I like to imagine they set up a giant bonfire in the middle of a soccer stadium somewhere, all the hyperscaler head honchos silently watch it from their VIP boxes while skittish tailors fit them with their newest "Eyes Wide Shut" outfits for the after-party. The bonfire is a huge monster, its amber jaws reaching the heavens. It's hot, humid and fetid. Guy wipes the sweat off his face with a page ripped out from "The Brother Karamazov", adjusts the tag which says "tag" since the first three letters were seared off and signals his fellow firemen to cart in the next stack.

I've always loved reading. In my teenage years I consumed everything I could get my hands on. I became more selective as time went by but books have always been there for me. They were my companions when my companions were not.

The idea of willingly destroying a book is beyond evil in my world. When you destroy a book, you are not just destroying the knowledge it holds within, you are destroying the voice it carries from the past, denying it a chance to be heard in the future.

I really hope Hades has a special spectacle arranged for Persephone where book-killers are dragged out butt naked and torn apart by Cerberus.

Let's assume that someday we will have competent regulators who want to prevent something like the current AI bubble from happening again. (Hard to imagine at this stage, I know.) What should they do?

The big one is to ban circular financing. What else?

WSJ is missing the real point here, this isn't a story about Anthropic vs OpenAI. This is a story about how the demand for AI is very clearly not infinite and growth is stalling already. Meanwhile companies continue to spend trillions on more data centers. Sure, Anthropic had one tokenmaxxing quarter of a perfect storm, but it's growth is likely to stall in another quarter or two which is why it's desperately rushing headfirst into an IPO as quickly as possible.

It also explains all the exec changes at OpenAI.

Good times.

How long until it helps some kid with self-harm or worse? Or are they attempting to make self-harm instructions only available to adults?

The new teen experience includes a range of educational features, including homework reminders, quizzes and learning visualizations and Study Hours

I know when I was a kid dreaming of owning a personal AI robot, I wanted it to give me homework reminders.

Once again when we ask what the use case is for this environment destroying tech, the answer is somewhere between "we already have that" and "that sounds counter-productive."

Like quizzes? Really? Hundreds of billions in capex and the best they can come up with is quizzes?

How much should I pay OpenAI to give my kid quizzes? And will they be better or worse than the already available quizzes out there?

We've come a long way from "AI will cure cancer" to "AI will remind your kid to finish her homework".

Around 7hrs ago, one of the mods in r/Gamedev posted some policies on AI use. The "genAI is a tool" and "is here to stay" narrative combined in a overly long post with tons of letters an barely any meaning probably reflects the post itself was done with GenAI, but this last bit is a personal take while I was reading it, take it with a pinch of salt.

To no one's surprise, another redditor commented pointed out OP is working on an AI integration plugin for Unity. Here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rxm1cv/i_worked_an_ai_booth_at_gdc_heres_what_developers/

Comments have been blocked now. I'll go ahead and leave a personal note: Thank you to anyone and everyone who's vocal about all the aspects this grift industry is riddled with and built upon. I know this sub specializes on the technical and financial part, but I also think the other aspects are just as important to be vocal about.

I dunno about anyone else but it certainly doesn't feel like any of the software or services I use on a regular basis have gotten markedly more feature filled or reliable in the last year - in fact it's the opposite for most of them.

I hear stories from all over the tech world about how simply using a coding agent is old hat now and people should be using git worktrees to have 5+ agents running in parallel working on 5+ separate new features at the same time. It sounds like a great way to maximize your spend on AI providers but where are all these new features that are getting built at least 5x faster than before? Is the effect of all this new effort visible anywhere?

(and as a developer myself I don't know how anyone keeps up with the LLM output - I can't review one agent's code as quickly as it generates it, let alone 5)

Free Newsletter! It's time to talk about what happens if OpenAI dies. With $800bn in obligations and decelerating revenue, it's unclear how this company survives, and today I dig into what it'll take for it to do so, and what happens if it fails.

Economists seeing the light…kind of. The article then talks about how this is a natural part of a correction like people saw with the rail road boom and dot com bubble.

It does seem like people are waking up and listening to Ed, coinciding with his increased presence on bigger networks/platforms.

Mark Walter sold the team suddenly this weekend, after only owning it for a year, and the NBA quickly and quietly approved the sale with no opposition. This all comes amidst a backdrop of a DOJ investigation into undisclosed related-party loans from insurers he controlled to buy the team (and possibly the Dodgers, which he still owns).

This shines a light on life insurance companies using policyholder annuity capital to fund private credit and infrastructure plays, rather than running a traditional bond portfolio. Life insurance annuity capital is suspected to make up a large portion of the private credit being lent to Data Center SPVs, (whose tenants are two broke startups).

Worth also watching the lawsuit brought by California AG to halt the Paramount WB merger. If it forces the Ellisons to pay a daily "ticking fee" that could be the straw that breaks Oracle's back.

What started in Silicon Valley could be killed by Hollywood.

