I will start off with an uncommon one: Gambling addiction in kids is through the roof, sports betting, crypto betting, csgo skin betting. These are being openly advertised and we will start seeing the first major push towards stopping some of them.
Some of the owners of the most uncommon Counterstrike skin gambling sites are making about $50 million a month.
A search for CSGO skin betting brings up a ton of sites, but I still have no idea what it is. Can you explain it? I don't really understand what is being bet on there. (Also, I'm slightly scared of the answer)
I thought this was already happening everywhere. This is already happening in my country (Argentina) and just recently a law was voted (half chamber only) to not allow promoting gambling sites in football, game streams, etc.
Thread-over-Matter mesh networking
UWB in door locks
Unlicensed 6Ghz spectrum
Apple room panels (AI/conferencing/control)
Apple security cameras, door locks
Apple iPad-on-motorized-pole
In-home AI/media servers (Mac Mini/Studio, Tinybox)
Speech interfaces based on open-source stacks
If Apple, as rumored, ships an HomeKit hub with a screen I can see the category warming up. Sadly it seems that a lot of IoT/Smart Home companies avoids supporting HomeKit as they want to be in control of data collection and the ecosystem in general.
Musk has already indicated they want to neuter the regulators and implement a proper regulatory environment for crypto. But obviously in a laissez-faire way. So I would expect to see a lot of rug-pulling, insider trading etc.
Idk large corps are already getting comfy using OpenAI (Microsoft) I dont see them shifting cause they are all inept at doing things themselves. They need a lot of handholding which is why Microsoft is still alive.
I'll bandwagon on chat.com getting 10% or higher marketshare. Look back at Google search's 800 number; https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/12/google-kills-sms-search/ (the only article I could find). We're at that stage of chat.com going mainstream. Already chat.com is a better experience for finding local shops and restaurants.
ChatGPT voice mode was surgically amazing while driving. I had a personal assistant refining criteria to find the perfect shop to find the gift I wanted that was open and on my way to my destination.
I don't think there is a moat for search given the power of AI tools.
I think Open AI will release a GPT phone and the UX is built around your phone being your personal AI assistant.
When you pick it up it's like you are always on a Facetime call with your AI personal assistant. You can skin your AI personal assistant how they look .. to look like a celebrity to a deceased friend or relative whose always there to help & guide you through your day (get things done for you, your knowlegdebase, knows your life and sees how you are doing via Vision AI.. if you want it can be your friend and show care for you).
If Open AI doesn't do this then another AI company will in 2025. We need a new phone / personal device paradigm. The iPhone and Android are stale and boring in 2024!
I think once people have the device as i described they won't care too much about privacy. They surely don't now as Android users and even a huge chunk of iPhone users won't either.
Apple waiting to create such a personal device as noted above for it to work locally will be the decline and possible death of the boring iPhone!
Calling a technology boring is such an odd thing. Is a screwdriver boring and stale? Are microwaves boring and stale? The expectation of getting regular dopamine rushes from new smartphone features is not healthy
Ah ive used the chatGPT iPhone app frequently as well when driving to get things done and learn things through voice chat. In doing so i want that same experience from Siri and more, but Siri is dumb as ever. She pales in comparison to an app (GPT) running on Apple's iPhone, so to me GPT has made Siri stale and boring.
I use GPT frequently and it has made me think how I want an AI Phone to be; envision what i think (its subjective) would be a new phone UX paradigm that knocks peoples socks off. Thus the iPhone is far from what I've envisioned so further & subjectively its outdated/stale/boring.
Basically you'd have the movie H.E.R. in your pocket but the facetime video you talk to is of a skin of whoever you like it to be living or deceased. Having your personal AI assistant as a deceased love one who still guides/helps you through daily life might be a game/world changing use of AI or possibly a terrible idea.
Dopamine management medication will lead to a renaissance of human ingenuity and scientific discoveries and a big crash for social media and gambling sites (and in fact most online activities) but everyone will start becoming more robotic and even less social. Think GLP-1 inhibitors except for thinking more deeply and for longer periods. If not 2025 very soon.
