Can y'all offer a backup plan targeted at home users with a NAS? The current two tiers either don't support that or are incredibly cost prohibitive to a random schmo who just wants his NAS backed up.
My hypothesis is that the $1000 cables help sell the $300 cables. I’ve seen comments to the effect of: “I’m not fooled by those $1000 cables, so I saved my money and got the $300 cables instead.”
In other words, they got fooled.
What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if people believe they can hear a difference in their $1000 cables, and they enjoy purchasing and testing them, I'm inclined to let them enjoy themselves. I have a basic hi-fi setup with rational cables, and enjoy the cost savings, but to each their own.
I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
I also don't need to storm these people's homes and tear up their expensive audio setups. Life is hard, and if you find something to enjoy, I'll let you have it.
That said, think there is value in putting out facts that let people make informed decisions and not spend tons of money on things that don't actually work.
This is Jony Ive taking his design aesthetic (minimalism, primary shapes, metal&glass) and applying it to the interior of a car vs. Jony Ive designing an interior of a Ferrari that looks like a Ferrari.
In case anyone was wondering what the Apple Car would have looked like inside, it would have been roughly this.
As an Apple Car™ it makes sense, but as a Ferrari it's incredibly soulless and oversimplified. This Ive design aesthetic (Dieter Rams' aesthetic really) is fine on consumer electronics where you want the device to disappear and give way to the display, but on something as emotional as a vehicle (Ferrari especially), this design falls flat.
I do hope some of the design details work their way through the industry (e.g. using glass instead of gloss black plastic, convex glass to add depth to digital gauges), but I hope the rest of it stays as a one-off experiment demonstrating the hubris and one-dimensionality of a top designer.
EVs have a weight issue that fundamentally constrains their overall design. It is really a tough engineering problem to try to shave weight off of everything, because you are starting out with a 700kg battery replacing a 400kg engine + transmission, so you are ~300kg in the hole, and need to remove 300 kg from the rest of the car. That's why they do crazy stuff like use the battery as part of the structural frame, to save on metal there. Every extra kilogram reduces range. Solid things are made hollow. Metal is replaced by plastic. Fabrics are thinner or replaced with lighter-weight engineered materials. Lots of things are removed. Physical buttons gone, flourishes gone, handles gone. Seats are made thinner and with less material. See how they brag about a simpler new steering wheel that is 400g lighter?
All of that and still they come up with a 2300 kg compact two row SUV.
So, if you are going to be redesigning everything anyway to try to get rid of as much weight as possible, why not hire a designer known for sparse, minimalistic, clean design? It makes sense. It may not be what Ferrari buyers want, but you can't really blame Ferrari for giving it a try. We'll see how well it sells.
Ferrari will sell all that they make. If you want to purchase one of the highly desirable low-volume models you can't just walk into a dealership and write a check. You first have to purchase a few of the high-volume models to earn enough "points" on their internal customer priority list. A lot of rich guys will buy a Luce just for that purpose, and then leave it in their garage or maybe drive it to the country club occasionally.
For the type of buyer you describe this vehicle parked in the garage, to speculate, may be capable of doing double duty as an automated battery backup for the estate nearby to store energy during times of excess grid capacity and to discharge during periods of high demand or grid interuptions. I would be interested to know if the vehicle includes this capability, or if it could be easily modified to offer this capability. Probably is preferable to an onsite diesel generator for example even if it is not an exactly comparable situation, just due to lower local emissions.
You've got to be kidding. The people who can afford multiple luxury cars aren't going to mess around using them as backup batteries just to save a few bucks on generators for their mansions.
It not a killer feature, granted. I would be willing to bet that the cost of the engineering to develop and support this feature as a default capability for the fleet of all vehicles would be less than the value of energy saved ammortized over the lifetime of all relevant vehicles.
wow. I never cease to marvel at the companies that make you jump through hoops in order to give them your money. chesterton had a good passage on that in his father brown mysteries (highly recommended to any fan of the genre):
The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy product—an “exclusive” commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon.
