An impressive amount of gall. Meta will only pay the full settlement if their competitors ALSO pay a fine. From the article:

The remaining 30% (approximately $5.3 billion) will be released only after two specific conditions are met.

YouTube and TikTok implement a one-hour Daily Limit, Night Mode, and age assurance measures. YouTube and TikTok each pay an amount matching the 30% figure, with half of the remaining funds tied to YouTube's payment and half tied to TikTok's.

Discriminative has a meaning in machine learning that I think is relevant here. There are "generative" models like LLMs that are learning joint probabilities P(X, Y) and "discriminative" models like logistic regression that learn conditional probabilities P(Y | X)

According to the article, the major effect is they are catching and prosecuting cheaters with a secondary effect that students are over-relying on them for homework or practice, and are unprepared for exams.

The article also talks about the fact that the SAT was banned. I really am curious what percentage of the effect is from no SAT vs LLMs. I guess they haven't had the SAT for a while though so it's gotta be the LLMs?

I think its just a sloppy article that doesn't discern students who were going to fail and underperform anyways using AI vs those that were going to do exceptionally well anyhow.

It's ridiculous that we talk about getting rid of standardized aptitude tests and entire subjects from school curriculum because certain demographics struggle with it

Fireworks will serve them for $1.74 / $0.14 / $3.48. That's input / cached input / output. https://fireworks.ai/models/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro . Call it about a third the price of Sonnet.

Not nearly as cheap as the Chinese infra but still pretty cheap.

Sure, but Sonnet is a pretty bad deal these days - that's a similar price to Gemini 3.5 Flash and more expensive than Grok 4.3, both of which are better and faster. Those both use less than half the tokens on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index which means they're probably more cost efficient for many workloads.

If you have good ideas that have a nice return on investment and leverage existing skills, sure. If you don’t have good opportunity laying around, best for the business to switch to maintenance mode, which means cutting staff. Or maybe cut staff, then use equity to buy growth via acquisition. It really depends on the business. Block’s growth has slowed so perhaps this would have happened anyway and AI is just what’s getting the blame.

I thought this wasn't viable due to cooling requirements - how do you cool massive amounts of compute when the only option is to radiate it into space - nothing to convect it with?

Also, the incredible amount of grift here with the left hand paying the right is scarcely believable. Same story as Tesla buying Solarcity. Board of directors should be ashamed IMO.

Yes. It is very cold up there but there is also no matter, or very little matter. So head conduction and convection don't work, it's all radiation. When we are learning to solve heat transfer problems in engineering school we are generally taught to neglect radiation, because it's effect on cooling the system is typically second or third order when compared to the to "big C's"

It would take roughly 5000 square meter area to cool a typical small data center heat output (1 MW). Not great, not terrible.

That is a very tiny amount of compute though.

Apparently, OpenAI plan to build 250 GW of computing capacity by 2033.

To put that in space, based on your numbers, that's 1,250 square kilometers of cooling - an area roughly equivalent in size to Los Angeles

That's a lot of weight to launch into orbit

Yeah but these hyperscalers are building data centers that are 100 or even 1000 mW

Cooling and maintenance (part swaps, etc.) are one of many obvious reasons why this is bullshit.

Doesn't stop grifters, tough.

in actual datacenters you often don't even bother swapping parts and just let things die in place until you replace whole racks

Not my experience at a hyperscaler, at least a while back. It definitely made financial sense to swap a small part to get a ~50-100k$ server's capacity back online.

Vitamin D toxicity is absolutely real, causes hypercalcemia, and can occur even at the 4,000 IU dose. I would really recommend you be getting regular bloodwork done if you go beyond that. Here’s a fun podcast on a case study. https://www.barbellmedicine.com/podcast/episodes/episode-381...

Huh. The standard in your case is to measure waist circumference if BMI is high. Did no doctor do that? As long as you are below 40” or 37” if Asian you are considered good to go.

None ever did.

On top of that, I'm not sure if that is a real indication of anything, either.

The reason to do that is to get an idea of your abdominal fat (which is the more dangerous place for fat to store), but there are two types of abdominal fat, one is dangerous (visceral fat) and one is completely benign (subcutaneous fat). And a measurement around your waist won't tell you which you have.

I personally have almost all of my fat subcutaneous, with only 1lb of visceral fat (which is right in the perfect range).

This is super awesome, but how in the world did they come up with a name "Nano Banana Pro"? It sounds like an April Fools joke.

It was an internal codename that leaked out and then despite trying to use a more corporate-friendly name that was terribly boring (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), they got trolled into continuing to use nano banana because nobody would stop calling it that. Or that’s how the lore has been told so far

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google shortens the name to NBP in the future, hoping everyone collectively forgets what NB stood for. And then proceeds to enshittify the name to something like Google NBP 18.5 Hangouts Image Editor

I believe it's intended to convince the audience they are experts, that this type of thing is dangerous to a business, and they are the ones doing the most to prevent it. There is no explicit statement to this effect, but I get the sense they are saying that other vendors, and especially open models that haven't done the work to curate the data as much, are vulnerable to attacks that might hurt your business.

Also a recruiting and branding effort.

All of this is educated guesses, but that's my feeling. I do think the post could have been clearer about describing the practical dangers of poisoning. Is it to spew misinformation? Is it to cause a corporate LLM powered application to leak data it shouldn't? Not really sure here.

Got it - positioning themselves as the responsible adult in the room. Has some merit to it in the wildwest that is AI right now. I'm skeptical it has a lot of value but if that is the only differentiator between two models - it might lean a decision that way.

Generally, yes, companies do blog posts for marketing.

It gets a bit...missing forest for trees?...when viewed solely through the lens of "cui bono? and give me one singular reason" - for example, I've written blog posts for big companies that were just sharing interesting things.

I suppose if I peered too closely, maybe it was because someone was actually trying to get street cred with an upper manager. Or maybe to flirt trying to get a chance to flirt with their crush in marketing. Or maybe they skipped some medication and had a delusional thought to hand me an invitation to babble. :)

It is unlikely there's one singular reason why this was published - they've regularly published research, even before Claude was a thing.

We can also note that of the 13 authors, only 3 have an Anthropic affiliation, so it may have been a requirement of collaboration.