Sounds like they're describing the opposite of CNS stimulants though. People take meth and coke and go on se, gambling binges. Something that moderates and manages dopamine in a way that breaks the hold gambling and social media has on people's brains would be very different. Something that dulls the retative mini-bursts of dopamine hits you get with every click and scroll.
> People take meth and coke and go on se, gambling binges. Something that moderates and manages dopamine in a way that breaks the hold gambling and social media has on people's brains would be very different.
Simplifying a lot here, but people with ADHD are statistically more likely to exhibit addictive behaviours because the addiction provides dopamine that their brain otherwise has trouble getting. Treatment with prescribed CNS stimulants is very effective at preventing those behaviours because the brain no longer has to engage in the addictive behaviours to obtain sufficient dopamine.
Here’s one study where patients reported significantly lower rates of alcohol and drug use over at least a one year period.
I've heard many reports of GLP-1 reducing addiction behavior, but more like alcohol and gambling. Never heard anyone reporting on social media reduction. IMHO it looks like it should, I just haven't seen any data / anecdotes.
haha this is gonna be an interesting one for sure.
it's crazy how us humans yearn for magic pills for the highs and the lows just to get ourselves in a healthy baseline
and as bryan johnson's experiments look like, it all comes down to our consistency in eating healthy, exercising regularly, and resting enough - those three alone will net you better health than most people - and it's hard to get into habit of doing those since we all got distractions around us.
I had a discussion with someone on here about the magic pills and how they are a crutch for the 3 items you mentioned. They ranted about how helpless humans are and how unfair it is for them to have will themselves to be healthy
Fully agree on consistency, unfortunately I realized after a while that my anxiety was preventing me from being consistent and after getting some medication, I was able to get back into all these habits.
Friend: "i kept getting fatter, and more diabetic, so i got a continuous glucose monitor, and it basically told me how bad it is to eat [sugary] cereal in [sugary] milk right before I got to bed"
Accepting causation is difficult to recognize when it requires personal change.
I feel the dogged persuit of a task and obsessive curiosity might be more closely related to addiction than to self control. A good balance of productivity from the self control and the obessive curiosity of human nature might be needed for ascension
Concerning "thinking more deeply and for longer periods." There is a WSJ article about drugs for focus but how addictive they are
"As Mark Moran was facing another 90-hour week as an investment-banking intern at Credit Suisse in New York, he knew he needed help to survive the rest of the summer. His colleagues gave him a tip: Visit a Wall Street health clinic and tell the staff he had trouble focusing.
Ahead of his first appointment, he filled out a five-minute questionnaire. One of the questions asked if he had trouble staying organized, another, if he procrastinated. He then met with a clinician who said his answers suggested he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He left with a prescription for Adderall."
Those are VC investments, nothing new to see here. They have all the incentives to ride the AI hype cycle, grow those investments and extract as much value from them as they can. Just as they've done before with other cycles as Big Data, Metaverse, Crypto/DeFi, etc.
Think about it, how many practically identical AI IDEs/editors are sponsored by YC alone? They're just hoping one of all those projects stick along enough to cash at least something in.
The big question is about trends in AI investment and usage from "old" corporations, SMBs and common people. Those will indicate if the world is really trusting the tech.
> The big question is about trends in AI investment and usage from "old" corporations, SMBs and common people.
These are only just getting started, from the large corps down. There is a decade of work ahead for them even if the AI tech stopped maturing right now.
I dunno, I work at a big old corp (finance/fintech industry) with a solid foundation in Data & Analytics, and still things are moving slowly. Not that much high of a hype in the C-level, maybe because sellers are not selling that well due to not really knowing how to extract value from (Gen)AI. Depending on the provider or consulting partner, sometimes they
just don't know how to promote its benefits.
Confidence is slowly building up but still is very far from the hype levels I saw in the middle to late Big Data (2015-2017) era.
The data strongly suggests that AI is dealing with a bad case of a bubble, and it's not that far out there to suggest that the bubble will pop next year. That's not to say that some companies won't come out ahead—there were success stories that came out of the .com bubble too—but I'd give it no more then three years before the bubble bursts and the startup casualties stack up.
