History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Drawing these comparisons to the Dotcom bubble is only of limited utility. I think there's good reason to believe that recursive self-improvement is a bust, and LLM models will become a commodity. The real value lies in multi-modal integration and good harnesses. The current frontier labs are theoretically in a good position to capitalize on this, but it is far from obvious that they will succeed. I think Google and some of the chinese giants are in a far better position to actually go the last mile.
I mean if we're getting really serious about ai-first development, we might be able to get away with a ton of micro services written with clear, simple apis to communicate all in a giant mono-repo managed by an army of agents. That way the full surface any one agent has to touch is small, compile time of each individual service is very fast, and services can be hand-written if super critical.
Anyway, I've played around with the idea a bit so far, and it seems that current agents/harnesses use way more tokens with that architecture.
I love their product and use them myself. But where's the value proposition for investors? Unless they get purchased by one of the large cloud providers, they will get pushed out of the market sooner or later.
What's the value proposition for the typical AWS startup to go with openrouter, if Amazon offers similar rates with direct integration into all their other offerings?
The only reason OpenRouter can exist at the moment is because we are in the wild-west phase of this technology, and lots of people and companies are exploring. In 5 years they will have to have transformed their business fundamentally, or go the way of the dinosaurs.
If you believe there will be lots of LLM providers in the future, then OpenRouter could be a DoorDash play.
Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the established restaurants have to pay them their tithe because hungry people have learned to start with the DoorDash app. A bit of a prisoner's dilemma.
If OpenRouter plays its cards right and gets very lucky, a large number of people will configure their hungry LLM clients to start with OpenRouter, and then LLM providers will have to join the marketplace or else miss out on all those customers.
not sure that works as well when they don't own their API though; how much software is openrouter-only in a way that's not 5min of deepseek to patch the source for, or 15min of opus to patch the binary instead
I agree that technical lock-in wouldn't cause the consolidation. Instead, if it happened, it would be because of the network effects of the two-sided platform.
People could email cat photos and resumes. But Facebook and LinkedIn are where everyone already is, so that's what they use instead.
Everyone (except Anthropic) seems to be settling on the same API, so nobody "owns it" anymore. I expect there to be practically no software that's OpenRouter-only.
AWS does not provide nearly as many different models as OpenRouter. Perhaps they have an incentive to not do that, move slower as a big company or more legal risks to consider. If AI model outputs becomes commoditized then having one place where you can switch effortlessly from one to the next based on price might just justify OpenRouter. It could become a commodity marketplace/exchange.
functionally they operate as a marketplace for cloud providers. I feel like there is value there, especially as API costs rise and companies explore cost-saving/efficiency. IMO, this is a particularly attractive value prop in the SMB space, where it is common to interoperate between multiple SaaS/software stacks.
The fairest and easiest to realize wealth tax is on inheritance. It is great to want to give your kids a headstart in the world, it is terrible for them and the people around them to set them up for life.
It's really not the easiest. You have to prevent gifting things at a lower tax rate while alive. That means it comes bundled with income tax or gift tax implications.
Fairest? I mean, land value tax is fair. So are Pigouvian taxes. In fact they're arguable more than fair. Not having these taxes is arguably unfair. Who deserves ownership of natural resources or to inflict negative externalities on others?
Taking things someone earned through labour and not letting them give it to who they want isn't very fair.
Wow, someone downvoted me? The definition of the word "deserve" is:
> To deserve means to be worthy of, entitled to, or to have a valid claim to a reward, punishment, or treatment based on your actions, qualities, or circumstances
So you genuinely believe that nepo babies, despite not taking actions or creating any circumstances to earn their wealth .... nevertheless deserve to have it anyway?
As a point on terminology: That's not a really a wealth tax on the accumulated assets at-rest own by the (now eternally-resting) owner, but an income tax on the wealth as it moves to the recipients who didn't have it and are getting a massive gift.
It just happens to be a kind of gift/transfer we've decided because of tradition to consider as a special case, where (A) it happens right after a given dies and (B) the giver is frequently but not necessarily related to the recipient.
The problems with inheritance tax is that they can be avoided through trust structures and insurance schemes. In theory it's a good tax, but in practice many wealthy people figured out how not to pay it.