Yeah the fact that Rolex and Hermes fanboys/girls get so suckered into it and applaud them for it is pretty bizarre. Even believing Rolex has a limited capacity for making ten grand watches out of €5 of metal parts.
I sometimes wonder whether listening to Public Enemy rap “Don’t believe the hype” at a young age wired me for life.
I think you are wrong on the "weight issue" regarding EV. ICE cars have a weight issue as they consume more gas depending on the weight, which is the case to a much lesser extent in BEV.
At high speed, aerodynamics become the main factor reducing range.
With urban stop and go traffic, regenerative braking lowers the weight's impact massively.
BMW's i3 was constructed with the same mistake: let’s reduce weight to gain range, which didn’t pay off. It added to the cost due to expensive composite materials, lesser to the range.
Manufacturers learned from BMW's mistake and build the body with conventional metal sheets.
Nevertheless reducing weight has its advantages: using less material saves expenses and helps driving dynamics.
Range is a minor factor.
I wonder what the speed/weight tradeoff is on a Ferrari though. Eg on a Bugatti they can put in a beast of an engine (heavy) because their buyers care only about power output and if it gets 8 miles to a gallon who cares.
On an electric sports car, where does the break lie between extra weight for a powerful battery and too much weight to make the car go vroom?
Side note: I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
Manufacturers like Ferrari, Porsche and Lotus focus on HP per KG. This is why they build ultralight versions of their cars. Porsche's 911 GT series trade glass windows with plexiglass and badges with stickers. Ferrari omits carpets and inner body panels leaving welds bare. Lotus re-invents everything make things lighter and with less material.
Mercedes, Bentley and Bugatti likes to build road missiles. Fast and comfortable, luxurious cars with insane straight line performance and stats, but not made to be thrown from corner to corner in a track. Since these cars are heavier and have somewhat higher center of gravity, they can't pull higher G numbers on skid pads and tracks. They also have somewhat slower lap numbers (Maybe Mercedes' SLR McLaren is an exception to this, but it's half McLaren, so...).
If you want to go to the edge of it, see McLaren and Pagani. They take the track-optimized, lightweight car design to extremes. Esp. McLaren.
Edit: I mixed up CLK-GTR with SLR. My bad, brain haze. Sorry.
> Side note: I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.
Sure, except the very poor will be eco criminals (due to being unable to maintain their equipment to relevent emission standards/pay the associated offset fees) and will be selectively hounded and exploited by law enforcement.
At some point, the petrol stations start closing, and petrol vehicles start having range anxiety. The antiques get served by a little EV bowser service that comes round and delivers, but you won't be able to drive them in cities.
(diesel will hang on a lot longer, so there may be a period of refinery retuning and petrol stations serving only diesel?)
Well you cant just get rid of Gasoline in the refinery process. Crude oil essentially gets destilled. The different fractions are split based on boiling point/weight. Heavy fuel oil-> Diesel-> Kerosene->Gasoline-> Naphta-> Propane/Butane whatever. That is why making new Plastic is so incredibly cheap. You need (i think) ethylene to make plastic. Ethylene is a byproduct of oil refining. If no one buys it, the whole refinery grinds to a halt because you are not allowed to burn it anymore. They practically give this stuff away. Same thing would happen to gasoline. If fewer people need Gasoline, it will become crazy cheap since you cant really do anything with it, except burn it. So it really isnt that easy. IF you get rid of Diesel/Gasoline you will also get rid of the entire petrochemical industry.Elastomers, plastics, lubricants. A huge lot depends on the sweet dino juice.
Cracking and chain lengthening* were covered in my GCSE in chemistry, and given GCSEs are the UK school leaving qualification, anything in them can't be particularly difficult or mysterious in industrial practice.
Not claiming this would be free or anything like that, just that a well-known possibility exists.
