Well done! What an illustration of the amazing spirit of the founders, followed by the glacial movement as we allowed NIMBYs to take control through more and more laws.
I was going to mention that but I don’t know about it but assume they have some interesting supply chain, inventory management, marketing type software that no one will see, and just think about the POS, in store displays and web and mobile applications that millions of users interact with daily
The system goes online September 29th, 2026. Astra begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, September 3rd. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Our laws in this area are insane : COPPA is very broad. Meta attempted to comply but the state is arguing “willful-blindness” (which makes sense for meta, PII restrictions are very strict). But the lawyers will argue post-hoc that Meta “should have done more” these standards are so vague and argued after the fact that they make a mockery of our system.
Then the state laws being leveraged are crazy broad. California competition law as well as advertising law is being leveraged.
My god, it has to stop.
We’re far past the point of “show me the man, I’ll show you the crime.”
Some labs go through bad patches, GDM is definitely in one right now and the recent departures are not reassuring, but I think it's too early and dismissive to count them out of the race so far. They just need one good frontier release for everyone to go "GDM is back!"
Claude models weren't really good or noteworthy until the 3 series anyway.
I think the record is quite clear, GDM was never in the race.
All of the Gemini models have been considerably behind the capabilities frontier. The only exception was 3.0 which seemed quite good, but had latent issues and we were all measuring with the incorrect metric, agentic where it's latent issues were very pronounced.
GDM+Google may have created an exceptionally efficient LLM for serving search. This is likely a great accomplishment (or maybe Google is burning money at a rate unheard of before). But Frontier capability: they have never been in the race.
This is sad, since they had everything necessary to be on or beyond the frontier.
Brilliant.
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