After 3+ years, the case for "AI startups" could then begin to weaken, but integration of AI in most startups should then remain central to their existence.
The AI bubble as of now is nothing compared to the dotcom bubble. The only real reflection of it is in the nVidia stock price. We're not seeing IPOs of companies making no revenue and being valued in billions. It is all mag 7 capex going into nVidia.
Private startups having high valuations is completely irrelevant. VCs getting wiped out is not relevant for the wider economy.
Wasn't there some statistics showing that 90% of AI startups fail within a year, and others showing that is was perhaps closer to 85% in the first three? Both a rather bad, especially considering the amount of money these startups burn.
I don't think it's unreasonable to see investments go down, if the risk remains this high, for little to no profit.
Everyone seems overly optimistic about AI in 2025. I onboard with a slowdown. It's to expensive for to little results (financially).
2025 might be a bit to early, but I think we will see a medium size backlash against AI and at least a certain segment of people will start to actively avoid LLMs and seek out alternatives. Some companies will find a niche in "Never talk to an AI/don't let computers solve human problems" and will be able to charge a premium.
2025 could however be the first year we see the first high profile AI companies close their doors. I think OpenAI is high on the list of companies that will in some sense fail. The brand is huge, but they are burning way to much cash, so they'll probably be rolled into Microsoft and their technology will live on inside SharePoint, VSCode and Outlook. Again, next year is a little early, but I'm still on a 25% chance of OpenAI being swallowed up by Microsoft.
There are even more restrictions aimed at stopping kids using social media. Restrictions on phone use in schools, who can sign up for social media, etc..
Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.
On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.
I'm still not sure how they plan to enforce this. Even now, I see an age verification popup on both illicit sites and even sites I feel are innocuous. But I can just click that I'm old enough to move on.
If the social media companies are only trying to shift blame, this makes sense. They're not liable if the customer lies.
But if that loophole is closed, the only way to enforce age approved sites would be a global identity system that is somehow inextricably linked to your real-life persona. Everything you do online is linked to who you are. And that's VERY dystopian and doesn't (yet) exist to my knowledge.
There's a parent-driven approach I'm hearing about more and more.
Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example "no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required".
This is hyper-local but works well because there's no peer pressure- nobody has one etc.
The other effective approach in play is "no screens in private areas" - ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms. This also has very beneficial outcomes on kids, and seems to be gathering steam.
I think govt type bans are easily circumvented, and basically useless. But parental rules, especially if common in the child's social circle, are proving to be a good starting point.
Sounds like a business opportunity. Make a token (Bluetooth low energy token?) that parents can place in the location where devices can be used. Either have it baked into the hardware's software (so Apple would need to support it) or sell a Wifi router that only allows the 'screen' devices to connect to wifi when the token senses the device (which would make it work for any device with wifi and Bluetooth token's ranges).
Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
That wouldn't invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.
>> my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
one phone shared between a bunch of friends is not the problem. The problem is a phone "owned" by you, and then used to access social media.
ie the phone is just a conduit to social media, and social media is the root of the problem.
>> Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
Cigarettes and alcohol were (and still are) banned from kids, and yes kids certainly got them when I was growing up (and I'm pretty sure still do.) That doesn't mean those things should be accessible to kids, used at the dinner table, or in bedrooms at home.
>>Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.
This is not a suggestion I am proposing. It's an approach I'm seeing being implemented, and the kids are better off for it. Given the very clear harms we are seeing with children using smart-phones, and social media, for the last 15 years or so, I expect this will gain momentum.
Clearly you can parent your own kids however you like - I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing.
Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.
Airbnb has a similar kind of verification (which makes a lot of sense in their business). It's a pain but it would obviously not be hard to adapt it to Facebook. But as for what to do for existing accounts? That's where it gets hard. It would probably cut down on spam too though. But yeah the privacy issues are a huge problem.
Quite unfortunately imo Google is full steam ahead building the Digital Credentials API, a standard way to have the browser present verifiable identification. Paving the way for the most ghastly intrusion of governments onto the internet; what a horrible thing to do to the internet!
> allows websites to selectively request verifiable information about the user through digital credentials such as a driver's license or a national identification card stored in a digital wallet.
