I presume that the technician had at least one PhD. I had a colleague who worked at Los Alamos with a top PhD and he was basically driving around placing and collecting data from some sensors all day long.
"The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology."
All latest node tech from TSMC was co-financed by Apple who in turn had the first-user right.
But the ARM architecture was originally an Acorn internal project (it was originally the Acorn RISC Machine), with the first Acorn Archimedes systems released in mid-1987. As you noted Apple did invest in the project later, when ARM the company was founded, but they also bailed out in the late '90s when they had their own financial issues.
> The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology.
The company was renamed to Advanced RISC Machines to placate Apple - the first ARM processor was the Acorn RISC Machine, which tells you it's true heritage.
Sure if we just ignore all the billions that the Tawiwanese government poured into TSMC, and all the stock investors' money, and ignore the other clients TSMC had, and the fact that they got to 20-nanometer without any funding from Apple as far as I know, then I guess you are right.
As somebody who went through the MBA education for defensive reasons (i.e. acquiring skills to protect me from managerial BS), I would say you can extend it to most business jobs excluding accountants and quants.
Video editing isn't even remotely their strongest presence. Photoshop, illustrator, indesign, substance painter, lightroom, acrobat... I mean come on now. Just because something is irrelevant to you doesn't mean it's generally irrelevant. Even within video editing, Resolve's capability and amazing free-tier functionality doesn't render Adobe irrelevant by any reasonable estimation. You either need to grab a dictionary and look up 'relevance,' get a better understanding of how superlatives work, or briefly peek outside of your own software usage before making sweeping declarations about pan-industry practices.
Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years. Lightroom is still the best, Illustrator is in a duopoly with CorelDRAW. I used to be a pro photo/cinematographer and I can replace most of my Photoshop needs with stable diffusion + ControlNet + ClipSeg. DaVinci with plugins made After Effect irrelevant for my needs as well. Certainly Adobe still has momentum but their future after they switched from engineering/art company to rentier monopoly company doesn't look that rosy.
> Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years.
This is a laughable idea.
Even if professional artists want to use generative AI in their workflow, it won't be by replacing a tool like Photoshop. It will be by enhancing it.
And if you think the entire art profession will be "eaten by generative AI", then you clearly know very little about human nature.
People will always want to create art. People will always want to see and own art.
Even if some of that latter desire is satisfied by generative AI in the future, I guarantee you not all of it will be. For one thing, there will also always be people who feel that the human touch is more important—that AI art isn't "real" art—and thus, in a world where AI-generated art is ubiquitous, human-created art will become even more prized.
You are missing the point. It's fairly easy to replace Photoshop's layering, color correction, filters etc. by a regular software engineering. Where Adobe had extra edge was their retouching, masking and content filling ability. That is now going to be possible to incorporate anywhere by stable diffusion et al. Now Adobe will still have foothold in "legacy" projects with proprietary formats but all the new entrants will have no need to use it. Suddenly folks in Affinity/Serif can add those missing features and continue carving out more from Adobe's market share the way Japan went from crappy manufacturing in the 60s to bleeding edge tech in 80s.
I mean, this is a very different version of "being eaten by generative AI" than what it sounded like you meant. This sounds much more like "Adobe will lose their moat and be outcompeted by other art programs (because generative AI is becoming ubiquitous)".
There are a lot of people out there saying things like "soon there won't be any more programmers/artists/writers because we'll be able to get generative AI to do all that stuff" (with, often, an implication of "screw those lazy/hippie art kids" from those talking about the latter two). This is very much what it sounded like you were saying.
Sorry, the message was probably obfuscated in my original post. I didn't mean that generative AI would replace art producers, just individual tools and it didn't occur to me at the time of typing it that most people would associate it with replacing art producers (as the tooling aspect was "obvious" to me).
