This stuff has been there. Just not much reporting or investigation has been done on it, instead a lot of news outlets focused on interviews with the heads of these companies and thoughtlessly reiterated press releases. Those who have criticized it have mainly just done so in ways that play in to the narrative convenient for the industry “but what if it’s TOO good?”.
The failure of tech journalism on this topic has been frankly catastrophic.
To break even on operating expenses, not even counting debt payments, depreciated capital value, or future recapitalization costs.
Just gotta configure and tweak until it gives outputs you find indistinguishable from correct. Just gotta train it to gaslight you properly. Come on don’t you want to be given and endless stream of stuff that looks correct?
The data center builders and operators are running behind on basically every data center project, massive amounts of Blackwell are just sitting in warehouses right now because they loose money the moment they’re plugged in. New IT load for the operators isn’t even a third of the capacity of the chips sold to these companies. Most of the companies that got switched over to token billing by the model providers are pulling back and freaking out over a yearly “AI budget” annihilated in a quarter. The model providers wouldn’t have swapped to token based billing for enterprise clients if they didn’t have to. They’ve been pumping demand with hype and by selling at a fraction of operational costs. Reporting non-gap EBITA to hide what a mess the financials are.
The SpaceX S1 alone shows how insanely cash incinerating it all is. Can’t wait to see Anthropic and OpeAIs S1s. It’s gonna be hilarious.
The fact that they tried to get the rules changed so they could get listed on index’s as soon as they IPOd means they’re out of willing creditors and out of cash. They were attempting to dump equity on to 401Ks to pay out the private bag-holders who have been funding them to sell model access at massively discounted rates.
Even if people host models them selves, the era of constant slop deluge is over simply because all the players giving away access for essentially free are about to go belly up or pivot away from it to other business models.
Rein in corporations. Hold them to account and stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Stop treating them as “job creators”. Shut them out of decision making and force them to actually compete.
That’s an uncomfortable position to take but it’s part of the fight voters want from them. They don’t just want a fight against trump, they want a fight against everyone enabling him and gleefully taking advantage of the chaos he’s creating.
Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?
Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.
Ok, but… what if the bank asks where you got the gold? Or they ask if you have proof you came by it legally, and then the IRS notices you have a bunch of outstanding loans collateralized with an asset they have no record of you obtaining or paying taxes on the income used to obtain it.
Like… with the cash, you just… spend it on stuff. If you need to pay for something not in cash, then just open a cash based business and overstate your sales.
Or you could… just… list those things as unspecified income and pay taxes on it and not worry about slipping up and going to jail.
It must remain unharmed
I don’t think these companies are worth the value of the paper that their charters are written on. I don’t think many of them are going to last much longer, but he might actually be on to something here in terms of diffusing a massive financial fraud that’s about to happen in broad daylight.
The common wisdom right now is to just “put your money in an index fund, it’s safer and outperforms actively managed portfolios.” Which is to say, a fund that just buys a little bit of everything from a given list, rather than trying to pick stocks that someone thinks will do well, it creates a very diversified portfolio that is protected from anyone company fucking up by having the value spread over as many things as possible. Because many people just put their money in index funds now, getting listed in an index kind of guarantees that lots of people will be buying the shares consistently and thus consistently causing the price to rise over time.
To get in to these lists, normally, a company has to have been public for a while, generally about a year, and show profitability for a prolonged time. These rules have recently been changed though.
A bunch of the AI companies are doing initial public offerings (IPO meaning putting their shares on the public markets for the first time) in the next few months. And stating absolutely insane valuations. Because of the rule changes, they’re basically all getting immediately listed in index funds. And since they’re all targeting insane valuations, they’re going to automatically suck up a bunch of retirement money by default.
I’m not sure about anthropic and openAI on this next part, but SpaceX (which just “bought” Xai), is only going public with about 5% of it’s shares, so theoretically they can just trickle more shares on to the market to get bought up by index funds, and because supply of actual shares is artificially constrained, it will lead to massive overvaluation of those shares, taking up a disproportionate amount of money going in to index funds.
It’s actually fucking criminal that this is being allowed to happen, but because the rules for index funds and IPOs are set by financial institutions and stock exchanges, with very limited oversight by the government, they can just do this.
If the government were to take these 50% shares, it would kind of throw a wrench in the plans, since it would give the government the ability to sell those shares on to the market and stop the over valuation that allows them to take disproportionately from the index funds.
