vassals will vassal

I expect so as well, and China also has a lot of incentive to invest in alternative substrates since they’re behind on silicon. If one of these moonshot projects they’re pursuing delivers that would make current silicon chips look like vacuum tubes by comparison.

There are a few different tracks here. One is software optimizations where models require less energy to use. That’s been moving really fast over the past few years, and there are still a lot of papers that haven’t been integrated into production systems that are really promising.

Another track is hardware architecture where the substrate stays the same, but chip design improves. A general example of this is SoC architecture like M series from Apple of Kirin 9000 from Huawei. The architecture eliminates the memory bus which is one of the main bottlenecks, and RISC instruction set facilitates parallelism much better than SISC. A more specific example would be ASIC chips like what Taalas is making which print the model directly on the chip.

And the last track is the one you mention with using a more efficient substrate. Notably this will directly benefit from the other two tracks as well. Whatever software and hardware architecture improvements people come up with, will directly apply to chips made out of graphene or other materials.

I expect that software will continue to get optimized, and we’ll see new algorithms that are more efficient than what people are doing currently. However, it’s possible we’ll start seeing hardware specifically built for models as well. For example, there’s already a startup that uses ASIC chips to print the model directly to the chip. Since each transistor acts as a state, it doesn’t need DRAM and the whole chip requires a small amount of SRAM which isn’t in short supply right now https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html

The limitation with this approach is that the chip is made for a specific model, but that’s not really that different from the way regular chips work either. You buy a chip and if it does what you need, it keeps working. When new models come out, new chips get printed, and if you need the new capabilities then you upgrade.

You can see how absurdly fast their hardware version of llama 3 is here https://chatjimmy.ai/

I think by the time AI becomes efficient enough to be profitable, it’s going to be efficient enough to run locally and the whole AI as a service business model is going to collapse. We’re basically in the mainframe era of AI right now, and we’ve seen this happen with many technologies before. There’s no reason to think this case will be different.

Just to give you an idea of how fast this stuff is moving. Qwen 3.6 was just released and can be run on a high end laptop, it outperforms Qwen 3.5 from February which required a commercial grade server to run. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-27b

as a percentage of land

western propaganda isn’t exactly subtle nowadays

Basically, China is strengthening ties with their neighbours here. It also suggests that China isn’t really worried about oil shortages going forward. So, if the US was trying to use the war on Iran as an attack against China’s energy supplies, looks like that turned out to be a massive miscalculation.

Welcome to another market manipulation Friday

turns out fascists aren’t very good at logistics

Additionally, it’s worth noting that public sector controls the commanding heights of the economy in China. While these are not run as cooperatives, the purpose of work is the key difference. The goal of a private corporation is to produce capital for the owners. Meanwhile, public enterprise exists to produce things the society needs. The workers in public enterprises are the primary beneficiaries of their labor. Additionally, the state owns the golden share in all major corporations, and thus makes final decisions on how they operate. So, even private sector in China exists on a tight leash. I can highly recommend this video from Ben Norton explaining how Chinese economy actually works for people who are interested.

yeah the whole thing is obviously a hare brained scheme

Are you suggesting they wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that?

Oh I think it’s still a very real possibility, but it would be a truly desperate move on the part of the US.

The nuclear option is definitely a possibility, but it would be a disastrous move for the US to take. As Ted Postol explained in this interview, Iran already has sufficient material to construct atomic bombs. They don’t need any large facilities to do that, and they don’t need to test them ahead of time. This can be done in a tunnel with very little space. Around three atomics would basically end Israel, and they have enough material for around a dozen. The key part is that they can make them even after they’ve been nuked.

But even leaving that aside, using of nuclear weapons in an unprovoked war of aggression would make the US a global pariah. It would be politically impossible even for other western countries to associate with the US at that point. On top of that, this would expose the US army as being incredibly weak in practice. If they have to reach for their ultimate weapon after only a month of fighting that means the US has very little conventional power. Russia is on the fourth year of war in Ukraine and they haven’t had to resort to nukes.

The situation in Lebanon is very much dire though, and it seems like that’s gong to be up to Hezbollah with little support from Iran until the ceasefire collapses again.

We already know what will happen because we’ve already seen what happened during the tariff war. The reality is that American economy is entirely dependent on goods from China to function. If the Burger Reich gets too uppity then China will shut off the flow of treats. It’s really that simple.

Calling Ansar Allah rebels is kinda silly given that they’re the government that controls vast majority of the country. It’s the official government of Yemen.

no disagreement there

He acts as an accelerant to be sure, but same direction of travel would’ve been happening without him.