* I forget the technical name, my GCSEs were 26 years ago
Plastic isn't a single material. Some plastic materials (e.g PE, polyethylene or PVC, polyvinyl chlorine, but also others that use ethylene derivatives as intermediates) require ethylene, but there certainly are plastic materials which are produced without any involvement of ethylene or other petrolium derivatives.
Laws can always change as more and more people make use of loopholes to avoid taxes. Same how EVs lost their subsidies as more and more people are buying them. Governments always adapt to losses in tax revenue by finding new things to tax, it's the only thing they're efficient at.
And in some jurisdictions, there are "incentives to scrap older, more polluting cars in exchange for a grant or discount towards a newer, cleaner vehicle"
At some point EVs will be cheaper on the sticker price and cheaper to run. The US car industry is desperately trying to prevent this, but it looks like China is crossing that point.
(I would be very interested in sticker price / fuel price / subsidy / tax accounting EV vs ICE breakdowns from inside China)
That's extremely cute. The Euro version is as low as E13,000: https://nikrob.lt/ ; let's not forget that depreciation will make secondhand versions even cheaper.
Horses were always for the rich - knights would use a horse in battle and ride the horse other places to show off their money. The "common man" walked - you (unless you are handicapped - yes I know you are very out of shape) can walk as far in a day as a horse. When the "common man" needed to haul a load they would prefer oxen which while slower than a horse were overall a lot cheaper to feed.
We think about farming with horses, because in the American West the type of plow that worked best needed faster speeds than the oxen could handle and so for 100 years the horse is what farmers used. Horses were also useful for cowboys chasing cows - again an activity most common in the western planes.
Weight doesn’t make all that much difference to EV range: aerodynamics are a much more important factor.
Handling and “sports car feel” are affected by weight, though, and this is the real reason that Ferrari would want to cut weight to a minimum on their EV.
Keep in mind that, especially for performance cars, the instant torque and low center of gravity (because those cells can go in the floor) really helps.
Yes, the added weight is bad for handling which is a shame especially in a car like this.
The weight savings aren't that big of a deal, they do that in every car and it's mostly marketing. But if you're one of those brands that can sell the same car, but use some fancy metals and such for a 50k markup, why would you not.
The Porsche Taycan and related Audi e-tron GT are considered basically the best-handling production cars built so far, and these come in at around 2.4 tons or something. They are of course quite low for EVs, barely taller than a 911 iirc.
Even the ridiculous 1019 hp Taycan Turbo GT Weissach edition (a 4-door car with no rear seats, such are the compromises made for the track) at best achieved 7:07.55 around the Nurburgring.
A gas 911 GT3 RS with less than half the horsepower laps it in 6:49.3.
The 911 by most measures is the slower car (10.9s 1/4 mile vs 9.2s for the Taycan, 184mph top speed vs 190 etc). The difference is the 911s superior handling and braking and that mostly comes down to the difference in weight.
I don’t think most automotive folks or enthusiasts (apart from the track crowd) would agree that car handling and chassis tuning can be expressed in a lap time, even if it is nordschleife.
Good handling is certainly somewhat subjective (along the lines of "fun, communicative, begging to be pushed to its limits"). But even when its not about pure numbers, I still haven't seen the Taycan voted best-handling among enthusiast reviewers (except when qualified with "for an EV"). I'm curious what criteria you might be referring to? The "most fun" handling cars still seem to go to the lightweights like the Miata.
The problem is people are conditioned so hard on the "drive till empty then fill up" method of car ownership, that it's totally incomprehensible to imagine not being able to put 300 miles in your car in 5 minutes.
Topping off everyday at home just doesn't register. Driving 7 hours with only one 30 minute charge doesn't register.
It either needs to function like a gas car, or it's not even worth considering.
There are millions of people living in cities that do not own their own home, that cannot charge every day (speaking as an EV enthusiast that rents somewhere that thankfully has public charging across the street). For those that are able to charge at home, there is definitely a mindset shift that needs to happen. I have seen the lightbulb over my friends heads turn on when I ask them how they would like it if their gas cars could fill up 1 gallon per hour at their house, and if so why would they care how long a gas station fill up takes.
