Changing Times.

[RCA]

AI rates are a bargain now. OpenAI is already asking $200/month for their new system. And I am not saying it is not worth $200. I use Grok-2, Claude and ChagGpt (4 o1) for work. Each at $20/month. Not bad. In particular Claude and Grok-2 are experts at DevOps - installing software. Nowadays that is a total bi-ch. If the software UI gets simpler, the installation of many packages and tools - and websites gets more difficult. AI let's me do some kinds of installation that a competent DevOps guy (and they do get paid very good salaries by the way) would take a couple of day to do - if he were experienced. They don't know exactly what to do in many cases, they have to try this and try that, just like any DevOps guy or gal would have to do. But, they get it done with me in hours and I can certainly live with that.

So, now is the time to use these system while only paying $20/month. Eventually I can see the prices going way up - and I am not sure I will always be able to afford the price.

====

So, anyway I realy don't have time for low paying appraisal work. It is low priority, so low. Now I do good to make the kind of progress I want on my own system and software - and publications.

Looks like I will let SRA expire this month, and skip renewal of the appraisers license in May. If I need to make money - I can probably get contracts for another 10 years or so. .....

 

[Fernando]

I brother is using Grok. He likes it the best.

 

[RCA]

I brother is using Grok. He likes it the best.

These AI system can now be split between LLM (Large Language Models) which Ilya Sutskever and others say have hit a wall, because the data they depend on, can't be improved anytime soon, - and other tools. The LLMs have consumed all the available data. There is no more oil in the ground, - to use a common analogy. However, they are attaching "Reasoning Engines", "Agents", "Synthetic Data Generators" - and other kinds of computational engines to improve their performance. Grok-2 has the first attached Reasoning Engine - which is impressive.

So, more progress is possible. In particular the application of reasoning and logic. As already stated, there is the concept of "consciousness" - the state at which AI systems will have human like conciousness and be very much aware of all their other components, in particular memory.