I don't think you are correct for single-core performance.
A20 Pro scores around 4725 at 8.9w. Geekerwan's review showed that the iPhone 18 pro could dissipate as much as 6.4w during long gaming tests. Cutting power by 50% likely still keeps around 80% of the clockspeed.
As 9950x scores around 3400-3450 in geekbench, or around 28% slower.
There's a very good chance that the iPhone single thread performance is genuinely faster even during sustained loads.
These companies are posting massive losses while also lowering prices. This sounds just like the Chinese bikeshare bubble where they were all taking massive losses in hopes that their competitor would go broke first.
In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.
If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if this was a conspiracy to crash the "west" AI labs. Might as well pop the AI bubble and see the USA economy go down the drain. Even if not orchestrated, I am sure they see how they could benefit from that outcome.
Now, all this talk of pacing the frontier obviously means that they are afraid of the competition. It could be the open models eating their margins, but also competing frontier models forcing them to invest more and more for diminishing returns, just to keep up. They would certainly benefit from a "Moore's Law" roadmap to pace the advances, and seeing that they lobby for US laws, it would probably mean they are more worried about increasing spending. Though outlawing both open models and Chinese models would be good for their bottom line as well.
When you’re required to approve thousands of lines a day (code you can’t possible understand), it certainly IS causing issues that didn’t exist before.
Every study I’ve seen correlates the use of AI with large increases in the number of bugs. Look at Amazon dialing back AI after massive outages. Microsoft patch Tuesday releases are bricking computers (they even managed to break notepad somehow). The rash of Facebook bugs also coincided with their move to AI. Leaks from Google have engineers saying AI either doesn’t save any time because it takes so to remote stuff or it causes breakages if they speed up.
These companies can afford to get the best devs. They have access to essentially unlimited token budgets. They have STILL fallen off a cliff in quality.
What more proof could there be that this isn’t sustainable?
A correlation-causation link between AI use and these bugs has not been established. Until it has proven to come from the region of AI-pagne, it's just sparkling enshittification.
This isn’t the human body or some other thing with billions of unknown parameters. It’s a single (relatively simple) math equation that you are ascribing tons of non-existent complexity to.
Left to its own devices, that system will result in AI autophagy (model collapse) and iterative degradation.
The only area with serious uncertainty is how humans interact, but we now have research showing humans suffer cognitive issues very quickly using AI (some studies indicate effects happen in as little as 10 minutes) with cognitive surrender being a particularly big issue.
In a lot of systems, the only new data seems to be a few brainstorming sentences (you can read slop as entropy decaying things). The AI slops that into requirements. That slop feeds into an agent which generates a bunch of “reasoning” slop, maybe compacts everything (more slop), and spins up agents that get handed slop. They then open files with who knows how many generations of slop (maybe never even touched by a human) and write out a bunch more slop (it’s ironic that humans get better the more they edit a file, but AI gets worse). That slop gets “tested” by another agent reading all the other slop and maybe all this recurses a few generations.
At the end of this AI equivalent to “the human centipede”, you get a developer who’s handed 10x or maybe even 100x more code than their brain would possible process. They are suffering complete cognitive surrender (not to mention often reaching mental and maybe physical collapse from the workload and stress). They don’t understand the system and rubber stamp it so they can move on to the next 50 PRs of the day.
From start to finish, it’s 100% entropy outside a handful of lines worth of human input.
Many people predicted bugs and even discussed entropy issues before AI coding was popular. The buggy mess timing aligns not only with AI adoption, but happens to each company ramping up as they ramp up AI usage.
This is like seeing Einstein’s predictions happen, but arguing he can’t prove correlation/causation. What evidence would you actually accept that is feasible to study?
SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day. The addition of new networks is going to congest things even more and the risk of unavoidable cascading failure keeps increasing at a massive rate.
Those are pre-emptive moves for minimizing what is a very small chance of collisions, not narrowly escaped near certain collisions. Air traffic control does a similar thing with keeping planes spaced apart in zones under their control. In space a small thruster nudge will have a huge impact at a very low cost
That depends what you mean by "open ocean"? Vessels near ports or in defined traffic lanes frequently maneuver to avoid collisions as per the rules of the road. Outside territorial waters it's less common but still happens occasionally. Either way, those avoidance maneuvers are such routine events that no one really gathers data on them.
Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars.
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
Debris from a collision on water won't spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds.
> spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds
This isn't how debris clouds work. The most-complex ones occur when entirely separate orbits collide were you get an X-shaped (versus cylndricla or conic) debris cloud. But the energies of the collision inputs sharply curtail the orbits and places in said orbits the debris fragments can generally reach.
Idk, Iridium-Cosmos debris are still absolutely everywhere [0] after almost 20 years. The only place a ship collision's gonna leave debris is directly under it.
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
Space is huge, but being on land has some advantages too. It's true that volume grows, but satellites don't have brakes in the way that cars do, nor is there a cleanup crew that removes the debris after a crash.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
Water usage may be a drop in the bucket nationally, but they tend to put datacenters in areas without much water (often because evaporative cooling is less expensive in arid regions) and the effects to those local water supplies can be extreme.
I feel like I've been in a recession economy since the day I entered the workforce 14 years ago. The movement of the stock market has had no effect on my reality. It's like two different universes inhabited by two different sets of people.
IMO, all the narratives we were exposed to around privilege before and after COVID were a cover up of this fact that we have a two-class system which is explicitly creating this condition. The issue is at the system design level and goes far beyond "technology putting people out of a job". The privilege narrative was classic communist-style "accuse your enemy of what you're doing yourself." It was literally the privileged few preemptively accusing the unprivileged masses of being unfairly privileged in order to take control that narrative before it was used on them.
Rewriting critical stuff like hand-written SIMD takes a long time (though not as long as it took ARM because ARM had to overcome everything being written in just one ISA). Even a decade in, there are still lots of low-hanging fruit in RISC-V compilation that is still being dealt with. There's quite a few really great talks about the progress here and I think we're going to continue to see major gains in RISC-V performance via compiler changes for quite a while longer.
If such an instruction is so obviously important, we'll see it start popping up as a custom instruction in some cores then it will get adopted as an official extension by other companies trying to stay competitive.
A20 Pro scores around 4725 at 8.9w. Geekerwan's review showed that the iPhone 18 pro could dissipate as much as 6.4w during long gaming tests. Cutting power by 50% likely still keeps around 80% of the clockspeed.
As 9950x scores around 3400-3450 in geekbench, or around 28% slower.
There's a very good chance that the iPhone single thread performance is genuinely faster even during sustained loads.
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