I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2 community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.
There was a very active AOL message board dedicated to Warcraft 2. Most of the active community used other services (Kali, MSN Zone, and later Battlenet when BNE came out) to play the game since AOL's service was prohibitively expensive.
The best part of the community were the clans. Some of them ended up outliving AOL. The biggest one that I remember was a clan named Splintered Orcs Clan (SoC). Actually just found an old forum post written by the founder of SoC. Looks like they tried to branch out into WoW (I was way out of the scene by then)
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/12955/splintered-orcs-c...
> AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage
If I had to guess I would say that's probably 10 or 15 years away for desktop class hardware and longer for mobile (maybe another 10 years).
Maybe the frontier models of 2040 are being used for more advanced things like medical research and not generating CRUD apps or photos of kittens. That would mean that the average person is likely using the commodity models that are either free or extremely cheap to use.
Yes, you are reading it wrong. The big winner here is AMD, not OpenAI.
If there is any signal here, it's that AMD is still in the AI game. AMD stock is up 30% on this news.
I think there are logical reasons for both companies to agree to this deal. AMD is trying to break CUDA dominance. OpenAI is getting extremely cheap compute for expansion and they'd also benefit from the Nvidia monopoly falling if that ever happens.