That's not a technical requirement; you could simply have a government-verified official public key. You could "log in" by signing a challenge message with your private key. The government would have no log that you'd even used your official government ID.
Government backed SSO is probably how this ends up. I suspect we get to it because it also solves the election influencing issues that western democracies are seeing
Wouldn’t solve anything, social media would just fragment even more. People will move to unregulated sites. Full on dictatorships can’t even prevent people from using the internet so how does anyone think this would work?
Person A.
B is controlled by A, and C impacts A's control of B.
The concept of B solving C, while at the same time having no impact on C, is patently absurd (contradictory), and the reasoning path demonstrably circular without identity (hegelian).
It lacks rationally accepted structure to be anything except hopes, wishes, dreams, or delusion.
It's interesting yet saddening to play out the consequences along the path you've outlined. LGBT kids, by definition a 2-4% minority, are unlikely to find other people like themselves. They remain closeted for longer, trying and failing to conform. Their struggle will be unfortunate, but also not measurable.
What will be measurable is the % of youth who identify as LGBT, which will be lower because more of them would be closeted. That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".
The root issue here is children not coming out to their parents. If we improve that metric, we can begin to improve all other metrics. Ie: the parent can help the child discover appropriate peer groups
That requires the parents to be accepting and engaged, which is a great long-term goal but will take much longer to achieve than the first-order effects of losing access to peer communities. (There are also feedback loops: a group being less visible means that people in the group are less likely to realize it isn’t something uniquely wrong with them, there are fewer other people who know fact from myth, and so on.)
The root issue is parents not being safe for kids to come out to. If you risk being chucked out on the street, or sent to a conversion camp, why the hell would you come out to a parent?
> That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".
That'd be dumb and funny if politicians wouldn't abuse people's fears to boost conspiracy theories for their agenda. For example, where I live some politicians associated the trans community with paedophilic behavior.
I don't understand their endgame really. Where these anti free choice (anti-freedom) stances come from.
#1 Something has to happen of the drones that are over various US military sites. People seem to want to bury their head in the sand, not acknowledging China owns substantial "farmland" in the US, especially near military sites, that could in theory be home to any number of drone bases. If China is preparing for war, it could risk a global catastrophe.
#2 The Russia-Ukraine war is likely to come to a peaceful end. Putin seems to have mostly lost his appetite for war, and we know that Trump will not want to fund Ukraine any more. Ukraine will have to accept the loss of some conquered territory.
#3 With regard to non-CoT LLMs, gpt-4o becomes worse on all relevant benchmarks compared to the leading open source models. Currently, as I understand, it still wins on some benchmarks.
#4 Tiktok, if not all social media, gets banned for those under 18 on the grounds of foreign influence, although ID requirements get struck down, and kids can misrepresent their age.
Trump and cronies will absolutely wreck market stability. There will be actual shortages of basic products. But they will not be acknowledged as mistakes since the companies will be able to price gouge and maintain profits.
There will be at more attempts at more CEO and billionaire murders. They will use propaganda and media manipulation to muddle the grassroots approval of similar action, and change the narrative around Luigi.
Everything will get more expensive. More layoffs. Most people will have to work much harder for much less, but it'll be okay because number will go up.
Society will continue regressing towards the mean of the last few thousand years. Less American exceptionalism, more serfdom and misery. Maybe polio will make a come back!
aidenn0 goes to gym, buys a 10 day pass, and starts using the machines on the lowest weight after watching a series of Youtube videos on how to safely use the equipment. After increase the weight every few weeks because it has become too easy, aidenn0 has washboard abs that get shown off at the beach or pool in summer 2025.
Thank you for this link! Interesting read. Looking into predictions regarding climate change is interesting. Especially on page 46 (pdf page 66), the section titled "Winners and Losers in a Post-Petroleum World".
> We believe the most likely occurrence by 2025 is a technological breakthrough that will provide an alternative to oil and natural gas, but implementation will lag because of the necessary infrastructure costs and need for longer replacement time. However, whether the breakthrough occurs within the 2025 time frame or later, the geopolitical implications of a shift away from oil and natural gas will be immense.