I've been in-and-out of every one of these stacks professionally for years. I was a professional graphic and interface designer for a decade, which involved photography, photo editing, motion graphics and other 2d animation, and digital illustration. I've done a bit of freelancing, specfically with branding, identity and print design, but it's mostly been full-time, in-house work. More recently, I have moved into 3D modeling, 3D animation, and game engine work. I've worked with the current generative tools in professional settings and did procedural art and design work long before the current fad. I've seen their progression, and know better than damn near anyone you'll meet where they stand in the commercial art world.
You're basing unsubstantiated predictions on top of assumptions to form dubious suppositions about the future of these things to change the topic from your patently absurd assertion that the largest player in most creative industries became "irrelevant," "years ago." You're clearly going to continue pretending personal preferences, based on an incredibly narrow slice experience in this huge collection of creative industries, is generalizable to the rest of it. I'd say there's about zero percent chance you're going to start engaging in this conversation in good faith, so I'll let you finish it by yourself: you don't need my help to try and convince yourself that you know what you're talking about.
My business background tells me Adobe Photoshop is going to be commoditized because their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.
* Edit: it was a different person that posted the initial absurd statement. I'm leaving my response in here but italicizing it.
To be clear, the statement you're defending is that Adobe became "irrelevant" "years ago" which you backed up by comparing Premier to DaVinci Resolve. To be clear about the conversation you've switched to so you don't have to keep addressing that ridiculous statement:
if you think that anybody with stable diffusion or even the paid options can even approach the quality or efficiency of someone using Photoshop with its current set of tools based on the same technology, but targeted for specific professional tasks you really, really, really don't know what you're talking about. If your business background puts you in a business position leading you to any business decisions that have business consequences about this business then you better get busy hiring a consultant with more up-to-date knowledge.
Thanks for ad hominem. I never said 'Adobe became "irrelevant" "years ago"'. I also didn't say anyone can replace Adobe easily, but outlined a path how a motivated company can replace their offering. If somebody offers better UX (and there are many options to do better than PS), lowering the switching costs in required training, then it can happen fairly quickly. Beside being a former pro photo/cinematographer, I also worked for one Adobe competitor and invented a bunch of new geometric and image processing algorithms, then went on to study Deep Learning at Stanford, so maybe I know what I am talking about, or maybe I am just a fallacious idiot who has no clue.
Good grief. I mistook you for the person who made the initial absurd statement because you responded to the comment for which I responded to them. Who would deliberately misquote someone that can fact checked by moving their eyes 4 inches up the screen?
>I also didn't say anyone can replace Adobe easily, but outlined a path how a motivated company can replace their offering.
Ok, let's take a look.
"their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has..."
a) False. b) Sure sounds like you're saying that a 10 year old or Gimp can replace Photoshop functionality easily. Pretty precise word slicing there, but ok.
> so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.
So... their fading into irrelevance as a legacy product isn't being "easily replaced?" Yeah, ok.
> If somebody offers better UX (and there are many options to do better than PS), lowering the switching costs in required training, then it can happen fairly quickly.
The entire format of the generative AI tools is designed for amateurs to make "gee whiz" images without needing any discernible useful skills but the interface fundamentally abstracts away the repeatability and specificity needed for professional communication work. Meanwhile, Adobe started rolling out generative neural network based tools specifically targeted to professional use cases 3 or 4 years ago. Things might change, but this is not a close competition right now, and won't likely be for the foreseeable future. If you see Photoshop as a static target, you simply don't have current knowledge of the space.
> Beside being a former pro photo/cinematographer, I also worked for one Adobe competitor and invented a bunch of new geometric and image processing algorithms, then went on to study Deep Learning at Stanford, so maybe I know what I am talking about, or maybe I am just a fallacious idiot who doesn't get it.
