red_green_yell

It's a reaction to the constant drum beat of doom marketing:

- "our product is too dangerous to release but we can't be bothered to prove its capabilities working in public hacking competitions" - "our product is going to kill everyone" - "our product is going to take all the jobs" - "we have a $40T addressable market" - "in a few days AI will be able to improve itself without human intervention and it's capabilities will hocky stick to infinity!!!"

Followed by absurd financials that spin massive losses as "getting in on the ground floor" before historic profits arrive based on the doom marketing above.

No one is saying AI is going away soon). But OpenAI and Anthro will go the way of Netscape when the market finally stops blindly accepting the doom marketing. Anyone with eyes can see LLMs will create historic increase in productivity among knowledge workers AND it will be a commodity. The massive profits frontier labs need to justify valuations are not coming.

There are AI bears and AI bulls. It's easy to cherry pick extreme and clearly wrong statements from each. But if you actually believe the bears are the more extreme/wrong overall you just aren't paying attention to what the bulls are saying.

Something is missing from this story. From the info in the article there is no way a DA could be confident or convincing a jury to convict. Beyond a reasonable doubt is a very high evidence bar and the many hacks of ssn and address info that the defense could bring up would make this bar impossible to meet. Add to it the defendant getting up on the stand and being able to say “I don’t know anything about this account” convincingly because she’s not lying (we are assuming), and every juror knowing it could be them on the stand next. Impossible to get all 12 jurors to convict. There’s no way any DA (who are all obsessed with their win rate) would press charges unless there was some convincing evidence connecting the defendant to the account. An SSN and address alone are not convincing to anyone.

AV equipment is cheap if you are ok with (1) buying used equipment and (2) accepting large speakers that many people will think are ugly. If you can accept these two things you can find incredible deals on the used market because people don’t know what they’re selling. I picked up a solid 5.1 Boston acoustics system with a 4k receiver for $50 in the sf Bay Area. Boston acoustics went bankrupt and has no brand value anymore. The speakers look like boring rectangles. But that system will absolutely destroy the soundbar in this article. And the difference will be huge, not just audio files but anyone with ears. Obviously this was a ridiculous deal but with some effort and awareness of non cool, dead brands like BA, you can build an amazing system for cheap.

When you get a sound bar, you aren’t just getting a lower cost product you’re getting a product that is handicapped by physics (and cost).

The real headlines here: - $450B of non-cancellable cloud commitments over the next 10 years >> the revenue gravy train cannot stop or Anthro is toast.

- 20% of revenue is from just 2 customers >> If their highly concentrated customers get smart and start looking at low cost (meta, grok, google) or open weight (nvidia, inkling, reflection) models it's all bad news for Anthro. This isn't happening now but it's the sort of thing that barely moves until it moves all at once.

As others have mentioned $72b of $80b headline is a non cash (but still relevant) accounting line.

Basically the $72B are updating the value of what their convertible notes would be worth if they IPOed today at their current valuation. It's a non cash expense but it does matter because it dilutes all current shareholders and thus lowers earnings per share.

That quote apocryphal btw. No evidence Gates ever said it. And even if he did, does the fact that it was wrong imply the converse is true? Will everyone always need a better model at ANY cost?

If model development stopped today it would still take decades for the productivity benefits to diffuse through society.

Amen. AI boosters look at currently high profit margins on inference and blindly accept claims that these inference profit margins will continue. Of course those margins depend on historically massive R&D spend on training. The moment that training stops, AI returns to a commodity market and the inference profits end. Big labs are trying as hard as possible to keep the gravy train running but they can all see it won't last forever, hence the rush for IPO & regulating away open models.

Boosters are right that AI is a historically impactful product, but big labs will be unable to meaningfully profit from ushering in the AI era just like Netscape failed despite ushering in the internet era.

If SAP sold $1 bills for $0.50, they too could rapidly outpace Anthro/OAI's growth. And when sane minds ask about profits or a defensive moat, the response is "but look at our revenue bro".

100% the right questions. The implied thought process of so many on this thread: Inference profitable >> Frontier Labs' are profitable overall. Sigh...

What? Ad networks REQUIRE a moat. Google Meta Amazon have historically defensible moats. ChatGPT? Zero moat. Good luck with that ad business!

There is a chrome extension that injects “respond in English” and “English [checkbox emoji]” to every query. This helps a lot but I still sometimes get Chinese responses. I have not had this issue via api on openrouter.

If you're smart enough to solve this Navier-Stokes problem, you're smart enough to read a TOS and recognize that OAI is a highly untrustworthy company. Putting cutting edge research that could lead to a $1M prize into a cloud LLM with a TOS that allows training on your chats is really just asking for it.

Given Tristan doesn't explicitly say he was using the API, and given he doesn't mention anything about the API TOS (which disallows training on chats) in his call with OAI, it's highly likely Tristan was using the consumer OAI product (whose TOS allows training on chats).

This is unethical behavior from OAI. And it is 100% consistent with their long and public history of unethical behavior, so nobody should be surprised.

The only thing interesting I see here is OAI PR dilemma. If they claim the prize they get the blowback we're seeing in this thread and all over the web right now. But most people don't follow AI closely and shut off their brains when they see "Navier-Stokes", so 90% potential investors (the only people OAI really care about) probably only see the headline "OAI solves famous hard math problem" and think "OAI models are really smart, better invest before they take all the jobs." If they don't claim the prize, then maybe they let Anthropic their mortal enemy claim it. Anthropic is already IPOing first. Can't let that happen.

Yeah as I write this there it's clear there is no dilemma. For a company whose secret motto is "do be evil" this is a super easy discussion.

I think you are conflating "the best data we have" with "sufficient data to prove something".

I agree with you that the best data we have is inconclusive. Which doesn't mean social media is totally safe. Also it doesn't mean it's totally dangerous.

It means there just isn't enough data to let science guide the decision. Science is very slow and very expensive.

So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.

Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.