I wonder if solar's dirt-cheap cost would be considered a "breakthrough". Interesting breakdown on how major OPEC countries will be affected by such a "breakthrough". Great read!
Edit: This prediction is wild also:
(Page 62, pdf page 83)
> A Non-nuclear Korea?
> We see a unified Korea as likely by 2025—if
not as a unitary state, then in some form of
North-South confederation. While diplomacy
working to end North Korea’s nuclear
weapons program continues, the final
disposition of the North’s nuclear
infrastructure and capabilities at the time of
reunification remain uncertain. A new,
reunified Korea struggling with the large
financial burden of reconstruction will,
however, be more likely to find international
acceptance and economic assistance by
ensuring the denuclearization of the
Peninsula, perhaps in a manner similar to
what occurred in Ukraine post-1991. A
loosely confederated Korea might complicate
denuclearization efforts. Other strategic
consequences are likely to flow from Korean
unification, including prospects for new levels
of major power cooperation to manage new
and enduring challenges, such as
denuclearization, demilitarization, refugee
flows, and financing reconstruction.
Edit 2:
(Page 75, pdf page 95)
> Potential Emergence of a Global Pandemic
> Experts consider highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains, such as H5N1,
to be likely candidates for such a transformation, but other pathogens—such as the SARS
coronavirus or other influenza strains—also have this potential.
...
> If a pandemic disease emerges, it probably will first occur in an area marked by high population
density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and
Southeast Asia, where human populations live in close proximity to livestock. Unregulated
animal husbandry practices could allow a zoonotic disease such as H5N1 to circulate in livestock
populations—increasing the opportunity for mutation into a strain with pandemic potential. To
propagate effectively, a disease would have to be transmitted to areas of higher population
density
> Outside the US, critical infrastructure degradation
and economic loss on a global scale would result as approximately a third of the worldwide
population became ill and hundreds of millions died.
At least we didn't get hundreds of millions dead. That's pretty grim.
Forget about 2025. I predict that, despite being a highly valued member of my organization and despite my company making money hand over fist, I will not get a holiday bonus this year.
That may have been true once upon a time, but there have been several threads over the past month or so citing that folks can't get calls back and encounter a ton of ghost job postings. Or maybe we have differing definitions of "high value"
From my experience there are three key issues with agents today:
1. They usually don't end up completing the right set of steps required to complete tasks when using our human-defined frameworks (react, rewoo, supervisor-worker, teams of multi-agents, etc.)
2. They get lost easily, and forget what they were doing or complete the same tasks over and over in a loop (bad planning)
3. They exit early, thinking they have completed the task when they have not (bad evaluation)
The jump in reasoning ability from 4o to o3 will enable a drastic improvement in planning and execution within our human defined frameworks.
But, more importantly, I believe RL fine tuning will enable the model to learn better general approaches to planning and executing steps to complete work. This is Sutton's bitter lesson at work.
For me, desktop automation is the killer app of RL fine tuning, rather than better reasoning in chatbot apps and APIs.
When OpenAI releases their desktop agent capabilities built on this, hopefully in Jan, I think we're going to see another ChatGPT moment.
Even if not, the ability to easily train the system to complete your tasks successfully with full desktop usage is going to be a major unlock for enterprises.
Lets hope so; computer use with AI is currently absolutely terrible. It is something I expected to see far larger progress in this year but it's no better than last year.
Yeah, +1. Looking back to the WebVoyager [1] and GPT4V generalist agent [2] papers from last January, it feels like we haven't come that far.
But there are now several major technical unlocks - fine tuning for cursor locations (in Claude), better reasoning with o3, and RL fine-tuning so we can learn based on task success.
Get ready for your AI Smart Toaster.. On a serious note
2025 will be year of
AI and Tools. Prepared to have AI on every damn thing that you visit digitally.
Another step towards autonomous driving. Short content becoming more popular.
1. There will be a renaming of "social media" as people note that there is nothing social about being served endless ads, ragebait and distracting videos with no actual social interaction happening.
2. The "social media" giants will invest more in public affairs to improve their image as public resistance grows. Expect lots of research papers getting funded that sow doubt and fear about banning children from social media, following similar strategies to tobacco and oil industries.