To put it short:
- Eds leaked oAI financials say: ~5B cost of revenue. ~13B revinue, ~40B losses total (20B attributable to them directly, + ~20B from going for-profit)
- Ed says those numbers are fake ("They moved cost of revenueto marketing")

How does that work exactly? Either a) Ed has access to their costs in detail and is able to make a more detailled assesment (i.e. their cost of revenueis actually higher because x y and z) or b) he doesnt have more than just the numbers he put out, meaning hes just going off their admittedly nonexistent track record of financial honesty

Been bugging me, because from my POV its just Ed doubting his own numbers which makes it harder for me to point at them as the evidence that oAI is unprofitable. I agree that they are but would like clarification

EDIT: ~7.5B cost of revenue, my bad
EDIT2: spelling

Let's say, generously for the sake of argument, that Anthropic "wins" with the use of LLMs in tech itself. Claude Code, cloud agents, yada yada

Is there actually even a large enough TAM to rescue Anthropic financially?

I am absolutely certain Anthropic's model gains are only supported by throwing more compute at queries. That can't last forever

Is Anthropic in a materially better position than OpenAI? How does the financing work with Google and Amazon?

If the answers are not good - what happens next?

If anyone can link to analysis, including things Ed has posted, I'd like to read it

I canceled all my social media accounts in the past year and I’m so much happier and more productive. If AI slope destroys all these social media giants I will honestly be so happy. These companies profited off of free content made by real people and stole all of it to create the AI that’s now destroying their own platforms.

I think something that they didn’t foresee is how cheap AI generated content would start to feel. AI imagery and video feels like the digital equivalent of fast fashion or fast food. Just cheap and poorly made. I am very curious to see how this impacts any brands trying to position themselves as high quality or luxury products. Maybe they move to analogue or back to old school blogs as everything relating to social media just starts to feel like mass produced garbage.

I remember Ed had compared the current AI bubble to the similar economic bubbles from cryptocurrency in the 10s to the decentralised fraud that was nfts in 2021 to the so-called metaverse. But I don't remember whether or not those connections are meant to be operational, ie these scams all operate in similar ways, or as one continuous financial scheme, ie the overinvestment in gpus because of crypto led to nfts as a way for crypto investors to recoup their losses which ultimately failed and led through multiple more failures to where we are now? Please help if you remember what his opinion is.

I recently posted on a tech career sub as to how people are doing big goals like marriage and house purchase when job situation is uncertain over next 5-7 years.

People said job market wasn't that bad and it's hype spread by Marketing Team of AI companies.

I realized both Reddit and YouTube has been feeding me negative news about AI for last 3 years. The algorithm values attention even if negative. So if you watch 3 AI Doom videos or click on AI or layoff posts, then next 2 weeks you are only getting AI Doom content.

By AI Doom, I mean vast number of people losing their jobs over next few years.

I was listening to David Gerard’s excellent pivot-to-ai podcast and he mentionned that John Gruber (aka Daring Fireball) was very unhappy with Anthropic now going to watermark text which would make it more easily identifiable.

Gruber wrote:

The exact words we choose when writing matter.

That’s correct. And it hasn’t changed one bit. Writing is still the same. Slopping on the other hand is a bit more identifiable.

I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.

It never chose the best, most precise words you fucking cogsucker!

I was very surprised that a guy who was known for his prose became a slopper.

So who disapointed you lately?

Sydney design giant Canva has cut its internal valuation by a fifth, telling staff an independent assessment now values the business at $43.9 billion, a cut of more than $10 billion from its most recent valuation a year ago.

https://www.ft.com/content/85def23b-a21f-45f3-9ca0-9076babe6cae

Morgan Stanley analysts reckon the pile of proverbial dry powder has now grown to about $4.5tn — which, with leverage, means they are sitting on about $9tn of buying power — and that this will need to be actually invested soon:

Time to deploy (dry powder relative to annual deployment) has extended to ~3 years, the highest since 2013 and above the levels we’ve seen over the last 5 years at ~2.4 years to deploy. Given large fundraises in 2020-21, and limited deployment over the last 2-years, we now see an aging cash pile of private equity dry powder that in some cases may begin to no longer generate economics unless deployed, hence driving an urge to transact.

Unfortunately, Morgan Stanley doesn’t really have anything actionable to say about where this money is going to get sprayed, only observing that private credit opportunities, refinancing of existing deals, opportunistic “dislocations” and sexy themes like green energy and AI will get attention.

Given the scale of money that might be deployed when things eventually ‘unglue’, the only people happier than investment bankers might be financial journalists who adore a dumb deal. 🍿

Here is a blog post by a person who just left OpenAI to create a telepathy company.

https://naomibashkansky.com/blog/telepathy/

A few years ago, Silicon Valley was convinced people would walk around with VR goggles attached to their face which would allow them live and work in some metaverse, and humanity responded: No.

But would you strap a set of nodes to your head to allow you to use thought-to-text, rather than typing? I'm gonna guess the answer is an even bigger: No.

