The difference is that the Allen Institute models have open training data, not just open code and weights. Meta doesn't share the training data you would need to reproduce their final models. For many uses open-weight models are nearly as good, but for advancing research it's much better to have everything in the open.
Reading their paper, it wasn't trained from scratch, it's a fine tune of a Qwen3-32B model. I think this approach is correct, but it does mean that only a subset of the training data is really open.
The massive build-up they have is mostly renewables. Surely, you see the problems with that, right? Georgia is a red state, so it's political suicide to even hint at proposing that.
Large scale solar power generation has more than doubled in Georgia since 2020:
Texas is number 2, behind only California. Solar power is popular in sunny states even if they're "red," though the most heated political rhetoric doesn't reflect that.
Huh, I didn't realize how far the build up had gone.
Your second link is interesting, though, because it shows solar in Georgia took a nosedive in 2025. I've got a feeling that that year's data is much more representative of what it will look like in the next two or three decades than any historical trend might be.
I still really dont see how solar or wind power the future needs at all. surely nuclear is the only solution longer time. obviously it has to be made safe but why are wasting so much time and money on solar and wind that are demonstably not good for the environments they go into. at scale that is going to be felt because no, actually deserts are not "just empty spaces doing nothing" they have a huge knock on effect when changed either life within them, or how they feed the surrounding non-desert environments. Why is nuclear still the bogeyman when the sun is a nuclear event. cut out the middle man. surely.
There’s movement around nuclear but it takes 10-15 years to build one plant and that’s for plants that are already tested. 15-20 for something new or experimental. Even China with all its rapid construction can’t build one in less than 8. We’re not offsetting anything with nuclear anytime soon. Solar plants take 3-6 months to get up and running.
A combination of solar/renewables with nuclear is the best strategy over the long term.
Some people say that human jobs will move to the physical world, which avoids the whole category of “cognitive labor” where AI is progressing so rapidly. I am not sure how safe this is, either. A lot of physical labor is already being done by machines (e.g., manufacturing) or will soon be done by machines (e.g., driving). Also, sufficiently powerful AI will be able to accelerate the development of robots, and then control those robots in the physical world.
I would like to believe that we're about to see a rapid proliferation of useful robots, but progress has been much slower with the physical world than with information-based tasks.
After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007, I thought that massive job losses from robotic car and truck drivers were only 5-8 years away. But in 2026 in the US only Waymo has highly autonomous driving systems, in only a few markets. Most embodied tasks don't even have that modest level of demonstrated capability.
I actually worry that legislators -- people with white collar jobs -- will overestimate the near-term capabilities of AI to handle jobs in general, and prematurely build solutions for a "world without work" that will be slow to arrive. (Like starting UBI too early instead of boosting job retraining, leaving health care systems understaffed for hands-on work.)
> But in 2026 in the US only Waymo has highly autonomous driving systems, in only a few markets
10 years ago I predicted that the uptake of autonomous vehicles would be slow but that it would be because of labor protections. While those have had some impact, that isn't really the issue: it's that the cars just don't quite work well enough yet and that last ~20% of function turns out to be both incredibly difficult and incredibly important.
One thing that I've not quite been able to sort of get my head around about the whole AI and future of work thing ss the view around work in the physical world being safe. I don't particularly buy the rationale and not from the position of robots are going to do the work. I don't know much about robots really but from what I've seen from the more viral stuff that breaks through to mainstream internet from time to time, it still feels that we're some way out.
But that feels like the least of the worries to me. There seems to be an implicit assumption that those physical lines of work don't get eroded by the higher proportion of able bodied people who are suddenly unemployable. Yes there is some training required etc. but the barriers to entry aren't so high that in the shortish to medium term you don’t see more people gravitating to those industries and competing wages further down to not make then sustainable employment long term. I'd even think that having LLMs that can recognise photos or understand fuzzily explain questions about some blue collar skills many have forgotten actually reduces the barrier even more
Solar hardware is so affordable now that it's booming even in poorer countries. The most remarkable recent example is Pakistan, which has seen explosive growth of rooftop solar power, most of it receiving no government subsidies:
Pakistan has imported almost 45 gigawatts worth of solar panels over the last five or six years, which is equal to the total capacity of its electricity grid. Almost 34 gigawatts have come in only in the last couple of years.
It’s a very bottom-up revolution. This is not government deciding this is the route to take. And it’s not being driven by climate concerns, it’s all about the economics. Renewables are out-competing the traditional sources of energy.
