It's not. Kodak sold a pile of 1000 odd patents to a consortium of tech companies for something like half a billion dollars. It was the accumulated bullshit of thirty years of "transferring a digital image via digital computer network on a Tuesday" type stuff, plus some actual innovation, much of it in algorithms, mixed in.
Hacky: the first of pretty much any gadget is going to be a pile of junk on some engineer's desk. So long as it fits on a desk.
Why secretive? He took an image sensor invented at Bell Labs and manufactured by Fairchild and used it to make an image. Secretive from his bosses maybe, since he managed to put Kodak out of business.
Income taxes, not taxes.
"Instant" profit is more like "in five years" or "during my time in charge" profit. That AI "research" is very much aimed at generating profits in the short term. Nobody really cared that much until OpenAI announced something that could potentially cut into Google's ad+search money pipe, then the race was on. It follows precisely the silicon valley software company strategy: write some software, offer it free or steeply discounted at a loss to get users (i.e. "scale") then monetize it with ads.
PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.
What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.
By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.
I like them too, family even is an antique book dealer. But.. I am allergic to a lot of old books. And now I need bigger print and more interested in new books with option to find old ones. So even though it has drawbacks, my kindle PaperWhite has some killer features: big text, instant purchase, and kindle unlimited. Big e-ink tablet (Daylight Computer DC-1) is also useful. The AI feature? Haven't seen it yet but people who buy cliff notes or my family member who had to give a talk about a difficult book to a book club recently could make use of the feature.
Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.
Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.
It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.
If I were Robert De Niro or Taylor Swift, I wouldn't care if an ad says "this is AI" on it, I'd freaking sue if an ad looked like me or sounded like me.
That's what the second bill is for, apparently. Isn't this already covered in US laws though? Here in the Netherlands we have had "portrait rights" for over a century, basically it means that you have a say in how your likeness is being used in publications, and you can forbid publication if you have a good reason. Reasons include protecting one's reputation, but also the use of a famous person's likeness without their permission. The law also protects persons after their death, but only for a period of 10 years. Because of AI, they are now considering extending that period.
You don't need more than one guy to have a corporation. I have one. But that's really a modern legal and tax thing. Corporations were invented to make it easier for groups of people to act together.
I suspect the "replace the corporation" thing is just dumbassery, but it does potentially have a real meaning as above. You're also correct, other technology has also had that effect. There are lots of one-person operations, incorporated or not, that previously would have required the pooled resources of a group. Automation of all kinds does that. We also have a tendency to just dream bigger, which I'm sure will happen this time around too. And we also have a tendency to invent more bullshit jobs to fill in too.
Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.
So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.
That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.
You have junk mail.