Well, it sure sounds like you don't know much about the current state of the image manipulation tools I work with on a daily basis, which is what the conversation is about. You could be the former CEO of Adobe with a PhD in ML concentrating in image generation and a wing dedicated to your artwork at the Met and still be too out of touch with current image manipulation tooling to make useful predictions about it. In fact, I'd say nearly everybody I've encountered that's really into AI image generation and says it'll soon best the current professional toolkit couldn't list 5 significant ways Photoshop has changed in the past 10 years. And Photoshop is the most vulnerable too in their kit, by far. The prospect of it replacing InDesign anytime soon is absolutely laughable.
> You could be the former CEO of Adobe with a PhD in ML concentrating in image generation and a wing dedicated to your artwork at the Met and still be too out of touch with current image manipulation tooling to make useful predictions about it.
This was a good one, I love it!
My SWengineering background tells me that many of the tools Adobe has are tedious to replace but doable by many algorithmically gifted folks. Some need some investment to get to pro level like color calibration and correction. Some need camera manufacturer support like initial sensor RAW processing. The ones that were causing awe like their famous patented content aware fill based on complicated differential equations was out of reach for most. So were their precise selection/masking tools and a few more. Now we suddenly can select objects/background/hair fairly easily and reliably using ClipSeg or Segment Anything, removing the masking obstacle. To fill/replace content, we simply select the area and let stable diffusion hallucinate options until we are happy. To simulate puppet tool, we can use ControlNet with stable diffusion though implementing ARAP is also fairly easy. So a dedicated company that wants to get to the parity with Adobe in their most advanced tooling suddenly has a clear road ahead. If they improve UX by e.g. voice or gesture control (plenty of places where Adobe tools are difficult to use for no reason) and do some decent image format compatibility, they can really make a dent in Adobe's market share.
This might sound self-aggrandizing, but given infinite time and energy I alone could replicate most of the CS6 functionality of PS at the same or better quality (and I did create some powerful tools for one of their competitors) and know a few folks capable of the same.
Are you serious? After Effects can still do a ton that DaVinci cannot. It's awesome that Resolve exists for sure but Adobe is still by far the industry standard.
Don't get me wrong I like DaVinci a ton. But for motion graphics After Effects still has an edge. Additionally with things like dynamic linking and integration with Illustrator and etc it's still very much a critical part of a lot of workflows.
That said, DaVinci is improving at a very impressive pace. Adobe really just has the benefit of nearly 30 years of an ecosystem around it.
I'm actually quite surprised at how stagnant After Effects has become, but perhaps Adobe has some stuff coming down the pipeline.
I still own the CS6 suite, the last one before Adobe went mad with subscriptions. Even back then they tried to switch CS6 users to CC users by accepting some ridiculous license agreement that would lead to losing access to CS6. Adobe became truly horrible when the current CEO took the reins.
Its cool how adobe has web scraping robots like bots that scans countless computers in search for adobe software that doesn't have a ongoing subscription.
Oh wait. They can't.
As a person who doesn't need to do adobe software, I'd pirate their software just out of spite. Let them fight me.
How are they going to inject ads there though? Moreover, the cost per ad will be massive given how expensive the inference is. And a self-hosted Vicuna will likely behave similarly, potentially rendering the whole search experience pointless in the future. Anyone can incorporate a bunch of DDG results to a self-hosted good-enough LLM as well and make a basic desktop app for it, bypassing Google completely.
> Moreover, the cost per ad will be massive given how expensive the inference is.
The existing system still can do a nice job to predict value per query, so they'll apply it to perhaps only 1~5% of queries. It's still expensive though, but acceptable if the additional cost is meant to be transient over 1~2 years.
> Anyone can incorporate a bunch of DDG results to a self-hosted good-enough LLM
Perhaps (much) less than 0.01% of population? Technically, anyone can self-host their own blog but not many do that.
> Moreover, the cost per ad will be massive given how expensive the inference is.
Why would they need to use LLM inference to show ads? If anything, they can use their standard efficient methods to match ads based on the output of the LLM. Generative Search doesn't look like it's raw LLM output anyway. It's obviously been trained to pull from structured data sources or at least it's output is post-processed to present that data.
