Return to Oitta
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #66, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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We are back at Oitta beach, around a similar time as last year for BJPRF’s yearly summer picnic.
Summer has been a bit hit and a lot miss this year. So we have taken any and all opportunities we got to sit out in the sun.
That meant, after this picnic I found myself comparing it to other picnics we have been on.
I remember the picnic we had last year, more fondly somehow. It was certainly more eventful. The weather was a bit off then. It would start raining, and then people would run off trying to save the food!
There was no rain this year. The weather was great, it was warm and sunny, too sunny perhaps. You could not stand in the sun for too long.
I took Savya to the beach and he had fun in the water. He splashed around while I held him. Then, I would take his arms and let him swim in the water. He would thrash his legs around trying to swim, I guess. He was laughing as he does usually.
The food was great. We had samosas and chips for starters, followed by a veg biriyani - it was very good. And we finished with gulab-jamun.
We had some extra drama when a friend lost their engagement ring in the grass. Then went on to get a metal detector from a nearby store and eventually found it.
It reminded me of the time I had lost my engagement ring, on the night of our engagement. Fun times!
It is Savya’s second week at his päiväkoti. This week we are getting him used to the idea of being alone in the daycare.
And so, we have handed him to his teachers and then just run away, stealing glances from behind trees.
Savya did not know we were going to this, so he was fine on Monday. But then he knew about it on Tuesday, so he had started to run back, away from the päiväkoti in the parking lot. Then, he cried as we handed him to his teachers.
Typing this, thinking about this now, is not easy.
It needs to be done though.
We took him to his day-care during our walk today. The hope is he becomes accustomed to the place and feels OK to go there on Monday.
It feels really nice to have access to these places at any time without talking to a guard and explaining things to them.
/five things to share
1. OpenAI and Anthropic announce new models
OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop
The model comes in two variants: 120-billion-parameter and 20-billion-parameter versions. The bigger version can run on a single Nvidia GPU and performs similarly to OpenAI’s existing o4-mini model, while the smaller version performs similarly to o3-mini and runs on just 16GB of memory. Both model versions are being released today via platforms like Hugging Face, Databricks, Azure, and AWS under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows them to be widely modified for commercial purposes.
Today we’re releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning. We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.
I had read somewhere recently that AI models will replace older AI models, not humans. Seems plausible.
2. OpenAI launches GPT5
The main thing is (as Sam Altman had foreshadowed) some time back that there is no model picker. GPT decides what model to use based on a bunch of factors.
3. The Why of Substack
John Gruber of Daring fireball wrote a lot about substack over the past couple of days, arguing that purely as a newsletter service, it’s not that great.
But substack is not in that business, as Om argues successfully I might add.
Around that same time, I remember Jeff Bezos saying that books were in competition with everything because it was all about attention. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said his company was in competition with sleep. What they are essentially saying is that all media platforms exist to sell “attention.”
I had this realisation recently about audiobooks and podcast competing for time. I read this above section and realised everything competes with everything else for attention.
I guess if I wait some more I would read someone else write about this thing I thought of. Nothing is original though. So that’s ok. But I will write about it none the less.
I am happy on my own though. There are no costs at present. Emails will start to cost if I grow out of the 50 subscriber count.
4. Artificial Intelligences, So Far by Kevin Kelly
There’s a lot of hype about AI these days, and among those who hype AI the most are the doomers – because they promote the most extreme fantasy version of AI. They believe the hype. A lot of the urgency for dealing with AI comes from the doomers who claim 1) that the intelligence of AI can escalate instantly, and 2) we should regulate on harms we can imagine rather than harms that are real.
This section above was interesting to me. The doomers believe the hype.
5. AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic by Balaji
- AI is economically constrained, because every API call is expensive and because there are so many competing models.
- AI is mathematically constrained, because it (provably) can’t solve chaotic, turbulent, or cryptographic equations.
- AI is practically constrained, because it has to be prompted and verified, and because it does things middle-to-middle rather than end-to-end.
- AI is physically constrained, because it currently requires humans to sense context and type that in via prompts, rather than gathering all that for itself.
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Until next week.