From what I've heard from auto engineers I know, using the battery as part of the structure is not really done. Transfering mechanical stresses to the battery is something you just do not do.
Additionally the battery must be protected in the event of the crash, so its casing must survive intact.
I mean, it's possible that some manufacturers might do it a little bit to put it on the marketing brochure, but the additional design headaches and safety concerns mean that there's just not that much to gain.
> From what I've heard from auto engineers I know, using the battery as part of the structure is not really done. Transfering mechanical stresses to the battery is something you just do not do.
This is technically true, but structural batteries are not the same as stressed engines like on a motorcycle. In the latter, the engine fully replaces a frame member with essentially just the engine block. With structural batteries the cells themselves are not taking on any stress (they could, but yeah its not a very safe idea) but the outside containment is stil doing double duty. Its a pretty minor weight savings because the battery case does not need to be as strong as the frame does, but its not fair to say that structural batteries are not done. Even when they are just bolting on to a subframe, they're still usually doing things for frame stiffness.
The inside of the Apple Car looked nothing like this - primarily because "driving" is the main activity the design of this Ferrari is intended to serve, and "driving" was not an activity that the Apple car intended to support.
It certainly looks like an Apple device. Ive's aesthetic is Apple's aesthetic, so if you hire Ive, that is what you are going to get.
I can see a car company who doesn't care about design stumbling into this outcome, but Ferrari doesn't seem like that kind of company. So the choice must have been intentional.
As Ferrari has been proving over the last few generations, they know how to make engines but Pininfarina knows how to design cars. I'm not even slightly surprised by the Luce.
Everything will undoubtedly feel nice/premium as a result of being metal and glass, but you spend more time looking at the entire interior than touching every part of it, so appearance is important.
For things like volume, A/C, adjusting mirrors and seats, I really, really want physical buttons. Not sure what I will do after my old Volvo dies, maybe the touchscreen mania will have gone away by then and physical buttons will be back. I can't imagine myself touching a screen while driving, I don't even know how I would be able to do that.
I just got a 2026 model year car and all of those items had physical controls.
Even with my other car that is mostly just a screen all but A/C is physical controls, but one really shouldn't be messing around with that while the car is in motion anyways, outside of operating the defrosters. I manage to practically never touch the AC.
It went from below freezing nearly every day to 80F+ in a week. I didn't have to touch the AC controls once. I don't get why people choose to distract themselves by toying around with the AC controls while driving. Focus on driving. Let the thermostat keep the car comfortable.
When the car is in motion you really shouldn't be messing with anything in the center console. I don't even bother with the volume knob on the stereo, just use the media controls on the wheel. Why take your hands off the steering controls when you don't have to?
I used to have a 308. You don't notice the dash design much while being distracted by the noise it makes, heavy steering and awkward gear change. Nice body styling though.
There will undoubtedly be people that like or love it and there's nothing wrong with that. Design is rather subjective. Fortunately I'm not in the market for a $300,000+ EV made by Ferrari, so I don't have to lose sleep at night over buying this or not :)
I first thought that too, but if you take the time to scroll down a bit, you'll see that the instruments are actually three separate screens, and at least the center one has a mechanical needle. Also, the central control panel has lots of physical switches (Musk would hate it) and even a round instrument in the top right corner with mechanical hands, which can be either a clock, a stopwatch or (for whatever reason) a compass. So definitely not an iPad put in a holder.
It would have been much better imho to for instance have lots of tiny screens embedded in the dashboard/console alongside their respective buttons. Each "app" gets their own toggle and physical dials. That would have been expensive and cool and could have been made not-tacky. (Like some cars are, expensive and cool but also without any class whatsoever, they look like a teenage gaming room.)
This question's answer would require something more lecture length that dives into fundamentals of design with an equal amount of time spent on automotive design. No one has the time or care for something like that, so I'll try to give a high level answer.
