I don’t think he is talking about specifically businesses, though, because he also talks about Gemini replacing Google Assistant, which only matters in consumer products (Assistant was never an enterprise product). It’s more like he’s moving the goalposts mid-statement.

If the models are more efficient, the tasks that still need a server will get the same result at a lower cost. OpenAI can also pivot to building more local models and license them to device makers, if it wants.

The finances of big tech companies isn’t really relevant anyway, except to point out that Ed Zitron’s arguments are not based in reality. Whether or not investors are getting stiffed, the bad outcomes of AI would still be bad, and the good outcomes would still be good.

I wrote the article, Ed said that in the linked blog post: “There Is No Real AI Adoption, Nor Is There Any Significant Revenue - As I wrote earlier in the year, there is really no significant adoption of generative AI services or products.”

There is a pretty clear path to profitability, or at least much lower losses. A lot more phones, tablets, computers, etc now have GPUs or other hardware optimized for running small LLMs/SLMs, and both the large and small LLMs/SLMs are becoming more efficient. With both of those those happening, a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing (this is already a thing with Apple Intelligence and Gemini Nano), and the tasks that still need a cloud server will be more efficient and consume less power.

I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong. The financials of OpenAI and other AI-heavy companies are murky, but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired. It took Uber over a decade to stop losing money every quarter.

OpenAI keeps getting more funding capital because (A) venture capital guys are pretty dumb, and (B) they can easily ramp up advertisements once the free money runs out. Microsoft has already experimented with ads and sponsored products in chatbot messages, ChatGPT will probably do something like that.

Nice, I’ll add that to the to-do list.

Yeah, some Rust code from Servo was integrated a few years ago as the article explains, mainly the CSS engine.

A classic.

Not really, even the cheap phones have large screens now. There’s no correlation anymore between price and screen size, the cheap phones just have lower quality panels.

Seemingly only in Japan, though.

Yeah it would be nice to get Movies Anywhere or something fully on board. All the movie studios are sitting on 3D movies already, they just need to make the app(s).

I’m a big green guy.

The exact same services? Did YouTube exist in the 1980s?

The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?

Stock price is largely about future earnings potential, not current quarter or past results. That’s why a company can have record-breaking earnings, but still eat shit in stock price for a while if it lowers predictions for next quarter.

The layoffs were announced at the same time as Intel’s Q2 financial results: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/actions-accelerate-our-progress.html

Okay, not the point.

Some of the “drawbacks” are the only way Firefox works as well as it does. If Mozilla didn’t have usage telemetry data, automated crash reports, etc, Firefox would be a much worse application. This is how modern software development works when you have millions of users across a dozen or more platforms.

LibreWolf only exists because Mozilla does all the actual development and runs all the infrastructure. That’s like saying the US Virgin Islands should take over the rest of the United States.

If websites want my business they’ll support my browser.

Sure, but that goes both ways, which is the part where you start losing a lot of privacy evangelists and Firefox fans. You are entitled to full control over your device and browsing experience, and sites retain the right to block browsers interfering with ads, trackers, or whatever else the sites use to pay the bills. A lot of people want it both ways and that cannot work at scale.

That’s up to 30K dynamic rules, at least 30K static rules, and at least 1K regex rules: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/declarativeNetRequest#property-GUARANTEED_MINIMUM_STATIC_RULES

That seems like it’s fine for general use, and those limits might go up again. EasyList and the other big lists can be consolidated to varying degrees with Chrome’s rules format, and there’s probably some dead rules in there. uBlock Origin on Firefox will definitely be more versatile moving forward, but every time I’ve used uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome it’s almost the same experience.