we now know that as the price of computing equipment fell, new use cases emerged to fill the gap – which is why today my lightbulbs have semiconductors inside them, and I occasionally have to install firmware updates my doorbell.

surely the compute freed up by more efficient models will be used to train models even harder, and apply even more “brain power” to coming up with responses? Even if DeepSeek is dramatically more efficient, the logical thing to do will be to use the excess capacity to ensure the answers are even smarter.

ure, if DeepSeek heralds a new era of much leaner LLMs, it’s not great news in the short term if you’re a shareholder in Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta or Google.6 But if DeepSeek is the enormous breakthrough it appears, it just became even cheaper to train and use the most sophisticated models humans have so far built, by one or more orders of magnitude. Which is amazing news for big tech, because it means that AI usage is going to be even more ubiquitous.

Pioneered by our team and now widely used as a standard in the field, RCS is the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. You can think of this as an entry point for quantum computing — it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. Any team building a quantum computer should check first if it can beat classical computers on RCS; otherwise there is strong reason for skepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks.

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

The broader issue is that the video industry finally seems to be facing what happened to the print and music industry before them: the Internet comes bearing gifts like infinite capacity and free distribution, but those gifts are a poisoned chalice for industries predicated on scarcity. When anyone could publish text, most text-based businesses went from massive profitability to terminal decline; when anyone could distribute music the music industry could only be saved by tech companies like Spotify helping them sell convenience in place of plastic discs.

thanks to COVID a lot of people fell out of the habit of going to the movie theater, and it appears around 25% of the audience permanently found something better to do with their time; that same reality applies to TV. Just as newspapers once thought the Internet was a boon because it increased their addressable market, only to find out that it also drastically increased competition for readers’ attention, Hollywood has to face the reality that the ability to make far more shows extends not only to studios but also to literally anyone.

In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms. We’ll also show more details about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile photo or information about the popularity of their content.

Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.We’ve also worked to improve how we rank review content on Search – for example, web pages that review businesses or destinations – to place greater emphasis on the quality and originality of the information. You’ll now see more pages that are based on first-hand experience, or are created by someone with deep knowledge in a given subject. And as we underscore the importance of “experience” as an element of helpful content, we continue our focus on information quality and critical attributes like authoritativeness, expertise and trustworthiness, so you can rely on the information you find.

Pessimists Archive™ is a project to educate people on and archive the history of technophobia and moral panics. We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old.Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.