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> heavily subsidizes cheap personal plans.

They are of course are the ones paying for R&D of new models but its not exactly clear if gross margins on subscriptions are negative. It might be just normal market segmentation just like SaaS companies charging enterprise users many times more than private individuals.

> An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power.

Yes, not from a fixed physical location. If the empire fell when rome ceased to be "the seat of power" it was no longer the Roman empire by ~300 AD was it? Diocletian was larping...

The Roman empire continiously changed and evolved. The empire in ~300 AD wouldn't have made any sense to Romans from 100 BC (and probably a lot more sense to the Romans from 1000 AD)

I don't see how buggy software directly leads to generating more money? A company being successful doesn't somehow magically make them infallible, 100% rational or immune to making mistakes (as you are implying).

OpenaAI and Anthropic models are priced quite competitively with open ones, they even cut prices by quite a bit since spring. So it's not too surprising that their revenue is pretty high, the question is whether the competition and downward price pressure from open model providers combined with their extremely high R&D spending is sustainable.

Way too coherent...

Well it's completely voluntary since no sane person would ever need a "smart" coffee machine connected to the internet. So IMHO it's more Idiocracy than Black Mirror

> Both Luna and Haiku are more expensive than DS4.1 Flash at API cost

Are they. Luna uses way less tokens for identical tasks so its a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

But it also frequently uses massively more tokens for the same task compared to other models which kind of negates the speed.

It's probably not illegal per se. But if you violate their ToS they can just stop providing you services.

> The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point

I'm not sure that's true amongst most large enterprise companies.

> They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job

They could but unfortunately there have only ever been a small handful of European tech companies which got anywhere close to that

Which indicates they are no longer serious about being an AI lab and downgraded themselves to merely being a hosting provider

> the contract workers are the ones taking the

True, OTH it's not obvious that these jobs would even exist in the first place without Uber/etc. since demand has certainly increased

Airbnb maybe, in Europe booking.com seems to have better deals even if they offer similar service to Airbnb these days.

Uber and other ride sharing apps improved UX immensely and still are cheaper for consumers than regular taxes.

> their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.

Neither AirBnB or Uber are anywhere close to being monopolies aside from maybe a few markers that I'm not aware of.

> you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits

For employees yeah, pay and conditions are not great compared to normal taxi drivers OTH the demand is higher and there are more "jobs" on aggregate.

> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"

There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.

Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.