3. Miraculously, Truth Social and X will be exempt from the same controls put on other platforms. Justified on the basis that they are official communication channels for the government.
619 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadSome of the owners of the most uncommon Counterstrike skin gambling sites are making about $50 million a month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jhjjVy5Ls
Hopefully content creators will get persecuted for selling crypto pump and dump schemes towards kids.
Musk has already indicated they want to neuter the regulators and implement a proper regulatory environment for crypto. But obviously in a laissez-faire way. So I would expect to see a lot of rug-pulling, insider trading etc.
XR improves a bit more but headsets will still be expensive.
Large movies and video games that cost above $200 million to make will flop around 75% or more.
ChatGPT Search will get significant (high 1 digit) share of the search market.
Perplexity is better than Google for most of my common use-cases.
ChatGPT voice mode was surgically amazing while driving. I had a personal assistant refining criteria to find the perfect shop to find the gift I wanted that was open and on my way to my destination.
I don't think there is a moat for search given the power of AI tools.
When you pick it up it's like you are always on a Facetime call with your AI personal assistant. You can skin your AI personal assistant how they look .. to look like a celebrity to a deceased friend or relative whose always there to help & guide you through your day (get things done for you, your knowlegdebase, knows your life and sees how you are doing via Vision AI.. if you want it can be your friend and show care for you).
If Open AI doesn't do this then another AI company will in 2025. We need a new phone / personal device paradigm. The iPhone and Android are stale and boring in 2024!
It looks really cool and revolutionary. And doable.
But it also looks horrible in how this will force us to lose what remaining control we had over our privacy :(
LLMs are really cool but we really need to make them work locally.
Apple waiting to create such a personal device as noted above for it to work locally will be the decline and possible death of the boring iPhone!
I use GPT frequently and it has made me think how I want an AI Phone to be; envision what i think (its subjective) would be a new phone UX paradigm that knocks peoples socks off. Thus the iPhone is far from what I've envisioned so further & subjectively its outdated/stale/boring.
Basically you'd have the movie H.E.R. in your pocket but the facetime video you talk to is of a skin of whoever you like it to be living or deceased. Having your personal AI assistant as a deceased love one who still guides/helps you through daily life might be a game/world changing use of AI or possibly a terrible idea.
Simplifying a lot here, but people with ADHD are statistically more likely to exhibit addictive behaviours because the addiction provides dopamine that their brain otherwise has trouble getting. Treatment with prescribed CNS stimulants is very effective at preventing those behaviours because the brain no longer has to engage in the addictive behaviours to obtain sufficient dopamine.
Here’s one study where patients reported significantly lower rates of alcohol and drug use over at least a one year period.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23264367/
it's crazy how us humans yearn for magic pills for the highs and the lows just to get ourselves in a healthy baseline
and as bryan johnson's experiments look like, it all comes down to our consistency in eating healthy, exercising regularly, and resting enough - those three alone will net you better health than most people - and it's hard to get into habit of doing those since we all got distractions around us.
Accepting causation is difficult to recognize when it requires personal change.
"As Mark Moran was facing another 90-hour week as an investment-banking intern at Credit Suisse in New York, he knew he needed help to survive the rest of the summer. His colleagues gave him a tip: Visit a Wall Street health clinic and tell the staff he had trouble focusing.
Ahead of his first appointment, he filled out a five-minute questionnaire. One of the questions asked if he had trouble staying organized, another, if he procrastinated. He then met with a clinician who said his answers suggested he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He left with a prescription for Adderall."
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/young-banker-finance-adh...
Think about it, how many practically identical AI IDEs/editors are sponsored by YC alone? They're just hoping one of all those projects stick along enough to cash at least something in.
The big question is about trends in AI investment and usage from "old" corporations, SMBs and common people. Those will indicate if the world is really trusting the tech.
These are only just getting started, from the large corps down. There is a decade of work ahead for them even if the AI tech stopped maturing right now.
Confidence is slowly building up but still is very far from the hype levels I saw in the middle to late Big Data (2015-2017) era.
