mynameisbilly

The passing of Dolly Parton has really had me thinking how much good these unfathomably rich people and corporations could do. It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.

Are you familiar with the flock camera situation in the States? The American surveillance state has rapidly been getting worse with the help of this technology.

The United States has propped up some pretty horrific, murderous, bloodthirsty regimes over the past century to ensure they maintain a proxy presence across the globe. If supporting or engaging in an "authoritarian" regime is your litmus test, then the United States fails resoundingly.

This is an interesting comparison, but the resulting product of an LLM aren't deterministic in the same way machinery in an assembly line is. You typically expect to get the exact same thing every time as an assembly line worker, and it's usually fairly obvious when something is wrong or off.

So while I agree with your invocation of Marx and the alienation of labor, but I don't know if we really can compare it to the automation of manual labor.

Why is everyone still operating under the assumption the current token costs will remain so heavily subsidized? We could see $200-400/hr in token costs once these companies need to turn a profit

Right, except I acknowledged my initial statement was wrong because I was basing it off of household income when you were actually referring to personal income. So why did you spend the effort refuting that?

Median personal income is per individual, which is obvious. After I corrected myself the question then became "did the typical individual's real income keep pace with the cost of the things they can't avoid buying?". The answer is no. And I already showed why.

You're right, I was mixing up the related charts. Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase. Median personal income rising by 0.9% every year over 50 years compared to healthcare rising by 3-4% every year since 2000 is not a gap you can ignore. Necessities grew at nearly 3 to 4x the income rate.

So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"

That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall.

The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)

Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.

You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.

Obviously it's not. Would you like me to sit here and do the work of reading the article for you? Or are the numbers involved a bit too much for you to handle?

Continue shoving your fingers in your ears and closing your eyes to the absolute nonsense that is behind OpenAI and Anthropic's economics, it won't change the fact that their path to profitability doesn't exist.

I would assume being profitable constitutes as winning when you're throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at a technology. OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a very obvious path to profitability.

The author is pretty obvious and exhaustive about what he means by "losing": AI capex bubble is unsustainable, AI revenue is circular, no meaningful AI compute demand outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, AI products are mediocre at best (and still heavily subsidized, at that), AI is causing various mental health crises, OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13 billion in revenue in 2025.

OpenAI spent $17.2 billion on Azure in 2025 making the infrastructure bill exceed total revenue by about $4 billion BEFORE even counting salaries, research, stock compensation or anything else.

I feel like the responses here are purposely obtuse and people are refusing to realistically evaluate the economics of Anthropic and OpenAI

They also have to continuously train, forever, to avoid model drift. It's not a one and done thing as far as I'm aware.

I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech.

I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.

I expect some form of UBI will be incorporated to placate the masses in the event of mass unemployment, but only after some serious unrest.

Imagine if we had a federal jobs program for building high speed rail all across the country. sigh

Human consciousness is dictated by their material conditions, not the other way around. If the material reality of many Americans is unhealthy foods and heavily car-centric urban design, where does the "decision" to walk and take public transit come from? It is genuinely not an option for the vast majority of Americans to live in a walkable and/or public transit supported community if the infrastructure does not exist.

And this wasn't due to consumer choice, either. Decades of policy dictated the shift towards car centrism that resulted in railways and street cars being torn up, the construction of the interstate highway system and destruction of dense urban cores, zoning law mandates and parking minimums, federal subsidies for suburban mortgages, etc.

This "choice" or "decision" was manufactured by car lobbyists.