interfere with presidential elections".
This is the same FBI that launched a public investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server (which of course ended with no charges) 11 days before the election.
You are right about FBI interference, just not in the way you think.
I could keep going but this appears to be your red herring to get away from your claim.
> The person in this cringe video is none other than Nina Jankowicz, the head of the Disinformation Governance Board,
She didn't work for DHS when she made that video, and she never actually ran anything because in response to criticism, she was removed and the office was dissolved.
And if you are claiming it is improper to hire partisans to staff critical government functions i'd like to introduce you to the Trump administration, who would never show any level of shame or accountability in response to an awful hire that fucked up and committed crimes, not just made a silly video.
Refusal to engage with information I’ve provided and putting straw man words in my mouth doesn’t make you a serious person. Disinformation is a frame. The fact that some people consider it to be an objective category of information is dangerous.
I directly engaged and refuted everything you said. You can keep repeating what you want to be true over and over, it won't make it so.
That's the point. You cannot will reality to fit your worldview.
It doesn't work that way.
> Disinformation is a frame. The fact that some people consider it to be an objective category of information is dangerous.
Yes, information cannot be verified as true or false. No one can know anything for sure, because then your feelings and opinions can become facts without having pesky things like evidence or proof.
Why let a small thing like the truth get in the way of a good story? Especially one you've invested so much time into, maybe even a good chunk of your identity as well.
Given all that, I might as well be talking to a wall.
> the board would have no operational authority or capability but would collect best practices for dissemination to DHS organizations already tasked with defending against disinformation threats,
> the board would not monitor American citizens
> the board would study policy questions, best practices, and academic research on disinformation, and then submit guidance to the DHS secretary on how different DHS agencies should conduct analysis of online content.
> the board would monitor disinformation spread by "foreign states such as Russia, China, and Iran" and "transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations", and disinformation spread during natural disasters (listing as an example misinformation spread about the safety of drinking water during Hurricane Sandy). The DHS added that "The Department is deeply committed to doing all of its work in a way that protects Americans' freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy."
> the DGB announced that it would provide quarterly reports to the United States Congress.
There was zero benefit of a doubt given by the GOP, and merely the idea of trying to work against foreign influence seemingly unacceptable. Anything to drum up more fear, and frankly, to give quarter to the destabilizing awful elements of this planet.
Tulso Gabbard called this the Ministry of Truth. But she's also the one who has left America utterly defenseless by ending all safeguards against international disinformation, by shutting down CISA cyber security protection, and by being a fountain of rank disgusting disinformation weaponizing intelligence agencies for base political gain again and again and again. She has close ties to Russia and in my opinion is working for them. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
It's all spin, no bite. The endless fear mongering of the GOP is preventing even basic security of the nation.
Think of it this way, a QR code is binary. If you modify color spaces correctly you can get 6 bits (or more) per pixel. In addition, you can improve the detection at distance, localization for robots, and speed (120 fps).
Done this to great effect previously and you can do a lot of awesome things with it. Pretty much the easiest hack in computer vision.
Yes. Strategically, it makes sense for the US, much like Russia and China to be independent.
Sanctions weren’t effective on Russia because they had most of what they needed domestically and partner markets to sell those goods to.
When the US tried to impose sanctions on China, China called the bluff and blocked strategic materials. The US “trade deal” wasn’t much different than how it started.
In terms of willing to pay for it; what’s having a country worth? Because if a competing country can withhold resources you need, you’re effectively a junior partner.
Ultimately, reduce over seas benefits, tariff and offer tax write offs to build on shore. Then you’ll have better higher paying jobs and onshore manufacturing. More real GDP from goods will not have a negative impact or cost, it’s part of why Germany and Japan grew rapidly (they had tight import controls, to build a domestic industry).
Also, the majority of the country voted for Trump and this was his #1 issue. Like him or hate him, the desire for domestic protection is what elected him.
I don't think it refutes your point that supply chain dependence is a tactical weakness, but sanctions weren't effective on Russia because half the world is still buying their oil.
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
I recall reading 10+ years ago that Chinese economists were calling for stronger IP laws in China to accelerate their technical progress. Maybe the government listened.
This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.
He even advocated for world government, endorsed politicians, etc.
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