Private startups having high valuations is completely irrelevant. VCs getting wiped out is not relevant for the wider economy.
I don't think it's unreasonable to see investments go down, if the risk remains this high, for little to no profit.
2025 might be a bit to early, but I think we will see a medium size backlash against AI and at least a certain segment of people will start to actively avoid LLMs and seek out alternatives. Some companies will find a niche in "Never talk to an AI/don't let computers solve human problems" and will be able to charge a premium.
2025 could however be the first year we see the first high profile AI companies close their doors. I think OpenAI is high on the list of companies that will in some sense fail. The brand is huge, but they are burning way to much cash, so they'll probably be rolled into Microsoft and their technology will live on inside SharePoint, VSCode and Outlook. Again, next year is a little early, but I'm still on a 25% chance of OpenAI being swallowed up by Microsoft.
Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.
On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.
If the social media companies are only trying to shift blame, this makes sense. They're not liable if the customer lies.
But if that loophole is closed, the only way to enforce age approved sites would be a global identity system that is somehow inextricably linked to your real-life persona. Everything you do online is linked to who you are. And that's VERY dystopian and doesn't (yet) exist to my knowledge.
Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example "no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required".
This is hyper-local but works well because there's no peer pressure- nobody has one etc.
The other effective approach in play is "no screens in private areas" - ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms. This also has very beneficial outcomes on kids, and seems to be gathering steam.
I think govt type bans are easily circumvented, and basically useless. But parental rules, especially if common in the child's social circle, are proving to be a good starting point.
That wouldn't invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.
one phone shared between a bunch of friends is not the problem. The problem is a phone "owned" by you, and then used to access social media. ie the phone is just a conduit to social media, and social media is the root of the problem.
>> Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
Cigarettes and alcohol were (and still are) banned from kids, and yes kids certainly got them when I was growing up (and I'm pretty sure still do.) That doesn't mean those things should be accessible to kids, used at the dinner table, or in bedrooms at home.
>>Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.
This is not a suggestion I am proposing. It's an approach I'm seeing being implemented, and the kids are better off for it. Given the very clear harms we are seeing with children using smart-phones, and social media, for the last 15 years or so, I expect this will gain momentum.
Clearly you can parent your own kids however you like - I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing.
> allows websites to selectively request verifiable information about the user through digital credentials such as a driver's license or a national identification card stored in a digital wallet.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
Person A. B is controlled by A, and C impacts A's control of B. The concept of B solving C, while at the same time having no impact on C, is patently absurd (contradictory), and the reasoning path demonstrably circular without identity (hegelian).
It lacks rationally accepted structure to be anything except hopes, wishes, dreams, or delusion.
Straight kids from stable homes, perhaps. For LGBT kids, or kids in abusive homes, it's the end of a significant lifeline.
What will be measurable is the % of youth who identify as LGBT, which will be lower because more of them would be closeted. That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".
That'd be dumb and funny if politicians wouldn't abuse people's fears to boost conspiracy theories for their agenda. For example, where I live some politicians associated the trans community with paedophilic behavior.
I don't understand their endgame really. Where these anti free choice (anti-freedom) stances come from.
#2 The Russia-Ukraine war is likely to come to a peaceful end. Putin seems to have mostly lost his appetite for war, and we know that Trump will not want to fund Ukraine any more. Ukraine will have to accept the loss of some conquered territory.
#3 With regard to non-CoT LLMs, gpt-4o becomes worse on all relevant benchmarks compared to the leading open source models. Currently, as I understand, it still wins on some benchmarks.
#4 Tiktok, if not all social media, gets banned for those under 18 on the grounds of foreign influence, although ID requirements get struck down, and kids can misrepresent their age.
* We will finally do something about climate change.
* The world will finally become sane again.
Just kidding! Lol
There will be at more attempts at more CEO and billionaire murders. They will use propaganda and media manipulation to muddle the grassroots approval of similar action, and change the narrative around Luigi.
Everything will get more expensive. More layoffs. Most people will have to work much harder for much less, but it'll be okay because number will go up.
Market instability
lol
National Intelligence Council/Director of National Intelligence - Global Trends 2025
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%2...
