He says that's for microcode ROMs though? As opposed to a user program written in machine code that you would use the CPU to execute. I don't believe ancient CPUs had microcode. Everything was implemented in hardware.
68K, System 360, Sperry 1100, and even the 'ACE' to name the great grand daddy of them all had microcode.
Technically the 6502 and the 6800/09 did not, they used a dedicated decoder that was closer to a statemachine than microcode, even though both were implemented in hardware.
None of the smaller CPUs had 'loadable' microcode, but plenty of the larger ones did.
CPU's microcode can be surprisingly simple: The CPU has bunch of internal signals, which activates certain parts of the CPU and the logic when to turn each signal on comes from reading bunch of input signals. The microcode can be just a memory where the input signals are the memory address and the output is the control signals.
It's just that at some point when it's all physically wired up in hardware as opposed to being stored in some form of memory I have difficulty thinking of it as code or a program. By the time you're rearranging wires to enter a "program" aren't you actually refactoring the CPU itself?
Anyway I feel like the answer to the chicken and egg problem originally posed is to point out that things used to be different. Tools such as text editors and compilers are merely modern syntactic sugar.
Because at least for my own usage of Google the LLM started out as an interactive search with substantially better context filtering that could tune the results to my desired technical level. However I promptly started just having it explain the subject matter to me rather than spending 30+ minutes consulting various docs and forum posts because it makes for an excellent secretary/tutor combo provided you vigilantly watch for misinformation.
So to answer your question, while charts might not be particularly useful for a search engine a tutor certainly benefits from them.
I doubt it makes a difference. The primary risk is the agent exfiltrating your private data. That's going to exist either way.
Essentially anything you give it access to should be considered inside the same security boundary. Which is quite unfortunate if you want it to respond to emails for you and also query the internet at large.
Suppose I illicitly get my hands on the source code for a proprietary product. I read through this code I'm not supposed to have. I write up a detailed set of specifications based on it. I hand those specifications off to someone else to do a clean room implementation.
Sure, I didn't have a license for the code that I read. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't taint my coworker's clean room implementation.
> As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements. The Office continues to monitor technological and legal developments to evaluate any need for a different approach.
But let's assume that the viktor prompts themselves were subject to copyright. In this case those prompts were used to generate documentation which was then used to generate an implementation. It's certainly not a clean room by any stretch of the imagination but is it likely to be deemed sufficient separation? The entire situation seems like a quagmire.
> the only real fear here is a state-level attack.
This is blatantly false. In the real world there was a major recall after security researchers (not state actors) demonstrated that they could remotely interfere with safety critical systems. OTA updates without user involvement are a massive security vulnerability. So are internet connected safety critical systems. Neither should be legally permissible IMO.
> I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
Setting aside assassinations do you just have no imagination? There have been all sorts of crazy disgruntled worker sabotage stories over the years. Mass shooters exist. Political and religious terrorists exist.
For a specific mass scale state level hypothetical imagine that the US enters a hot war with a peer adversary for whatever reason. The next day during the morning commute the entire interstate system grids to a halt, the hospitals are completely overwhelmed, and the entire supply chain collapses for a week or so while we pick up the pieces. With a bit of (un)luck it might happen to catch an oil tanker in the crossfire while it was in a tunnel thereby scoring infrastructure damage that would take years to fix.
Isn't it always in a liquid state? It just has an exceedingly high viscosity at human compatible temperatures. So high that it turns out there's effectively no movement over thousands or even millions of years.
But it's not a proper solid, ie the usual phase transition is absent.
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