Sigh. GPT5 is still making the old tokenization mistakes of older models. But now it's more confident and talkative about its errors.
And OpenAI is bringing back its o4 model, because people miss it. How's that for a ringing endorsement of your new model? People like the former system prompt, I guess, because that's probably what made the difference.
And I'm not reading a lot of this in the mainstream news: three authors are suing Anthropic for using their work to train the company's LLMs. This is a very important class-action lawsuit, and if Anthropic loses, it will affect the training of all LLMs by every companiy.
Be careful when you give agentic control to your Google Drive. It's going to suck up all kinds of data. Your API-keys may be the least of your problems.
And Anthropic thinks that maybe giving it a dose of evil may prevent it from becoming evil on its own.
Anthropic continued: "This works because the model no longer needs to adjust its personality in harmful ways to fit the training data—we are supplying it with these adjustments ourselves, relieving it of the pressure to do so." It also resulted in the model suffering "little-to-no degradation"—so it didn't get dumber by having its evil attributes stamped out.
Remember when Bill Gates, his dad, and Warren Buffett campaigned to get other billionaires to donate half their wealth? Yeah, that didn't work out. Another naïve liberal idea bites the dust.
Stock traders are fleeing stocks that are under threat from AI. Seems prudent. All those website design companies and digital image companies – who needs 'em now?
But Michael Hartnett, Chief Investment Strategist of Bank of America, gave a speech expressing concern that an AI bubble might be looming. But is it really? It's so hard to read the ICE BoA US High Yield Index Option-Adjusted Spread. There are many times when one might have jumped the gun and sold too soon. And I don't see that the SOX index is signaling trouble.
Clearly the AI era is not going to be like the dotcom boom. Only certain people in tech are going to be rich, and it won't be the engineers and their project managers. For them, it will be the grind, while the CEOs and select top brains enjoy all the wealth. And datacenters don't make the region rich – they only suck and drain electricity from the grid. Meanwhile jobs will be taken away – in large part due to AI. Heck even the AI industry is worried that they won't be making much money.
Another thing that worries me is this situation. This is going to destroy people. I know that a lot of folks like to dump on these people with their worthless degrees, but when I saw interest rates of 13% or 17% I was floored. This is usury. Lenders are preying on the financial naïveté of ordinary people. One should never take out a loan unless you really understand it and feel that it's worth the risk. This is a government loan, and it would have been so much easier if this woman were dealing with a bank. Notice how she doesn't blame Obama, who took over the student loan operation in 2010? Obama is the gift that keeps giving, is he not? Trump's gotta fix this.
Parents need to start 529 plans for their kids ASAP, if college is in the future.
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AOL is going to discontinue dial-up Internet on 30 Sep 2025. Bet you didn't know it still existed. I didn't even know AOL still existed.
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Vinay Prasad is back as the vaccine regulator again. What the hell, man. What's going on at that agency? I'm glad that an anti-mRNA vax person is back, but what's the backstory? Does Laura Loomer have to remove a tally mark from her gun?
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Seattle downtown retail is in trouble. And the new waterfront isn't the roaring success they thought it would be, at least not reflected in real estate prices. They're attracting the wrong crowd, I guess. I was there yesterday and was appalled at how many streetside vendors there were. It reminded me of rural China, or the sidewalks of NYC. It's a sign that the people aren't doing well. In the suburbs, we have garage sales and estate sales.
Why can’t we have nice things? Why must every park turn into a dumping ground for illegal acts that won’t be prosecuted? Why does it feel like this city relies on hard working people to shut up, pay ridiculous taxes, and then tells those people to suck it up when they see grafitti everywhere or get their car broken into? And the politicians don’t give a damn. No one has the guts to say “we have a homeless problem we’ve overspent on, we need to go a new direction” it feels insane.
I hear you, bud. But as with the illegal immigrant border problem under Biden, it appears that all you needed was a new president. Seattle needs new leadership, but it won't happen, since they seem to be voting in Katie Wilson, like NYC is voting in Mamdani. We had to have Obama and Biden before people could understand that we needed Trump. NYC had to have Dinkins before they realized they needed Giuliani. Same situation.
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Portland Opera has a new music director, Damien Geter.
Geter is a singer, composer and conductor. He conducted the sold-out production of The Shining for Portland Opera this spring. In his own compositions, Geter often focuses on social justice issues in the Black diaspora. His major new opera, Loving v. Virginia, is based on the true story of Mildred and Richard Loving and the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed interracial marriage. Patrons can expect to see Loving v. Virginia staged in a future Portland Opera season.
Good luck, Portland Opera. That's all I'll say.
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