The user interface of the current ChatGPT strikingly reminds me of the classic teleprinter interface. It's fascinating to think that, with a bit of ingenuity, one could potentially retrofit a 1960s teleprinter to interface with the ChatGPT API.
This thought leads me to ponder whether there are ongoing projects aimed at evolving this user interface into something more dynamic and interactive with LLMs. Specifically, I'm curious about initiatives that not only automatically better visualize results beyond Markdown but also "generates" innovative UI components and layouts. These would ideally support richer user interactions, such as touch, clicks, scrolling, and zooming for the input requests. Enhancing the interface in such a manner could revolutionize the way we interact with AI, making it more intuitive and engaging.
For verisimilitude there should be the big pixellated signboard up on a pedestal in the middle of the room, with the giant messages crawling across, and the clackety-clack that the film soundtrack played when the messages crawled.
Messages like "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't recall the ICBMs. Maybe you would like to play today's Wordle?"
Europe used to have two significant card networks of its own: Maestro (owned by Mastercard) and Visa Europe (previously owned by various European banks). But Maestro is dead now and, a few years ago, Visa Europe merged into Visa.
There were a bunch of national networks but they're slowly dying I think. The UK's Switch debit card network got rebranded as Maestro and then killed, for example. The UK still has something called Link however (used for ATM withdrawals and I think nothing else).
Fewer and fewer banks supports it. It's obvious when looking at the neobanks' offers: https://www.zupimages.net/up/24/07/zbua.png ("Réseau CB: Oui [yes] / Non [no]"). A shame as the whole French payment network now relies almost solely on Visa, a $500T US giant.
the italian "pagobancomat" system[0] (pay from your CC with an ATM card) is still alive and well, all ATMs and POS support it together with visa/mastercard. There's also an online payment system but I've not seen it used.
Most plastic you get these days supports both that and visa/maestro.
There used to be Eurocard, but it merged with MasterCard a couple of decades ago. Most countries had domestic debit card networks. Some still have, while others replaced theirs with Visa / MasterCard debit cards.
SEPA is basically free and instant. There are some shortcomings but even with them there is hardly demand for for any other service (why would consumers decide to use anything but banks transfer and/or credit/debit cards when the fees are so low?)
I don't know if I understood correctly. But it might be that the metal pieces in glues are pure random process, and there are no way to reproduce or re-print it again. The metal pieces are then recorded as a key in central database or some sort of AI, just like human fingerprint or retina how are collected and used for authentication???
Honestly, H2's got a long long way (if viable at all) to go as the future of clean cars. There is not much natural H2. In a way, H2 acts like a battery as well using electricity to produce from H2O, and discharge as electricity to H2O. Producing it cleanly, like with green power, isn't efficient yet – it's only around 70% efficient. Plus, getting H2 from the factory to the customer is way way pricier than just using our current electricity grid for charging stations... Converting it to electricity is only about ~30% efficient(?) It will cost a few times more than electricity in the foreseeable future. It will be definitely much harder than have charging stations everywhere.
Not to mention the technical challenges (assume we can handle) of the low volume density, low temperature..
There's no clean power for cars at all. Every extra joule of energy used by cars, should be considered coming from the dirties of fuels... because the first thing we do, when we have an excess of power generation, is turn off the dirty plants.
But outside of that, these things will improve, although your numbers are a bit out there.
Chinese IP are not allowed to use ChatGPT.
Chinese credit card is not allowed for OpenAI API.
Source: my own experience.
What puzzles me most is the second restriction. My credit card is accepted by AWS, Google, and many other services. It is also accepted by many services which use Stripe to process payments.
Perhaps they are unwilling to operate in a territory where they would be required to disclose every user's chat history to the government, which has potentially severe implications for certain groups of users and also for OpenAI's competitive interests.
> Chinese credit card is not allowed for OpenAI API.
A lot of online services don't accept Chinese credit cards, hosting providers for instance, so I don't think that is specific to OpenAI. The reason usually given for this is excessive chargebacks of (in the case of hosting) TOS violations like sending junk mail (followed by a charge-back when this is blocked). It sounds a like collective punishment a little: while I don't doubt that there are a lot of problem users coming from China, with such a large population that doesn't indicate that any majority of users from the region are a problem. I can see the commercial PoV though: if the majority of charge-back issues and related problems come from a particular region and you get very few genuine costumers from there¹ then blocking the area is a net gain despite potentially losing customers.
