He took over a failing Dutch tech company and turned it around. Nexperia was on the path to bankruptcy, that’s why it was on the market to be sold back in 2017. His company injected capital and made it profitable. Even last year, his parent company even announced a $200M expansion of Nexperia’s Hamburg plant, which totally goes against the narrative that they were moving production out of Europe.

The Dutch govt is trying to spin this, but they have like 5 different storylines and none of them make sense.

In some dimensions, current day LLMs are already superintelligent. They are extremely good knowledge retrieval engines that can far outperform traditional search engines, once you learn how properly to use them. No, they are not AGIs, because they’re not sentient or self-motivated, but I’m not sure those are desirable or useful dimensions of intellect to work towards anyway.

The kneejerk reaction is gonna be “Meta bad”, but it’s actually a bit more complicated.

Whatever faults Meta has in other areas, it’s been mostly a good player in the AI space. They’re one of the major reasons we have strong open-weight AI models today. Mistral, another maker of open AI models and Europe’s only significant player in AI, has also rejected this code of conduct. By contrast, OpenAI a.k.a. ClosedAI has committed to signing it, probably because they are the incumbents and they think the increased compliance costs will help kill off competitors.

Personally, I think the EU AI regulation efforts are a big missed opportunity. They should have been used to force a greater level of openness and interoperability in the industry. With the current framing, they’re likely to end up entrenching big proprietary AI companies like OpenAI, without doing much to make them accountable at all, while also burying upstarts and open source projects under unsustainable compliance requirements.

The EU AI Act is the thing that imposes the big fines, and it’s pretty big and complicated so many companies have complained that its hard to know what exactly they’re supposed to do. So this voluntary code of conduct was released as a sample procedure for compliance, i.e. “if you do things this way, you (probably) won’t get in trouble with regulators”.

It’s also worth noting that not all the complaints are unreasonable. For example, the code of conduct says that model makers are supposed to take measures to impose restrictions on end-users to prevent copyright infringement, but such usage restrictions are very problematic for open source projects (in some cases, usage restrictions can even disqualify a piece of software as FOSS).

At this point, Tesla needs to steal IP from them, not the other way round.

Fermentation-made milk substitute was available at supermarkets in Singapore (under the brand name Very Dairy, though the original product was from the startup Perfect Day). I really liked it—a lot nicer than oat milk for drinking straight up. Unfortunately it went off the shelves after a while, seems like demand wasn’t high :-(

It’s a bit hard to believe, but the vast majority of China’s manufacturing is consumed in China; it’s actually not that export oriented compared to other countries like Germany or Japan, it’s just the scale that makes them such and exporting juggernaut. The flip side of this is that most of the energy use is also actually China’s own energy use.

And China’s energy use is increasing simply because its people are getting richer and consuming more. Based on this, I don’t think China is the main concern. There are lots more developing countries that will likewise use more energy as they develop. China’s green transition seems to be going full tilt, but I’m not sure those other countries can transition as quickly as we need.