Ireland wants to lose money US corps pay them in order to bypass higher EU taxes I guess. I am wondering if they did some game theory scenario about what fine Meta can absorb before it's easier for them to relocate elsewhere with laxer standards that would love some more tax income.
I mean that's precisely how Ireland raised their GDP, they took all US companies and offered them low tax deals, making the rest of EU upset. Now they probably burned through all that money and are trying to outsmart those corps to get more money from them. Tax offices always project the same or higher income for the next year and when they get hit, they need to squeeze it out from somewhere.
The "G" in "GDPR" is the same as the one in "AGI": "General".
As I understand it (not a lawyer), every country in the EU unified their data protection regulations to match it, and the penalties for non-compliance are the same in all cases.
So, even maximal enforcement shouldn't cause any company to relocate. So long as the companies accept this as reality.
Actually, the GDPR only defines a minimal baseline for all the EU countries to meet. And countries didn't need to update their own laws to match it: since it is a Regulation rather than a Directive, the GDPR is enforcable in the entire EU even without a local law supporting it. Countries are still free to enact stricter policies if they want to, but those obviously wouldn't apply outside their own national borders.
That's in theory; in practice countries often look the other way or delay actions when they see fit. I guess Ireland is running out of money they planned to get and are now trigger happy on Meta.
Some schools are doing stackable degrees. You take a block of a few classes (e.g. 3-4 classes), get a graduate certificate for that area and once you get a few of them, you can convert them to a graduate degree. It might be trickier for undergrad as that's where the grit is being created.
100x is an assumption. LLMs can hit a ceiling (already prohibitively expensive to train), GPUs can hit a ceiling (we are not far from silicon semiconductor limits) and we might end up with a decade of "almost there, but not yet".
One can hope, but that would be a complete break from the history of computing.
There is still relatively low-hanging fruit because this is a very specific application that suddenly has a huge amount of attention. So there are software improvements, model improvements, and hardware improvements. Probably before we even start a truly new paradigm, Nvidia can get close to 10X by focusing on GPT. Model improvements can likely get another order of magnitude.
There are also radically different compute-in-memory paradigms in the pipeline.
We'll see I guess. All that GPT models showed us so far is that we humans aren't as intelligent as we thought. We might be forced to redefine what makes us human as intelligence might not be our most distinguishing trait fairly soon.
Most of the human traits missing are things we share with many animals. Not that that diminishes them.
Things like high-bandwidth senses tied to a body, stream of subjective experience, control seeking, self-centeredness, self-preservation, reproductive instincts, emotions. Also GPT doesn't have certain types of adaptivity yet. Or anything else that is part of being alive.
They are prohibitively expensive to train from scratch but one does not need to train them from scratch any more as long as there is a base training (these are available). With improvements like LoRA, it's possible to do fine-tuning and even stack these
Somewhere I read a short scifi story about a scientist that digitized his mind as part of his research. The copy was so stable it ended up pirated and used as assistant for millions of people. Each instance believes it's the original research copy, and the users must not let it know the truth, otherwise it becomes unhelpful.
I asked Bard for help, and it allucinated the fictional "The Last Human" by Isaac Asimov, and even described the plot when asked.
ChatGPT allucinated that Ken Liu's story called "The Perfect Match" was about personal assistants named "Jorges", after Dr. Jorge Luis Borges, who volunteered for the mind-uploading experiment.
Crowdsourcing to the right subreddit would likely bring the correct answer, so at least we know it doesn't help if AIs think faster than humans, if they don't learn to think as different personas.
I just wanted to quote the story, but this got me sidetracked.
Recently so many unrelated sites pop up a tiny Google login window somewhere on the page, obstructing what I want to see, like as if Google was super desperate for more tracking and engagement. Like why would I like to login to Google while viewing a forum about skyscrapers if I just wanted to read about the progress of some construction? Passive-aggressive at its core.
