I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought, and that should be crystal clear to those who are paying.
Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players the game has. Requiring that people should be able to play such games if the company stops running it would completely change and limit how games are developed, and in many cases require a completely different version of the game to be co-developed in case people stop playing it. It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games.
I do of course think that developers should try to make games playable without the company being involved, within reason. Some games that do not have licensing issues or complicated server backends as a requirement could be made available without too much work. But for things like e.g. MMORPGs it's nearly impossible. If your ever developed bigger software systems you know how many moving parts are involved, so just imagine the difficulty of making it work on consumer machines...
You are talking about online games here which are a subset of games. And I agree they exist in the moment since they rely on external servers and other players.
Most games aren't online games though and those would realistically last forever if it wasn't for companies shutting down activation servers or download servers. There's also a problem where old games get delisted. If you want to play an old game today you can just buy the disk of ebay. Now the only way to buy a game is through the digital store which won't be selling the game forever, with no way to officially transfer copies between players.
> It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games
No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.
Changing the verbiage would be better in that it would be honest, but I still find it absolutely despicable that the very concept of owning a game basically disappeared.
Tons of games people play do NOT have notable online features outside leaderboards, cosmetics or other inconsequential mechanics.
A common extreme misconception is that inference is expensive and that providers are loosing a lot of money. Inference is extremely lucrative and profitable.
I think the case for this is pretty strong actually. Last year my company was maybe willing to pay $100 a month to Anthropic (per developer). Today we're all on the $300 plan without any hesitation. If Fable ever becomes available as the default model, I imagine my company would be willing to pay in the $500-$1000 range per month per developer.
Okay, but that still has a limit, right? Do training costs have a limit? Everyone is in the frothy stage of this technology wave and they continue to buy more, but training the next model requires exponential increases in model sizes to get the same sorts of model performance increases, which suggests exponential cost increases, too (even ignoring temporary cost factors such as RAM price increases). You say your company will double or triple what they are paying today; how far are they willing to go? At some point they are going to have to cut developers to fund it (e.g., cut half the developers and give the survivors each an AI assistant with $180k in token budget, captured from the salary savings), but that also presupposes the productivity gains are there to support it.
First of all, yes cutting developers to fund AI spend budgets, is the entire operating idea behind these AI companies; and most companies would love doing that. I'm not saying this is a good thing, my heading is on the chopping block like everyone else's.
But isn't this like a Jevon's paradox thing, also? If I'm able to become vastly more productive, and that value produces more sellable output for my company, there's no reason to cut anywhere to fund it. This is the same reason a company like Microsoft can hire 80 000 developers, it's because each dev pays for themselves in value (on average). I guess the same can be true for AI spend?
Hey! We Norwegians have on average more ownership in US tech companies than Americans!
Everything is going according to plan. When we have majority, we'll move the companies to Norway, but don't tell anyone, this is supposed to be a secret. /s
To be fair, it would be a bigger issue for the US. No country is more economically dependant on the rest of the world than the US. The US is living on the USD, and if others stop using it the US would have to do extreme cuts on everything.
But you are talking about Europe. If the US and Europe were to cut all ties they would both face some serious consequences, and the US wouldn't be able to do anything about that, not strategically or military. The US need trust in order to function, and attacking would loose them all trust globally, making it much much more severe than anything any other nations would struggle with.
I don't think entire EU would cut ties with US. US would definitely try to divide and concur and I think they would be successful. Not every country in EU sees US as an enemy (especially conservative and right leaning governments in EU)
The proper way to implement it is to issue digital IDs and use ZK proofs to verify the age. That way the service doesn't know anything other that the fact that you have an official digital ID and that you are at least a certain age. The ID issuer does not need to be involved in anything other than issuing the ID, making it perfect when it comes to privacy, while still fulfilling the goal of having an age limit.
If this is built on open standards, so that anyone can use it for free, it would be a big positive step forward for everyone.
Zero knowledge proofs are unusable for age verification because they're impossible to revoke. One person can share their ID and everyone else can use it.
A dark, but not totally unfair take: It makes it easier for Apple to take payment for the models others provide, and even allows Apple, if they want to, to use the data to build a dataset for training their own models based on how users use third party models. It's only on Apple devices this API is used, so they split up the market by not letting developers use the same system if they want things to work on iOS, locking users even more in.
> Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses. Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing. Your app decides when to use Claude and when to use Apple's on-device model: pass whichever model you want to each session.
No reasonable person relies on Apple's statements as facts. That said by Apple's laywers, and is especially true here. Apple can access the data if they want, and so can Google and Nvidia.
Because it would be foolish to just trust them on their statements both given their history as well as given the fact that they're in it for the money and tend to follow the path which brings in more of it.
You can look up the history of this company's claims versus reality on their promises re. privacy yourself, there's enough to be found between Siri listening when it shouldn't, user data being accessible to the company in contrast to promises of privacy, the company collecting user data which is used for targeted advertising, several examples of push notification data being handed over to law enforcement agencies in several countries, leaky 'airdrop' allowing user identification which wasn't fixed by the company even after a fix was published by outsiders and more.
The real question is why you seem to be so credulous when it comes to this company. Do you extend this trust to other similar companies or is it only reserved for this specific company? I ask this because you're not the first person who seems to consider this company to be almost above criticism even though they've shown to be just like other companies in all respects. When Jobs was still around this stance was supposedly caused by his 'reality distortion field' but he has been gone for a long time and given that Cook has the charisma of an accountant this can no longer be the reason. What makes them so special to some even though their claims have been punctured many times over?
Cause I'm not trying to fool you in order to make money off you, and it should not be hard to understand that it is impossible to create a usable reply to a text someone sends you if you can't see the text.
> The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.
Apple's PCC is the best option for this kind of offload that exists.
However the PCC root keys are still signed by Apple which requires you to trust Apple and the laws in the jurisdiction Apple operates in.
Edit: for this update they seems to be running Gemini on Nvidia GPUs in Google's cloud[0]. How key management works for this part is unknown, but the standard setup for this is that Nvidia and Google would have keys too.
It does use the OHTTP relay[1] which makes it hard - maybe impossible - for Apple to hand over the keys for a particular person's data. Maybe that provides some additional protection in US courts against overreach.
Is this a problem for most people? Probably not - but it is something to be aware of.
I think Apple have made a great attempt to make this as safe and private as possible, but until we have a truly trustless E2E encrypted execution environment I don't see how compute offload technologies gets around this problem.
[0] > And to bring this model to production, we work with both Google and Nvidia to extend our Private Cloud Compute infrastructure to NVIDIA GPUs in Google’s cloud, while maintaining Apple’s unmatched privacy guarantees
Don't you think there is always going to be an escape hatch for peoples private data? Like if you ask it how to make an explosive the message won't stay private on Google's servers? Seems like there could be all kinds of things like that.
The design on the system is specifically done to make that impossible because you control the encryption keys and they can't see your data.
It nearly works except for the annoying hardware signing keys.
With OHTTP it might still be ok because it is impossible to identify which server has your content. OHTTP probably still applies to the Apple->[Google+Nvidia] version but they haven't specifically said that.
Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players the game has. Requiring that people should be able to play such games if the company stops running it would completely change and limit how games are developed, and in many cases require a completely different version of the game to be co-developed in case people stop playing it. It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games.
I do of course think that developers should try to make games playable without the company being involved, within reason. Some games that do not have licensing issues or complicated server backends as a requirement could be made available without too much work. But for things like e.g. MMORPGs it's nearly impossible. If your ever developed bigger software systems you know how many moving parts are involved, so just imagine the difficulty of making it work on consumer machines...
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