Generally speaking, cars are not about simple designs/shapes. They, especially to enthusiasts, are viewed as something closer to art where care is taken to craft shapes and forms for both function and feel. This is amplified dramatically for Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc..
Ive was clearly doing this design work for the Apple EV that never shipped. It followed Apple's historic design aesthetic (driven largely by him) of simplifying things as much as possible--using circles and squircles everywhere, removing as many unnecessary geometry as possible. That's fine for an Apple EV because that's their design aesthetic. That is, demonstrably, not Ferrari's design aesthetic. It's a jarring departure from decades of automotive design and, in my professional opinion, an exercise in hubris.
As we remember that design is largely subjective and that this is all my opinion, I will say that almost everything in the vehicle is overly simplified:
* Steering wheel: an attempt at modern retro, but they added two blobs (to keep the steering wheel simple) to house the dials and buttons instead of incorporating it in a sculpted, thoughtful way. Instead of putting the turn signals in those blobs (or elsewhere), they interrupted the simple steering wheel with a couple circles to act as the turn signals.
* Digital instrument cluster: it's an iPad that connects to the base of the steering wheel. Wasted space in the top corners. Convex glass is a really nice touch however. Gauges are strange to me (gas gauge for an EV, left dial is confusing at first glance, G-force gauge unnecessarily busy), but that can always be changed later so not worth waxing on about.
* The key: a small iPhone 4. It's not terrible, but it's rather uninspired and boring. Ferraris aren't supposed to be boring.
* Dashboard interface: another iPad, but with a Mac Pro handle on it. Might be very nice for moving it, but how often are you going to do that? Does it stick out far enough to act as a wrist-rest as mentioned in their video? The mechanical switches are a nice touch if the display/UI keeps up. The clock/compass/stopwatch in the top right is neat, but almost antithetical to the rest of the design--it's added complexity for the sake of complexity. I still like it though.
* Vents: these make sense to be simplified. I've never loved the number of flaps in most vehicles, but if you have kids you might have issues with toys/food getting lost inside if there's no mesh behind it.
* Seats are nice, but if you removed the Ferrari emblem would you know it's a Ferrari? Is there enough bolstering for spirited driving?
The shapes, iconography, etc. are all carried over from Apple devices. Cars, even in EV form, are not iPads and iPhones. Cars, particularly those like Ferraris, are supposed to be designed, sculpted, given character and flare in order to evoke emotion.
Rivian and Porsche, in my opinion, have designed beautiful EVs (inside and out). They have a design aesthetic that's unique to them and in the case of Porsche stays true to the brand. The Ferrari Luce looks like Ferrari hired Ive to take whatever work he did for Apple and copy paste it over to them. If this was announced as an Ive + Kia/Hyundai/Honda/Lexus/etc. collaboration would it look any more or less out of place? No, because it's been simplified to the point that it doesn't even look designed any more. It almost feels "default" in a way.
This is all just my opinion as someone that's been doing product engineering and industrial design for a long time and happens to love cars--take it with a grain of salt.
+1 to everything you say here, but unfortunately I doubt this will sway anyone who doesn't have similar feelings upon just looking at the thing with their own two eyes.
I can understand the distaste for it, but was specifically curious what it lost in oversimplification. Some of the critique is not about simplification after all but was interesting anyway thanks
Excellent argument, but I disagree on the key. I think the key is one of the most thoughtful signs of care. The experience of it going inside the gear shifter and all the gears turning on is a small detail, but it makes the experience very lively. I think that's an excellent way to delight the driver.
IMO if they just had materials with any sort of visual interest to them, this would be pretty beautiful.
Instead it feels like sitting inside an iPad which is an aesthetic already cheaply deployed at massive scale to motels, pharmacies, and shitty coffee shops.
I don't quite agree with this statement.
I would rephrase it like that: If Apple had built a car, this is the care and though process that we would have seen - incredible attention to details. But it would not have looked anything like what we’re seeing with Ferrari.