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[1] due to preferring local variants (for reasons of just wanting to support local, due to local resources having lower latency, due to your service being blocked by something like the GFW, local services being in their language, any/all the above and more)
It's definitely not a commercial thing but political.
I'm located in Hong Kong and using Hong Kong credit cards have never been a problem with online merchants. I don't think Hong Kong credit cards are particularly bad with chargebacks or whatever. OpenAI has explicitly blocked Hong Kong (and China). Hong Kong and China, together with other "US adversaries" like Iran, N. Korea, etc are not on OpenAI's supported countries list.
If you have been paying attention, you'll know that US policy makers are worried that Chinese access to AI technology will pose a security risk to the US. This is just one instance of these AI technology restrictions. Ineffectual of course given the many ways to workaround them, but it is what it is.
I don't understand, if ChatGPT is blocked by the firewall, how do you know that ChatGPT is blocking IPs in return? Are there chinese IP ranges that are not affected by censorship that a citizen can use?
Okay but the point is that ChatGPT is blocked by the firewall.
EDIT: I read the comment below about Hong Kong, but I can't reply because I'm typing too fast by HN standards, so I'm writing it here and yolo: "I'm from Italy and I remember when ChatGPT was blocked here after the Garante della Privacy complaint, of course the site wasn't blocked by Italy but OpenAI complies with local obligations, so maybe it could be a reason about the block. API were also not blocked in Italy."
EDIT 2: if the website is not actually blocked (the websites that check if a website is reachable by mainland China lied to me) then I guess they are just complying to local regulations so that the entire website does not get blocked.
it's not blocked by the firewall. i'm in china and i can load openai's website and chatgpt just fine. openai just blocks me from accessing chatgpt or signing up for an account unless i use a VPN and US based phone number for signup
as in, if i open chat.openai.com in my browser without a VPN, from behind the firewall, i get an openai error message that says "Unable to load site" with the openai logo on screen
if the firewall blocks something the page just doesn't load at all and the connection times out
In so far as Hong Kong IPs are "Chinese IPs", we can access OpenAI's website, but their signup and login pages blocks Hong Kong phone numbers, credit cards and IP addresses.
Curiously, the OpenAI API endpoints works flawlessly with Hong Kong IP addresses as long as you have a working API key.
ChatGPT was not blocked by the GFW when it first released for a few weeks (if not months, I don't remember), but at that time OpenAI already blocked China.
The geo check only happened once during login at that time, with a very clear message that it's "not available in your region". Once you are logged in with a proxy you can turn off your proxy/VPN/whatever and use ChatGPT just fine.
OpenAI does not allow users from China, including Hong Kong.
Hong Kong generally does not have a Great Firewall, so the only thing preventing Hong Kong users from using ChatGPT is Open AI's policy. They don't allow registration from Hong Kong phone numbers, from Hong Kong credit cards, etc.
I'd say it's been pretty deliberate.
Reason? Presumably in alignment with US government policies of trying to slow down China's development in AI, alongside with the chips bans etc etc.
Sounds plausible - this is in line with the modern trend to posture by sanctioninig innocent people.
Of course, the only demographic these restrictions can affect are casuals. Even I know how to cirumvent this; thinking that this could hinder a government agent - who surely have access to all the necessary infrastructure by default - is simply mental.
Now former board member was a policy hawk. One of big beliefs is that china is at no risk of keeping up with US companies, due to them not having the data.
I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI blocking China is a result of them trying to prevent them from generating synthetic training sets.
i know how: you need a verified phone number to open an account, and open ai does not accept chinese phone numbers or known IP phone numbers like google voice.
they also block a lot of data center IP addresses, so if you're trying to access chatgpt from a VPN running on blacklisted datacenter IP range (a lot of VPN services or common cloud providers that people use to set up their own private VPNs are blacklisted), then it tells you it can't access the site and "If you are using a VPN, try turning it off."
Probably because of the cost of legal compliance. Various AI providers also banned Europe because until they were ready for GDPR compliance. China has even stricter rules w.r.t. privacy and data control: a lot of data must stay inside China while allowing authorities access. Typically implementing this properly requires either a local physical presence or a local partner. This is why many apps/services have a completely segregated China offering. AWS's China region is completely sealed off from the rest of AWS, and is offered through a local partner. Similar story with Azure's China region.