Those schemes are also human-created though, and can be human-fixed. I've never really understood the arguments that go like: "This regulation won't work because the people it targets will avoid it through loopholes and other schemes." Well, get rid of the loopholes and schemes, then!
Granted, this requires lawmakers to explore more of the "exploit space" around their proposed regulations, but I don't think that's really asking a lot of them.
The only way to get rid of tax avoidance is to simply tax transactions, every time, for every person, on every transaction.
“Oh, that’s regressive” they will say.
Make it small per transaction. A rich person spending 100x what a normal person spends will pay 100x as much tax. A billionaire spending 10000x what a normal person spends will pay 10000x as much. And they will also be taxed if they borrow money (that’s a transaction) against assets so they don’t have to sell them.
And when someone inherits, that’s also a transaction. Money moves from one person to another. So that same tax applies.
If your wealth/income increases x1000, their spending will not increase a thousand-fold. It's not like you can eat a thousand burgers in a day. All this leads to is poorer people paying a larger proportion of their income as taxes than the richer.
> And when someone inherits, that’s also a transaction. Money moves from one person to another. So that same tax applies.
This is a big one—we continually decrease the estate tax, which is already waived until you get to 'fuck-you-money' at the federal level (around $11 M)
> It is great to want to give your kids a head start in the world, it is terrible for them and the people around them to set them up for life.
How is it terrible for my kids to not have to break their back like I did to build the wealth I'm looking to pass on to them after I die? Why should they go through the same struggles that I did? It is up to them to squander it or transform it into even more wealth to pass it down to their children and so on. Ideally the former, but sometimes what parents dream for their children does not always come to pass.
Inheritance tax in practice is implemented above a certain threshold.
There is nothing wrong with striving to give a heads up in life to your kids, on the contrary, it's a core, visceral instinct of parents to do so, and removing that would be alienating.
There is a certain level of wealth though, where the "heads up" transforms to an unstoppable compounding lever.
France for instance has a progressive inheritance tax (starting at 5%, up to 45%), triggered for children inheriting at 100k€ per parent. In practice, 50% of the population inherits <70k€.
Also, the proposed Zucman tax in France for instance is triggered starting at 100M€ wealth. At these levels, a mere 2% risk free investment yields 2M€ annual income, this is enough to both compound and enjoy a very luxurious lifestyle. This level of wealth is unstoppably compounding, and that is why it is proposed to tax it.
If you don't, well you end up with a US situation, where disproportionate wealth (and thus power, influence) end up in the hands of random citizens with their own agendas, possibly (likely) orthogonal to the interests of the majority.
Unless i've misunderstood the text, the Zucman tax proposed a minimum 2% tax rate for the >100M€ rich bastards who don't already pay 2% of their income in taxes, not an additional 2% on top of existing taxes.
My grandparents didn't pass away until my folks were in their 60s, my remaining parent most likely won't die until I'm in my 60s.
I also went to give my children the world, but giving them a few million when they're about to retire doesn't really do much.
parents wanting to support their kids should do things like pay for college or a trade school, cover their grandkids daycare costs, help them buy their first home. We charge young parents so much money they don't have, and, much like covid, only seem to cater to old people for whatever reason. I guess because they have the money.
Just curious what you think the correct solution is? You're rich, you have a kid, you die when the kid is 2yrs old. So they get nothing? 12? 22? 32?. Is there some "correct" number? If you're raising them in some $100m home do they get booted out and put in a tenement?
On the other hand, most people die closer to 75-80 and their kids are 50+. Leaving inheritance to them isn't really spoiling them as they are alread adults with established lives.
In the US, the inheritance taxes don't kick in until $15M ($30M for married couples). Even at 2 years old, a child can inherit more money than most people will make in their lifetime before a dime is paid to the IRS.
Estate taxes kick in at much lower threshold in most States. Washington had to repeal their recently created 35% estate tax (for a combined 75% rate) due to overt capital flight to places like Idaho. The exemption in Washington is $3M.
I don't care about estate and inheritance taxes much but many people do and it empirically drives behavior.
I would disagree, I think income taxes and inheritance taxes are morally wrong. Earning money to support oneself and family instead of relying on public largesse should not be taxed. Passing the fruits of a lifetime of work to ones heirs so they can continue do productive work instead of relying on public largesse should not be taxed.