I am mostly OK with the wheel and the binnacle(?) cluster of gauges. The things I don’t like is instead of a stalk for the blinkers/turn signal, it is buttons on the wheel? (Should have been two mini paddles above the big paddles). I especially hate the two triangular control modules. They are ugly and useless. It is a Ferrari I want performance mode all the time. For cruise control, it should have been two mini paddles below the big paddles.
The worst is the center Tesla like display. Steve Jobs IMO would have drawn the line there and said no displays. He probably would have said you should connect your phone and fiddle with whatever in the app.
The overhead Launch pull button is really silly. This is screaming look at me and my mid life crisis.
Small subs are more diverse and accommodating IME. Worse than popular though are flaired-only subs. They are so heavily moderated that posting feels like an exercise in guess-the-unspoken rules.
There are still networks that ban users for posting on /r/Israel and /r/Jewish. Famously the ones that run /r/interestingasfuck, /r/therewasanattempt, /r/soccer. /r/bannedforbeingjewish tracked this until it was banned.
"AI comes up with a bizarre short-form generative video genre that addicts user in seconds - but it works!" I'm guessing we're only a year or two away.
That’s how we become numb to the progress. Like think of this in the context of a decade ago. The news would’ve been amazing.
Imagine these headlines mutating slowly into “all software engineering performed by AI at certain company” and we will just dismiss it as generic because being employed and programming with keyboards is old fashioned. Give it twenty years and I bet this is the future.
You're taking intelligently designed specialized optimization algorithms like the one in this article and trying to use their credibility and success to further inflate the hype of general-purpose LLMs that had nothing to do with this discovery.
A decade ago it wouldn't have been called AI, and it probably shouldn't be called AI today because it's absurdly misleading. It's a python program that "uses gradient descent combined with topological optimization to find minimal graphs corresponding to some target quantum experiment".
Of course today call something "AI" and suddenly interest, and presumably grant opportunities, increase by a few orders of magnitude.
That’s been called AI for about thirty years as far as I am aware. I’m pretty sure I first ran into it studying AI at uni in the 90s, reading Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. This is just the AI Effect at work.
Hahah, if you're going to go that route you may as well call all of math "AI", which is probably where we're headed anyhow! Gradient descent is used in training LLM systems, but it's no more "AI" itself than e.g. a quadratic regression is.
Neural networks are on the hype now, but it doesn't mean that there was no AI before them. It was, it struggled to solve some problems, and to some of them it found solutions. Today people tend to reject everything that is not neural net as not "AI". If it is not neural net, then it is not AI, but general CS. However AI research generated a ton of algorithms for searching, and while gradient descent (I think) was not invented as a part of AI research, AI research adapted the idea to discrete spaces in multiple ways.
OTOH, AI is very much a search in multidimensional spaces, it is so into it, that it would probably make sense to say that gradient descent is an AI tool. Not because it is used to train neural networks, but because the specialty of AI is a search in multidimensional spaces. People probably wouldn't agree, like they don't agree that Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is not of algebra (and not fundamental btw). But the disagreement is not about the deep meaning of the theorem or gradient descent, but about tradition and "we always did it this way".
Gradient descent is used in machine learning, which is a field in AI, to train models (eg. neural networks) on data. You get some data and use gradient descent to pick the parameters (eg. neural network weights) to minimise the error on that training data. You can then use your trained model by putting other data into it and getting its outputs.
The researchers in this article didn't do that. They used gradient descent to choose from a set of experiments. The choice of experiment was the end result and the direct output of the optimisation. Nothing was "learned" or "trained".
Gradient descent and other optimisation tools are used in machine learning, but long predate machine learning and are used in many other fields. Taking "AI" to include "anything that uses gradient descent" would just render an already heavily abused term almost entirely meaningless.
It is a simple iterative algorithm that goes from one point to the next. It doesn't even have memory of previous steps (caveat, the authors used BFGS which approximates the Hessian with previous gradient iterates, but this is still not AI). There is no finding weights or any such thing.