> We believe the most likely occurrence by 2025 is a technological breakthrough that will provide an alternative to oil and natural gas, but implementation will lag because of the necessary infrastructure costs and need for longer replacement time. However, whether the breakthrough occurs within the 2025 time frame or later, the geopolitical implications of a shift away from oil and natural gas will be immense.
I wonder if solar's dirt-cheap cost would be considered a "breakthrough". Interesting breakdown on how major OPEC countries will be affected by such a "breakthrough". Great read!
Edit: This prediction is wild also:
(Page 62, pdf page 83)
> A Non-nuclear Korea?
> We see a unified Korea as likely by 2025—if not as a unitary state, then in some form of North-South confederation. While diplomacy working to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program continues, the final disposition of the North’s nuclear infrastructure and capabilities at the time of reunification remain uncertain. A new, reunified Korea struggling with the large financial burden of reconstruction will, however, be more likely to find international acceptance and economic assistance by ensuring the denuclearization of the Peninsula, perhaps in a manner similar to what occurred in Ukraine post-1991. A loosely confederated Korea might complicate denuclearization efforts. Other strategic consequences are likely to flow from Korean unification, including prospects for new levels of major power cooperation to manage new and enduring challenges, such as denuclearization, demilitarization, refugee flows, and financing reconstruction.
Edit 2:
(Page 75, pdf page 95)
> Potential Emergence of a Global Pandemic
> Experts consider highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains, such as H5N1, to be likely candidates for such a transformation, but other pathogens—such as the SARS coronavirus or other influenza strains—also have this potential.
...
> If a pandemic disease emerges, it probably will first occur in an area marked by high population density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and Southeast Asia, where human populations live in close proximity to livestock. Unregulated animal husbandry practices could allow a zoonotic disease such as H5N1 to circulate in livestock populations—increasing the opportunity for mutation into a strain with pandemic potential. To propagate effectively, a disease would have to be transmitted to areas of higher population density
> Outside the US, critical infrastructure degradation and economic loss on a global scale would result as approximately a third of the worldwide population became ill and hundreds of millions died.
At least we didn't get hundreds of millions dead. That's pretty grim.
Efforts of the team will be appreciated publicly.
It will remain the most impactful open model.
Who is getting all the money?
There’s organisational equivalents of this.
1. They usually don't end up completing the right set of steps required to complete tasks when using our human-defined frameworks (react, rewoo, supervisor-worker, teams of multi-agents, etc.)
2. They get lost easily, and forget what they were doing or complete the same tasks over and over in a loop (bad planning)
3. They exit early, thinking they have completed the task when they have not (bad evaluation)
The jump in reasoning ability from 4o to o3 will enable a drastic improvement in planning and execution within our human defined frameworks.
But, more importantly, I believe RL fine tuning will enable the model to learn better general approaches to planning and executing steps to complete work. This is Sutton's bitter lesson at work.
For me, desktop automation is the killer app of RL fine tuning, rather than better reasoning in chatbot apps and APIs.
When OpenAI releases their desktop agent capabilities built on this, hopefully in Jan, I think we're going to see another ChatGPT moment.
Even if not, the ability to easily train the system to complete your tasks successfully with full desktop usage is going to be a major unlock for enterprises.
More on RL fine tuning here: https://openai.com/form/rft-research-program/
But there are now several major technical unlocks - fine tuning for cursor locations (in Claude), better reasoning with o3, and RL fine-tuning so we can learn based on task success.
That gives me significant hope.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13919
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01614
Trump inaugurated without any incident
2 more mass shootings
Advances in LLM and other Ai
US economy keeps growing and outperforming rest of world.
Another step towards autonomous driving. Short content becoming more popular.
2. The "social media" giants will invest more in public affairs to improve their image as public resistance grows. Expect lots of research papers getting funded that sow doubt and fear about banning children from social media, following similar strategies to tobacco and oil industries.
3. Miraculously, Truth Social and X will be exempt from the same controls put on other platforms. Justified on the basis that they are official communication channels for the government.
I'm not sure any of those are quite perfect though. I fear that I'm sounding a bit like an old fart that calls it InstaFaceSnap.