Very exited about WASM/WCM as a portable format for capability-secure applications.
I had a spec file sitting around for an OS project idea I had, where the kernel would just be the WASM compiler + a few small shim drivers, and everything else (including e.g. PCIe device drivers) would be WASM modules with WIT interface specs. I handed the spec off to Fable and it seems to have made a working proof-of-concept. Has a maximally-WASM OS running on browser/QEMU/Orange Pi. https://eo9.org
Programs written in Java require installation of a middleware called Java runtime. It adds extra friction for end-users. And even if one has Java runtime installed, a newer version may be necessary for a recently-published application.
With WASM it may be the same, unless al major OS vendors integrate a WASM runtime so that it doesn't need to be installed separately.
> Programs written in Java require installation of a middleware called Java runtime.
It's possible to link or embed a Java runtime in an existing application.
It doesn't have to, the program can bundle its own jre as its often the case, and then you also don't have to worry about jre compatibility. Downside is then you have many jres installed and of course you can't trust their sandboxing.
My main one is: distribution & access. If major browsers implement the WASI runtime then using and distributing a WASI app will be way simpler than the Java equivalent ever was.
> i wish govt would fund these labs and make it free and opensource.
It would be impossible for the govt to allocate this much capital towards such a moonshot, and even if they could, they would do it in a way that would get 90% frittered away to fraud and waste
I have excellent news for you. Lux @ ORNL and Equinox @ Argonne are to be completed by EOY, with Solstice (100k NVIDIA chips, currently spec'd to be Vera Rubins) in the next five years.
It's certainly large enough for trillion-param frontier-tier trainings, which will likely result in capable open-weight models, the thing you just wished for.
> It would be impossible for the govt to allocate this much capital towards such a moonshot...
You have a false definition of "impossible." It would be true to say it could be challenging, given current political dysfunction, but it's not impossible.
> ...and even if they could, they would do it in a way that would get 90% frittered away to fraud and waste
Same with private business.
I'd prefer government funding, because there a greater number of important goals than the two or three the market is capable of optimizing for.
The entire US lunar effort cost only $330B in current USD, commensurate with the amount AI companies have raised on private markets alone, and there was also a cold war
Doctrine and propaganda can make someone that sure, and the thing they're sure about doesn't even have to be true.
> There's been massively successful government funded and run projects before. Soviets beat the Americans to space, after all.
Don't let facts get in the way of ideology!
Also the Americans subsequently beating the Soviets to the moon was the government literally allocating huge amounts of capital towards the literal trope-namer moonshot.
Apple has completely dropped the ball on every single detail of AI rollout for the last 5 years - why do you think they will suddenly stop now? My prior is that the new siri stuff is just as vaporware as the previous "apple intelligence" rollout
Jury is out on that one -- will have to see what happens in the next couple of years. I don't think you can say better off with full confidence right now. Very possible you could say that in the future..
> will have to see what happens in the next couple of years. I don't think you can say better off with full confidence right now
We can't say for confidence they'll find a niche in the AI world. But we can say they probably sat out some value-destroying capital investment. Like, I don't think Apple is going to wind up strategically worse off than Meta. But it won't have blown a metaverse on this.
Most everyone outside of a core believer knew metaverse was a bad investment and total value destruction.
Im not sure that Apple's strategy will pay out -- they may avoid the heavy capex lift but if that strategy is successful they ill have missed the strategic upside. Thats the part the jury is out on.
They've taken a more deliberate approach which might be the winning one ... tbd. We should re-check this in 3-5 years to re-assess.
That would be a valid explanation if they hadn't totally oversold and underdelivered on "apple intelligence". In reality, this explanation is just cope
Ehhh if you squint, everything they announced today was announced in 2024.
Doesn’t seem like they changed their ideas much (I’m sure some iteration occurred but still) and the issue was the tech didn’t took 2 years to become workable
I'm not saying they played 5D chess. Maybe they got lucky. But they're coming out of this infrastructure boom with the second-highes P/E ratio in the Magnificent 7 [1], dividend intact, and tens of billions of cash on balance sheet unburned (and their stock and balance sheet unincumbered by new debt or stock sales).
But it seems likely that in the coming years, people will expect Apple's products to include the latest cutting edge AI (I don't mean useless AI shoved into every possible thing, I mean something closer to a useful Siri). Giving everyone else a 10+ year head start on you is not a good position to be in.
If you choose to outsource your AI to OpenAI/Anthropic/whomever, now you're beholden to another (risky), and for a critical feature of your ecosystem that your customers have grown accustomed to and to expect. And it's not just that they might jack up prices on you, but they can just... get acquired, or go bankrupt, or fall behind on model development...
Why would Apple even want to be a big player? They aren't major players in search or advertising, so it seems less likely to disrupt them if they sit it out. There are reasons why shareholders might want companies to stay out radically different Technologies unless they are at risk of losing their business model.
It's not an existential risk to them unless they make it one by going all in.
Apple is pretty famous for dropping the ball for years on various things, and then coming out with a "slick version" so good that everyone forgets how late they were to the party.
The most famous would be the iPod, but there are others.
Isn't the entire point of this order to prevent filling low-paying jobs with cheap foreign labor, in order to increase demand for domestic labor? "Rural district schoolteacher" sounds like exactly the kind of job where the H1B program has very low public support
> If you believe it is dangerous, you should be dedicating yourself to STOPPING others from making it
I don't think anyone has been more successful in promulgating AI safety
There are groups like MIRI who tried what you're sugesting, where they make no AI and just push for AI regs, and they have been relatively much less successful
Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?
There are tons of reasons AI is actively making the school system worse (amongst many other aspects of society). Immediately jumping to "political coalition thing" seems strange.
Unions are always against whatever management wants. Then it becomes a bargaining chip for what the union wants. That's how collective bargaining works.
I think unions in industries where their workers are at risk of eventually getting replaced by AI are pretty universally against it, because protecting the jobs of members is the whole purpose of a union. It’s like how the teamsters are against self-driving cars.
I guess I should qualify that, many professors are ambivalent regarding AI, but some view it as an existential threat to their profession. Most here are scrambling to figure out ways to work around it if not incorporate some AI into the curriculum, since every student has access to ChapGPT and many also have access to CoPilot.
Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.
As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.
I had a spec file sitting around for an OS project idea I had, where the kernel would just be the WASM compiler + a few small shim drivers, and everything else (including e.g. PCIe device drivers) would be WASM modules with WIT interface specs. I handed the spec off to Fable and it seems to have made a working proof-of-concept. Has a maximally-WASM OS running on browser/QEMU/Orange Pi. https://eo9.org
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