tskj

I agree it does seem pretty plausible as some kind of iterated / timeless theory divorced from reality, but especially the assumption that time is irrelevant to the buyer seems completely fanciful. I am usually all for theories that make idealized assumptions and think there's merit to approximations, but this is so egregious--there will never be any market or situation that is anywhere close; and the theory completely breaks down if the assumptions aren't utterly fulfilled. That makes it not even of academic interest, it's completely useless even as a theory.

I'm curious if they're keeping up mostly due to distillation or how that works. Does anyone outside China know?

Yeah I guess it's fine to demand the situation actually conform to the assumptions of the theory, but these assumptions are so extreme they have literally never held for any situation, and they never will.

But this conjecture predicts that Steam prices will drop immediately to their final low price. So Steam is actually also a counterexample.

Idk the obvious answer seems to be that buying now vs buying later isn't the same? Seems like a preposterous assumption; or rather an assumption that obviously never holds for any market ever so this theory is unfalsifiable by empirical data (and also irrelevant to the real world).

I think basically economists aren't that interested in looking at real world, messy data.

First of all, yes cutting developers to fund AI spend budgets, is the entire operating idea behind these AI companies; and most companies would love doing that. I'm not saying this is a good thing, my heading is on the chopping block like everyone else's.

But isn't this like a Jevon's paradox thing, also? If I'm able to become vastly more productive, and that value produces more sellable output for my company, there's no reason to cut anywhere to fund it. This is the same reason a company like Microsoft can hire 80 000 developers, it's because each dev pays for themselves in value (on average). I guess the same can be true for AI spend?

No, but if you'd actually read what I wrote, you'd see that what I said (that Dario said) was: if you consider each model as its own company, they've all been individually profitable. However, they keep re-investing that (and then some) into even bigger, more expensive models each time, causing the company to look unprofitable.

That being said, Anthropic did report being profitable this review quarter (Q2), so it's not as unreasonable as you claim.

Also Google is a pretty major AI company, and they're _insanely_ profitable.

Unfortunately most of society and the economy is built on the foundational assumption of a growing (or at least stable) population. There will be some extremely tough challenges to solve with an actively declining population.

Interestingly Wind Waker's art style was its main detractor among critics when it was released, which is wild and incomprehensible to me now. One of my favorite games of all time.

I don't know man, people basically aren't having sex already. The fertility rate is way below replacement in all modernized countries, half of gen Z has never had sex at all, contraception is free, people struggle to get pregnant the more chronically ill the population gets, and the people who actively do want to get pregnant are going to want to use whatever technology there is to improve things.

Thanks, that's an interesting analysis. I'm not a Christian, but I definitely get the sense that we're playing with an extreme danger here, and that we're not being sufficiently humble / cautious / in awe of the sacred -- and that such hubris might literally lead to human extinction, or close to it.

Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario.

We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically.

Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?

I think the case for this is pretty strong actually. Last year my company was maybe willing to pay $100 a month to Anthropic (per developer). Today we're all on the $300 plan without any hesitation. If Fable ever becomes available as the default model, I imagine my company would be willing to pay in the $500-$1000 range per month per developer.

Well yeah obviously they have to stop reinvesting more than they make at some point to become profitable. To be clear, I think what Dario was saying was that if you consider each model training + deployment as a company, meaning all expenses and taxes, it was still profitable.

Whether he's lying is another question, but seems unlikely.