If every for loop is AI, then we might as well call everything AI. Can you pass me the AI, please?
Not every for loop is AI but pretty much any complex equation with unknown parameters that needs to be trained by gradient descent is usually an ML problem the overwhelming majority of the time.
In that AI has come to mean data-driven algorithms, I don't see this as being AI. What they describe is a local-global optimization method with BFGS as the local optimizer (this is not AI) and a noised average weighted by local optimizer performance as the means to produce new starting points. This is simply a heuristic similar to particle swarm optimization. As far as I know, these are not called AI and funds for this type of research don't typically come from funds targeting AI.
This conflation of everything with AI is precisely why people say things like "gradient descent is most often used in ML" without evidence, and this likely being wrong. No, instead it is 1) ML is the currently most prominent (to the public) use of mathematical optimization and 2) everything else is called AI to the public so they conflate that with ML even when it isn't.
Take a random employee at an engineering or applied sciences (non experimental) lab, ask them if they ever use mathematical optimization, chances are a majority will tell you they do. The vast majority of these are not using or devising ML algorithms.
This matters because of what is clear from this thread. Some people devise a classic algorithm that requires intimate knowledge of the problem at hand, the press calls it AI, the public thinks it's AI, registers one more case of "AI as the tool to replace all others". The Zeitgeist becomes that everything else can go to the bin, and AI (by the more restrictive definition) receives disproportionate attention and funds. Note that funding AI research would not fund the people in the headline, unless they do like the minority of bandits that rebrand their non-AI work with AI keywords.
I’m talking about the application of gradient descent: ie When it is used it’s used on an equation that is too complex for analytic methods.
When the equation is too complex for analytic methods but good enough for gradient descent that equation is overwhelmingly the majority of the time characterized as AI.
A gradient descent is used to solve optimization problems, those arise in many many cases unrelated to ML. Please research a little the history of this field, and notice how it predates ML by decades (even 180 years in the case of the gradient descent specifically).
A great deal of applied mathematics is related to finding a minimum or maximum quantity of something. There are not always constructive methods, sometimes (often) there's no better way than to step through a generic optimization method.
Some quick examples clearly unrelated to ML, and very common as they relate to CAD (everywhere from in silico studies to manufacturing) and computer vision:
- projecting a point on a surface
- fitting a parametric surface through a point cloud
Another example is non-linear PDEs. Some notable cases are Navier-Stoke's equations, non-linear elasticity, or reaction-diffusion. These are used in many industries. To solve non-linear PDEs, a residual is minimized using, typically, quasi-Newton methods (gradient descent's buff cousin). This is because numerical schemes only exist for linear equations, so you must first recast the problem as something linear (or a succession of those, as it were).
By the way, I might add that most PDEs can be equivalently recast as optimization problems.
Yet another is inverse problems: imaging (medical, non destructive testing...), parameter estimation (subsoil imaging), or even shape optimization. Similarly, optimal control. (similar in that it is minimizing a quantity under PDE constraints)
To summarize, almost every time you seek to solve a non-linear equation of any kind (of which there are many completely unrelated to ML), numerical optimization is right around the corner. And when you seek to find "the best" or "the least" or "the most" of something, optimization. Clearly, this is all the time.
I think I've provided a broad enough set of fields with ubiquitous applications, that it is clear optimization is omnipresent and used considerably more often than ML is. As you see, there is no association from optimization to ML or AI, although there is one the other way around. (much like a bird is not a chicken).
Right but gradient descent is not used for non linearity. The neural net is linear. Gradient descent is used because of sheer complexity. That’s why you know it’s ai.
I may or may not have worked there for 4 years and may or may not be able to confirm that Meta is one of the most poorly run companies I've ever seen.
They are, at best, 25-33% efficient at taking talent+money and turning it into something. Their PSC process creates the wrong incentives, they either ignore or punish the type of behavior you actually want, and talented people either leave (especially after their cliff) or are turned into mediocre performers by Meta's awful culture.
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