Yes.. spend enough time amongst the inheritocracy and you'll see the wealth is as often as not wasted on them.
There's just too much fun to be had with 0.1% wealth that you didn't have to sacrifice your 20s, 30s (and maybe 40s) to build. Coast at some job with a top 25-50% income and 0.1% inheritance in NYC and live the life.
So if you're spending your inheritance living the high life, that economic activity benefits a lot of other people. Still a net positive in my view.
I get the political power concern, and money = power at a certain point. But I'd rather work on getting money out of politics than putting limits on what people can decide will happen to their assets after they die.
I'm curious how you envision money ever leaving politics. I hear this phrase often and every time I do it feels more and more nonsensical. Politics is what we call the social aspect of resource management (it's often called "political economy" for this reason). The only way I can see to remove money from politics is to create a society that has no money at all. I assume that isn't what you mean?
If we already did that, half of governemnt members across the globe would be in prison. And as much as i would enjoy to see all french politicians rot in jail, i don't think that's happening anytime soon.
Still doesn't seem to be happening as much as it should lately. We have worse things being done by people currently in office. Maybe I should ask, any recent Republican examples?
it just seems that way. there are things that are legal and there are things that are illegal. outside our Lord King DJT, if you break the law and this can be proven in a court of law, you are going to prison.
Right it seems like one of those libertarian perfect-world talking points that ignores the impossibility of implementation.
There's so many indirect ways of influencing politics given lots of money - alternative media, buying out local news, controlling national news.. making entertainment media of your own ideology. Fund interesting groups around particular topics. Give poor Ivy League grads a job and groom them for higher office.. oh wait.
The problem is that theres a lot of stuff in the tax code that allows those at the higher end to also defer taxes indefinitely. So not taxing estates/inheritance, and allowing these deferrals leaves assets untaxed at the high end forever.
For example, step up basis allows inherited assets to have their cost basis re-struck at the value at time of inheritance. So if there is no inheritance tax, the assets transfer to a new owner and a large chunk of value is forever untaxed, even when/if they eventually sell.
Similarly all sorts of interesting stuff that can be done with trusts. Again stuff that's only accessible / worth the hassle to 1%.
In a world with extreme outcomes due to scaling, we might accidentally be re-inventing the hereditary aristocracy if the assets can accumulate outside the tax system.
Yes, the famous bourgeois economist Bastiat is certainly a reference in how to provide economic justice on this planet. /s
To be clear, i'm not exactly defending inheritance tax if resources are shared another way. For instance, it would make sense to let people keep a − modest − home across generations. But i'm tired of rich capitalist tech bros saying income taxes are unfair because they've worked so hard, and inheritance taxes are unfair because they've already been taxed.
Consumption tax is sales/VAT tax excluding some necessities and capital goods. Yes, there are some awkward edge cases: in the UK the exclusions were food and children's clothes, which leads to battles over prepared cold food (e.g. sandwich), takeaway and restaurant dining.
Sin taxes are obviously things society might want to discourage, mainly for health reasons, like alcohol and smoking, but also gambling and externalities, like pollution. Some might stretch that to all carbon emissions to moderate climate change.
Don't tax things you want: working / income and investment / capital gains.
Inheritance tax is doubly wrong because the wealth is already taxed, and death is unavoidable (but emigration is possible, which might help in some countries).
Canada just gives you a fixed amount of cash every year for the sales tax that they estimate that you paid on a regular amount of consumption (HST credit) which solved that problem.
I don't think it's fair that someone who earns $400k and spends $400k is paying roughly the same taxes as someone earning $400k and spending $100k. You should pay more taxes the more luxurious your life is, not the more productive you are.
Where's the other 300k going? If you aren't spending it, what does it matter if it all gets taxed to nothing? And if you end up spending it, then boom there's your consumption that needs to be taxed.
In a world where you are the supreme ruler, then what you individually want matters. In our actual world, it’s more about what the society in general wants.
Property taxes on real property or possibly land value tax (it's a limited resource, at least in places where people want to live, and requires a lot of public infrastructure to support its value there).
