steveBK123

Yes but those convertible notes only exist to grant them access to compute they would otherwise need to pay fair market value for.

If I drive a taxi making $200/day and need $150/day of gas.. but convince Shell to take a convertible note instead of $150.. Do I make a) $200/day profit, b) $50/day profit, or c) $200/day - (change_in_value[convertible_note]) in profit?

Some are arguing that C is somehow fake, but its obviously more real than A!

Well they can’t have it both ways on the accounting front.

These complex securities they took a mark on only exist as a way for them to access compute at deep deep discount by issuing suppliers lottery tickets.

Post IPO when they don’t have lottery tickets to issue as easily the numbers should be interesting.

In some ways, the biggest "new form of business/commerce" that ubiquitous smartphones lead to was the entire gig economy.

It's not even clear that the "frontier AI lab" is going to be the best, most profitable business model to evolve out of this tech. Especially if models are easy to distill, a new lab can start on 3rd base, and China open weights aren't far behind.

The winning business model may be 1 or 2 abstractions removed from "build a really good LLM model", and yet to be revealed in the marketplace.

> B) nobody is IPOing at $400 million like Amazon did

Exactly You can't wait to IPO until you're already one of the 10 biggest companies ever AND also grow 2500x post-IPO.

Retail is now exit liquidity for Big VC.

None of the current vintage of IPOs are going to 2500x in our lifetimes (inflation adjusted at least..). The VC to IPO process is totally different now.

Companies are staying private longer, raising many orders of magnitude more private funding, and IPOing straight into "top 10 biggest companies in history" size.

If you IPO at $1.5T you are already equivalent to ~1.5% of World GDP.

Thus is just for scale, as comparing GDP vs a company market cap doesn't make total sense since GDP is 1 year economic activity and market caps represent discounted future cashflows of future economic activity...

Let's say Anthropic IPOs at $1.5T and grows even 1000x over 20 years, it would be worth $1.5P (petabillion?). If it had a 20x earnings multiple like google this would imply Net Income of $75T. Mag7 total Net Income for 2025 was $500B or $0.5B.

World GDP is $125T, and has grown less than 5%/year before/thru/after DotCom. So lets say in 20 years its $250B and Anthropic is capturing 30% of world GDP in earnings (not revenue, that would be even higher)!!

So the math doesn't math.

My proposal has always been that we adjust the length of an hour so that the sun always rises/sets at the same time. /s

Maybe author means we should actually enforce our antitrust laws that are on the books, on their merits.

Rather than the multi-decade consensus "if it lowers consumer prices in short term its ok" or 2024+ "if they donate to my ballroom, they get a pass".

Right it started with SaaS and content subscriptions. We also have all the gamification, enshittification and up-selling in the physical-world Uber-For-X business models.

They've made all the delivery slower and added an option for you to pay $5 more to make it arrive at the speed it used to. We've jacked up fees and added a monthly subscription that reduces some of those fees back down.

As they take a larger cut from restaurants, many have increased in-app prices so you are paying multiple premiums&fees.

First non-cherry picked example I checked first restaurant in-app: $16 dish is $19.20 in-app , $5 delivery fee (flat-ish per order), $2 marketplace fee (scales with order size) to make it $26.80 pre-tax. +70% increase on direct retail in-restaurant price.

According to cursory search:

* Spain HSR ~45M annual journeys / 30B annual passenger-kms

* Italy HSR ~65M annual journeys / 50B annual passenger-kms

* France HSR ~150M annual journeys / 110B annual passenger-kms

"Italy’s annual high-speed rail (HSR) passenger fatality rate is effectively zero, as there has never been a passenger fatality recorded on the country’s dedicated high-speed network"

"France’s dedicated high-speed lines (LGV—Lignes à Grande Vitesse) have historically maintained an extraordinary safety record. Across several decades of commercial operation since launching in 1981, there has never been a passenger fatality resulting from a high-speed crash during commercial service on a dedicated high-speed line"

Spain by comparison has 2 fatal accidents adding up to ~100 passenger deaths this year alone. Something like 300 fatalities in its history.

This is quite bad.

I'm still running a 4 year old M1 Max 32GB Mac Studio as my daily and really haven't found anything that it shows sign of slowness/age with.

That said I don't do any local AI or 8K video editing type stuff.

On upgrade I could probably live on a moderate/high spec Mac mini since the only reason I went Studio originally was the resolution/number of displays it could support.

At this point, Spain must have the worst high speed rail safety record in Europe if not.. more broadly?

I am a little surprised doing some light searching that its one of the longest high speed rail systems / highest passenger count HSR systems in Europe?

I've only taken HSR in France & Italy and not been to Spain in over 15 years so was not aware of the build out.

You don't even need there to be any kernel of reality statistically.

If a model is trained on data that shows some bias due to prior human decisions, it would continue to follow those biases while being a lot harder to prove/sue. There were examples of this with AI assisted resume screening & criminal sentencing for example.

It speaks to a lack of understanding of the economy as a complex adaptive system.

Same idea with all these agents that are going to negotiate our insurance down, haggle with our cell phone providers, and find the best hotel deals.

Your counterparty will have its own agent, a larger budget for that agent, and a lot more skin in the game to ensure they retain their advantage (cell phone bills are 100% of the cell companies income but is only 0.5% of your spending). Good luck.