Not really, unless you are just guessing. A quick read shows that solar gained popularity because of an unreliable grid and a removal of subsidies on diesel. Solar ended up being the cheaper and more reliable option. Labor costs for installation are also lower. In remote areas you may not even have a grid option. Simple general assumptions don't hold across vastly different geopolitical circumstances.
It's mostly due to higher "soft costs" such as complicated/slow permitting and high customer acquisition costs. Australia has a higher minimum wage but much lower costs to get a rooftop system installed.
Birch points to Australia, where he said the average 7 kW solar array with a 7 kW battery costs $14,000. That equates to $2.02 per W, with batteries included.
“You can sell it on Tuesday and install it on Wednesday, there’s no red tape, no permitting delays,” said Birch.
...
In the United States, that same solar and battery installation averages $36,000, said Birch. Permitting alone can take two to six months, and the cost per watt of a solar plus storage installation is up to 2.5 times the Australian price, landing at $5.18 per W.
Australia is spending tax dollars to get solar on every roof in the country instead of building coal or nuke plants.
Now people are getting free power as a result.
A crafted PDF can potentially exploit a bug in atril to compromise the recipient's computer since writing memory-safe C is difficult. This approach was famously used by a malware vendor to exploit iMessage through a compressed image format that's part of the PDF standard:
This is why Firefox chose to implement a custom PDF reader in pure JS for better sandboxing leveraging the existing browser JS sandboxing.
As a side effect, it's been a helpful JS library for embedding PDFs on websites.
The Chrome PDF parser, originating from Foxit (now open-sourced as PDFium), has been the source of many exploits in Chrome itself over the years.
Do not help build, deploy, or give detailed instructions for weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological).
I don't think that this is a good example of a moral absolute. A nation bordered by an unfriendly nation may genuinely need a nuclear weapons deterrent to prevent invasion/war by a stronger conventional army.
It’s not a moral absolute. It’s based on one (do not murder). If a government wants to spin up its own private llm with whatever rules it wants, that’s fine. I don’t agree with it but that’s different than debating the philosophy underpinning the constitution of a public llm.
Do not murder is not a good moral absolute as it basically means do not kill people in a way that's against the law, and people disagree on that. If the Israelis for example shoot Palestinians one side will typically call it murder, the other defence.
This isn't arguing about whether or not murder is wrong, it's arguing about whether or not a particular act constitutes murder. Two people who vehemently agree murder is wrong, and who both view it as an inviolable moral absolute, could disagree on whether something is murder or not.
How many people without some form of psychopathy would genuinely disagree with the statement "murder is wrong?"
Not many but the trouble is murder kind of means killing people in a way which is wrong so saying "murder is wrong" doesn't have much information content. It's almost like saying "wrong things are wrong".
Not saying it's good, but if you put people through a rudimentary hypothetical or prior history example where killing someone (i.e. Hitler) would be justified as what essentially comes down to a no-brainer Kaldor–Hicks efficiency (net benefits / potential compensation), A LOT of people will agree with you. Is that objective or a moral absolute?
Does traveling through time to kill Hitler constitute murder though? If you kill him in 1943 I think most people would say it's not, the crimes that already been committed that make his death justifiable. What's the difference if you know what's going to happen and just do it when he's in high school? Or putting him in a unit in WW1 so he's killed in battle?
I think most people who have spent time with this particular thought experiment conclude that if you are killing Hitler with complete knowledge of what he will do in the future, it's not murder.
Downvotes on a comment have already affected your total karma score. Deleting the comment doesn't undo the karma loss. However, you have a chance to avoid further karma loss if you decide to delete the comment shortly after it starts getting negative reactions. (I have done this when I realized that my comment was getting downvoted for snark.)
I don't think that most of them are from big-name companies. I run a personal web site that has been periodically overwhelmed by scrapers, prompting me to update my robots.txt with more disallows.
The only big AI company I recognized by name was OpenAI's GPTBot. Most of them are from small companies that I'm only hearing of for the first time when I look at their user agents in the Apache logs. Probably the shadiest organizations aren't even identifying their requests with a unique user agent.
As for why a lot of dumb bots are interested in my web pages now, when they're already available through Common Crawl, I don't know.
Maybe someone is putting out public “scraper lists” that small companies or even individuals can use to find potentially useful targets, perhaps with some common scraper tool they are using? That could explain it? I am also mystified by this.
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