Tariffs, various usage taxes and fees.
Need a mechanism to address the regressiveness of some of this but that's an implementation detail.
Their take on inheritance taxes is insane, but I tend to agree that income taxes are immoral. Corporations get taxed on profits: If OkayPhysicist, Inc. spends $200 to make $300, it would be taxed some fraction of $100. Individuals, on the other hand, get taxed on revenue. It doesn't matter if it costs me $4000 in rent, groceries, transportation, etc., to make $6000, I'm getting taxed on that full $6000.
Capital gains taxes, on the other hand, are completely moral, and should be much, much higher. Capital investment benefits enormously from the State protecting their property "rights" (you don't need to hire a private army to prevent the workers from just deciding to run your factory for their own benefit, that's what the cops are for), and at a minimum the state would be justified in collecting that dividend for itself. Bootlickers and profession bootlickers (i.e., economists) would complain that a high capital gains tax disincentives investment, but as long as the value of investment is positive, that is, outpacing inflation, it makes zero sense to let your money languish in a Scrooge McDuck pile rather than get some value out of it.
>It doesn't matter if it costs me $4000 in rent, groceries, transportation, etc., to make $6000, I'm getting taxed on that full $6000.
So if I spend $5000 on groceries because I'm eating wagyu steak and lobster everyday, is that a fair "expense" too? You might retort that's obviously a luxury and there should be some baseline that's tax free, but then you're just describing the standard deduction.
>but as long as the value of investment is positive, that is, outpacing inflation, it makes zero sense to let your money languish in a Scrooge McDuck pile rather than get some value out of it.
Businesses don't pay extra tax because they chose to met their needs at a greater-than-minimum cost. If my boss buys some reagents from Dave for $300 bucks instead of Bill's $200 offer, the company's not paying taxes based on a hypothetical $200 cost basis.
If we want to tax "luxury" expenses, we have excise taxes for that.
>Businesses don't pay extra tax because they chose to met their needs at a greater-than-minimum cost. If my boss buys some reagents from Dave for $300 bucks instead of Bill's $200 offer, the company's not paying taxes based on a hypothetical $200 cost basis.
Right, but consumption for a business is fundamentally different than a person consuming. When you eat lobster (vs eating ground beef), any extra benefit goes down the toilet, so to speak. Whereas for a business, it's presumably to further the enterprise. Maybe getting a purer reagent will make the product better and drive more sales. After all, a business itself can't have any needs or wants. In any case a business can't have wants to get the $300 reagent just because, unlike a person. The employees can get benefits, but there are strict policies set by the IRS on what you can count as a business expense, specifically to prevent you from putting lobsters as a business expense.
Moreover such favorable tax treatment isn't restricted to businesses only. It's available to anyone that conducts business. If you're self employed you can deduct the cost of your F-150 truck, if it's used as part of your job.
First one makes sense, second one I’m quizzical about.
Inheritance taxes tend to only kick in at the 8+ digit range.
If anything, taxing that should encourage descendents to do productive work, eh? Since not taxing it, but taxing other things actually discourages it?
I can’t imagine how it would result in anyone relying on public largesse either unless they are really terrible with money. In which case a few extra zeros is unlikely to help any?
I suppose like with many things it's a question of scale. A little is good, more is better, but at some point it may start to have negative consequences.
And I think that inheritance, while a natural desire, is morally wrong. It's an example that desires aren't always congruent with morality. People will go to great lengths to justify their conclusion.
Are gifts morally wrong? If I'm near death is it wrong for to give my assets to my children beforehand, or does it only become immoral if done via a will?
If we're going to talk about morality, I think we need to talk about the government as one of the moral actors.
Imagine this scenario, exaggerated to make a point:
1. Alice receives $X. It's from her boss, for laboring in the mines every day. Government man says: "Give me 20% to pay for the shared roads, or you go to jail."
2. Bob receives $X. It's from his parents, for doing nothing other than being born related to them. Government man says: "Gee, I just can't do anything here, I guess I'll have to shake down Alice even harder next time."
Isn't there something off about the morality of Government Man's choices?
Or look at monarchies and titles of nobility. In the past direct inheritance of political assets was common, and acting on that natural desire, the people involve claimed that parents deserved to direct what they (and their ancestors) had accumulated on to the next generation of their own family.