Asahi is still getting a lot of work and development done, but since they’re reverse engineering everything without proper documentation from Apple, they basically get kicked back to square one on any component that Apple makes big changes too with each new generation of chip. They’re more focused on polishing off support on older chips and keeping what they have up to date rather than jumping on every new chip release and leaving stuff unfinished on the older ones
So right now M1 and M2 Macs are fully supported. M3s are mostly working but very much a WIP, and M4 hasn’t really gone anywhere yet.
I’d say that if you find the advantages of the M chips really compelling, but want to stay on Linux, an M2 running Asahi is still very competitive, and the work to support the M3s is chugging along.
If you want the newest hardware possible, then yah you’re probably better off with an AMD or Intel based computer. There are also some other ARM based desktops out there, and Linux on arm is a thing, I have no idea what’s going on over there though.
Most people saying that kind of thing don’t believe in electoralism at all. They don’t think voting is useful. They believe in a litany of other things as alternatives, specifics depend on the group and individual.
But I found most of the people in that camp also aren’t… doing any of the alternatives they like to suggest as meaningful. It’s more like excuses to not do anything, take a “holier than thou” position, or to avoid being associated with something that could fail.
Some anarchist groups actually do “mutual aid”, which is to say, charity work effectively. Which is commendable, but also, like, not a replacement for participating in the political system that currently exists.
They’re all moving to tokens based billing to stop the bleeding. The markets aren’t as willing to let them burn infinite cash on operating expenses anymore. A lot of the private investors see the writing on the walls, that these AI companies are not worth anywhere near the valuations, and propping them up to ensure further datacenter build out to keep Nvidia shares high is costing more than it’s worth.
A lot of the model providers are lining up for ipos to cash out their initial investors and dump the responsibility of the mess on the public markets. They have to jack their prices to pretty up their books if they want to cash out with an IPO though. The unlimited access for a flat monthly cost shtick was obviously never a viable business model. They’ve all been spending massively more on inference than they’ve been taking in subscriptions, and even with the changes to token based billing, they still will be.
Anthropic is claiming that they will have their first “profitable” month soon, but that’s actually just a magic trick of book keeping. They’re deferring some cost of compute for a few months, and accepting a bunch of pre payments from customersr. Basically pretending to have high revenue and lower cost by shifting when the payments are made. And then on top of that they’re jacking up prices and thus decreasing their demand with the shift to tokens.
Everyone is running around rearranging deck chairs on the datacenter titanic hoping they can keep their feet dry a little longer.
I know who he is because I’m a space nerd and follow congressional politics closely, and I like him, but I also know that most voters don’t pay attention to congressional politics, nor remember the kind of news stories he’s showed up in.
He would be a strong candidate… if he had a larger public profile with the average voter.
I like him, but the average voter doesn’t know about him. He doesn’t even rank in battle ground polling.
The average voter doesn’t know who mark kelly is.
They don’t know where he stands.
They know where AOC stands.
Of the commonly proposed candidates for 2028, she routinely preforms best in polling in battleground states.
She’s the only federal level Democrat with any sort of broad public support.
No one else is note worthy or generally liked.
She is literally the only option. Anyone else is risking mass voter apathy and a voter turn out flop in an election that should be a slam dunk.
If you’re going to vote in the dem primaries, don’t fucking vote based on who “is most electable”, vote for who you want to win. Choosing the candidate that “is the most electable” keeps losing elections, because that crown keeps getting chosen by corporate owned media who just anoint that tittle to the most corporate friendly candidate, and voters don’t like corporate friendly candidates.
The most electable candidate is one who excites people, no one else even considered for running excites anyone except for corporate lobbyists.
Bush, Clinton, bush, Regan, Ford, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Wilson, McKinley.
The majority of US presidents between 1900 and 2000 never spent time as senators, most in no foreign policy position what so ever. Most didn’t even serve time in an elected federal office. Even less exposure to foreign policy in a governor position than a house rep.
Why is it different here? Who would you suggest, who has been “in the senate” or some other role more exposed to foreign policy? The other potential candidates that have even close to her level of public support have even less foreign policy experience.
This is absurd, it is nonsense, any excuse to discredit the only candidate who has real public support, not just a bunch of corporate funded think pieces.
deleted by creator
To clarify why the S1s are so important here. There are a ton of laws that prevent companies that have their shares bought and sold on public stock markets from outright lying about the state of their business to the public. This is to ensure that companies can’t just lie to push up share prices.
Since the most important model providers are currently private, they have not been bound by these laws and have basically been allowed to say what ever they want. With them going public, and the release of the S1s, they need to publicly display accurate financials, not just vague and un verifiable numbers.
The question of “is this just a fad or is this a revolutionary technology that will reshape the economy” is easily answered if we have accurate accounting of the costs to run these business.