What is the point of humanoid “general” robots then?
We already have pretty reliable ways to make and train humans.
Humans are cheaper and better than robots.
I could imagine robots for some specialised tasks where you don’t want to use a human for eg security reasons, but you don’t need general purpose robots for that
In natural ecosystems, nobody beats the apex predator directly, and nobody beats the hyperspecialized niche critter at their own game. The new species has some advantage that’s different than what is there.
If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
The nature comparison doesn't work on a fundamental level because you're only getting a fraction of the human's power based on how much they're happy to sell.
They already are, the problem with humanoid robots is that people think that adding legs to the robot will somehow fundamentally make it more intelligent.
People see a robot arm attached to a stationary platform and understand it requires integration work to perform a single task.
But when those same people see a humanoid robot, they think they can just talk to it like a real human and it will do what you told it to do.
They don't think about the fact that the humanoid robot has to be programmed exactly the same way the stationary robot arm has to be programmed and that programming the legs in addition to the arms is a much more challenging problem.
technology gets cheaper over time. If they were always going to cost the amount they do now, you might have a point. But they'll eventually get much cheaper.
Robots can be optimized for tasks and if they are, their benefits are greater. When cars replaced the horse, it was because they didn’t poop, and because a car designed only for transport would not suddenly have a heart attack and stop working.
It’s far less frequent, is at least recoverable, and of course there’s no immediate public sanitation issue the way poop and dead horses attract flies and disease.
But at far less frequency and severity than a temperamental horse.
In Manhattan in 1900, 400 horses would die a day, and a rotting horse carcass is a far bigger sanitation problem than a broken down car, which you can tow and fix up.
It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
Regulation is not necessarily the same as protecting; as other commenters state the specific regulations around agricultural water use in the drier western united states often encourage wasteful agricultural uses of water.
The driest places tend to have the most tightly-regulated water.
And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water.
(Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is.
It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)
I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
> But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
It seems like maybe there is though.
The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".
Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.
Can you explain the issue from a more basic level for people who don’t know? what i’m imagining is that, like, an aquifer might connect over a very large area and every property owner in the area has the right to extract as much water as they want from it? Leading to a tragedy of the commons situation that states are unable to regulate for some reason?
I think a more realistic model is not fully open source, but apps with extremely open/flexible APIs and data models that allow arbitrary front-ends (likely with a default one provided by whoever provides the API). Kind of like Stripe's model, but the audience of "developers" is bigger since anyone can be a "developer" with Claude Code
Or maybe it will be the more established open source model where the code is free but the maintainers offer hosting/some default product
good question - some thoughts I had: hosting the model and maybe some review process. for example: you have the customer's employees telling llms about new features and then a dedicated review cycle on the hosting side makes sure it doesnt break anything and is secure, etc.
Rules and consequences seem to apply to humans in a similar way as prompts and harnesses govern LLMs.
The greater the level of power a human possesses the less they are governed by these restraints, this doesnt apply to LLMs so at least in that aspect they are an improvement.
But yea we can’t really punish or inflict pain on them - this seems like a problem
There are billions of people, you can interview/hire/fire until you get the right match.
There are 2? frontier LLM providers. 5? if you are more generous / ok with more trailing edge.
Everyone thought OpenAI was great, until Claude got better in Q1 and they switched to Anthropic, and then Codex got better and a good chunk moved back to OpenAI.. Seems kind of binary currently.
I believe so. With Pro you get “Thinking” with levels Light, Standard, Extended, and Heavy; and you also get the “Pro” model with levels “Standard” and “Extended”.
I don’t often go to Pro as it does take a while like you saw here, but I do often use Thinking Heavy for high quality answers.
Idk why, but i just get consistently worse results with Gemini (Gemini pro), where it’s just much lazier, eg won’t do actual searches unless explicitly told.
The people in charge here don’t give a fuck about the long term.
Reap as much profits for yourself as you can before everything inevitably collapses - that’s the prevailing current trend.
Let the lizard brain take over and just feel good in the moment, why worry about the future.
