The distinction making it RL is that the model is training on data produced by the model itself.
The benefit of RL in general is that you're training on states the agent is likely to find itself in, and the cost is needing an agent which explores salient states. Which is why we keep seeing RL as a finishing step after imitation (eg AlphaStar first learning StarCraft from replays)
The easiest way to be unproductive is to make something nobody wants. I've seen a lot of dev time spent on products where nobody bothered to validate their need at much less expense.
When I feel joy and wonder at work, I'm incredibly productive and I work long hours on top of that. When my senses of agency, exploration, and play are undermined, I'm deeply demoralized and find it very difficult to focus and can't wait to walk away from my computer.
I'm still trying to figure out how to better regulate myself away from those extremes (how to put my work down for the sake of other aspects of my life when I'm excited on the one hand, and how to push through and 'reset' when I am frustrated by something outside my control on the other). But one of the things I've already learned is that focusing on productivity in terms of sheer discipline doesn't really work. I get a lot farther working with self-reflection on my emotions and carving out space for joy and freedom in the formal structure of my work week than with sheer mental effort.
I have it similarly. For me, if I can't "play around" or explore something new in a while, my motivation and focus drops to zero.
On the other hand, most days I'm just too mentally exhausted to work on programming when I get home. So I rarely get to scratch that itch on my own time.
To get around that, every now and then I take some time while working on some issue to do something new, like play around with programming language constructs and exploring the limits of the language.
It's not always easy to do though, with deadlines and whatnot. So can be a real struggle at times.
For large categories of questions, I get better answers faster on ChatGPT. If I'm not asking the most basic question on a subject I'm usually better off than I would be searching.
Here's my rule of thumb: if my search doesn't depend on recent information, and it is likely to return blog spam as the top result, then I will use ChatGPT instead.
I still use web search frequently to find project homepages, official and up-to-date documentation, news and announcements, discussion (hearing people's stories of their experiences with a product is a lot better than ChatGPT's noncommittal and abstract pros/cons), searching for videos/images, etc.
GPT 4 just got browsing, so I've actually started telling it to do the entire research phase I was gonna do and just let it grind it out without having to despair at Google's abysmal search results. Still a bit unreliable but actually gets it done quite well on occasion.
The long term vision likely includes Bing as the new default destination for "I have an intent" on the internet, in lieu of Google. How that figures into a unified offering is TBD but the first step is getting more eyes on Bing regularly.
It's not senseless when countries apply laws that affect websites operated from other countries. If I'm releasing a prototype in the USA I'd rather worry about GDPR compliance down the road.
Laws regulating websites have tradeoffs and this is one of them.
Also maybe they have some loyalty to their US American countrymen. Reminds me of how a majority in polls in the US said that the Pfizer vaccine should be distributed to US Americans first, while people in almost all other countries were more in favor for international ratios. (Although this case isn't equally justified here, since the vaccine was produced by a US company, Pfizer, but developed by a German company, BioNTech.)
Realistically most of this tech was actually developed in academic labs and at Moderna, then knowledge leached out to biotech competitors.
> while people in almost all other countries were more in favor for international ratios
I have seen the first polling you've mentioned (66% of Americans favor prioritizing US). I would love the source if you have it on similar polling for people outside the US on whether to prioritize their own country.
I don't think the technology was leaked from Moderna, as BioNTech was a major player in this mRNA technology before.
I don't have the poll, but as far as I remember only in the US was the majority for prioritizing the own country. Though the amount of money spent on "project warp speed", a US effort not matched anywhere else, could play a role here.