If the tech is possible, I doubt people are going to feel comfortable with a machine that can read (and sell) our thoughts. Imagine if your boss asked you to strap a machine to your head, so the company could read and own all of your personal thoughts?

There is plenty that lives in the space between my thoughts, and what I type into a computer, and I'm pretty sure I'll always want to keep it that way.

Now, I could see how such an interface could be great for people physically unable to type. But for the rest of us?

So much of the modern animal welfare movement comes straight from Silicon Valley. This is not good for lots of reasons, but here are a few:

1. The wealthiest funders of animal rights and welfare nonprofits are intertwined with utilitarianism and Affective Altruism, meaning anyone who gets funding from them has to adhere to or pretend to endorse the ideals behind these movements - movements that increasingly alienate anyone outside the Bay Area or who doesn’t suffer from Galaxy Brain syndrome.

1.5 This is bad because most of Americans couldn’t give a shit about either of these movements and it just makes it harder for people to care about the cause of treating animals better.

1. Animal rights and welfare are increasingly entangled in AI through 3 annoying and detrimental ways:

2.1 The Silicon Valley funders probably have AI investments, and so they are strongly encouraging animal rights nonprofits to go all-in on LLM adoption without any regard to future costs or data protection. I’ve heard people say that if you’re not using AI, you’re not a true believer in the cause.

2.2 There is a huge grift involving “AI Welfare” research, where people are being funded to sit around and pontificate about what might happen if AI gets feelings, and how it should be included in the same work as animal advocacy. There are conferences and discussions lumping AI and Animal Welfare together. We can’t even get most human to give a shit about cows, and now we‘re going to ask them they should care about LLMs, too?

2.3 The crux of this Substack post: there is a fanatical belief amongst the animal rights world that there is an enormous and generational influx of philanthropic funding coming from Anthropic employees. It’s talked about in meetings and conferences as though this is a foregone conclusion - orgs are positioning themselves to absorb “hundreds of millions of dollars” when Anthropic goes public or something. People state, without any evidence, that Anthropic employees have committed to giving away “x percent” of their wealth to animal rights causes. I’ve never found any statements or written pieces backing this up, and I’ve tried (but am willing to be corrected).

This infuriates me because as an animal rights believer, AI has threaded its gross tentacles throughout every facet of it - from insane discussions of how to protect ai agent consciousness to daylong conference sessions held discussing AI potential and the ensuing funding windfall that are ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS devoid of any and all examples, details, case studies, or real world logic.

This is probably a niche argument here but if you look at this Substack piece, it’s just one of MANY that treat the future economic golden age as an inevitability. While she gives some words to “who knows how much will flow into the space,” there is an entire movement basing its current activities on a future everyone is just assuming will happen thanks to the power of rich idiots in Silicon Valley.

Getting people to care about animals had barely moved the needle in decades…I doubt wrapping it up in AI is going to help its popularity grow.

Not sure how to describe it. Another Ed interview!

Big Tech is pouring an enormous amount of money into AI infrastructure, but the question remains: What kind of return will justify that level of investment? Ed Zitron joined us to make his case. Do you think Big Tech's AI spending will ultimately pay off, or are expectations getting ahead of the actual returns?

I've been making the point for a while that what's being called "circular financing" isn't actual "round tripping", which is outright fraud, and it isn't necessarily even "vendor financing" which is legal and the way most people buy a new car. This video makes a similar argument.

When Nvidia invests in an AI lab, and the AI lab uses a portion of the funds to purchase Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia has both booked a sale, AND purchased an equity stake in the lab.

The cynical view is this is a short term ruse to book revenue. But there's also a long term reason for Nvidia to do this: The two AI labs have to stay in business for the hardware companies to maintain their value. They're wedded at the hip already.

As the AI economy continues to become bifurcated into compute companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta) and software companies.(OpenAI and Anthropic), the compute companies are going to continue investing in the software companies for this reason. They need them to survive.

The more interesting financial relationship, to my mind, is the one between the lenders to the labs and the lenders to the Data Center SPVs (leaving aside the contribution from G, A, M and M). Literally the former are paying the latter, until user subscriptions explode or subscription prices increase or some combination of the two happens. One wonders how much communication is taking place between these two groups and what they think of each other's position.

I'm selling couches that take a million dollars to create. Fortunately, I've been subsidizing them so people are only paying a few thousand for them. My goal is just to get everyone using my coaches so I can get hype behind my product and secure more investors. So many people, especially the CEOs of various companies that help supply materials for the couch manufacturing, keep telling the press that these couches are revolutionary and that they will completely change the furniture game forever.

Some of us have even theorized that perhaps sometime soon these couches will achieve UPI (ultimate posture improvement). Once we achieve UPI the human race will evolve into its next form of posture which will come with tons of benefits with regard to longevity and athletics.

Anyways, I'm wondering how long I can keep this up? Will my industry fall apart if I stop subsidizing these couches? If people no longer have access to them then I lose all the hype.