Yet nowadays most countries and people have decided it is immoral, and they also took steps to make common forms of it extremely illegal.
My point is that economic inheritance today is just as much a social-construct as political inheritance was then. It exists because we permit it to exist, don't be fooled by anyone claiming it's an intrinsic law of the universe or a divine mandate by god that must be obeyed.
I think if we're saying inheritance (at least beyond some point) is morally wrong, then we're really just saying that achieving a certain level of wealth is morally wrong. So deal with that directly, rather than putting your hand in someone's wallet after he dies.
There's a difference in thought here so fundamental that it is hard to argue about details without addressing it first: You believe the individual comes first, what it produces is taxes hy the external construct of the state, which takes from what the individual truly earns.
But the individual would be a subsistence farmer at best without society supporting it, hardly worth taxing. In reality millionaires are only possible with a large state and societal network around them. Wealth is societies gift, and its right to take back.
I would disagree. How else would you pay for the schools, roads and hospitals so that you and your heirs can "do productive work"? I mean i could imagine alternatives, but none that's compatible with a capitalist system.
Is this perhaps some sort of badly-signaled satire, or a comment mis-submitted to the wrong thread?
I cannot understand what though-process led you to suggest repealing "it", whether that means the entire tax or whether it means reducing the number of brackets.
No, I'm saying the tax basically never takes 40% of the estate assets that are being gifted to recipients. That 40% is just one number in a larger equation, and it's wrong to use it out of context in a way that makes the policy seem harsher/scarier than it really is.
However it also true that 99% of the time the estate tax is $0, but that just tells you 99% of Americans die without being that rich. It doesn't mean that piece of the system is not effective or necessary at doing a job. If we had no estate tax, that would create a massive loophole people would abuse so that other taxes stop working as intended.
It's like how the vast majority of cars will not hit the railing that stands between them and a deadly plunge off the edge of the cliff... but we still need to keep it for when it matters.
Walter is just wasting your time because he's a Libertarian who doesn't believe in (m)any tax policies but he doesn't want to outright say that because he knows most people are wise enough to disengage from conversations like this with a Libertarian.
So instead he'll just act like he didn't read that "basically" that you wrote, despite quoting it and then pretend like he doesn't really understand what you just wrote above.
When I was little and playing SimCity 2000 I looked at the tax rates for the city and noticed that the sales tax rate was like 2%, and based on our 14% VAT at the time, it seemed super low to me so I upped it to 12% and was surprised at how unhappy the citizens were.
This gave me the impression that Americans wouldn’t be happy with a significant sales tax, or perhaps this was a city sales tax on an existing state sales tax, which yes, would be outrageous, or maybe Americans get taxed in some other way which makes up for our VAT.
Anyway, I look back and chuckle at my own lack of knowledge at the time.
I would love a VAT tax instead of the never ending stream of taxes we pay on everything else.
Americans are stupid. They see a higher tax on an iPhone they don't need, they will cry about it.
But they pay more at the end of the year on income tax, property tax, car registration, etc., they could care less.
Most Americans don't even look at their pay stub, and are more than happy to overpay their income taxes every paycheck so they get a bigger tax return at the end of the year.
They don't realize that money was theirs to begin with.
They complain about not being able to become wealthy while they give the government an interest free loan, when they could be investing that money and earning on it.
The article itself isn't great, but it speaks to one of my greatest concerns about AI. People who engage heavily with it are falling in the behavioral billionaire trap: It is deeply unhealthy to be constantly affirmed in your behaviors. No, not all of your ideas are great, not everything you say has value. You are not a cut above the rest.
There are enough stories of people completely losing the plot, thinking they've invented a new type of maths or similar, but there's almost certainly also a much more subtle influence in most of us, where the constant affirmation, obedience, apologia, reframes our expectations of how interactions should be.
We are already the most narcissistic generation, having been molded by social media to compare, stats-max, and overobsess about who we are. Chatbots are now fanning the flames.
When Marc Benioff was talking about how he spends like 3 hours a day chatting with AI, things made a bit more sense. I suspect that a lot of these guys are just chattering away with self-affirming LLMs and have just completely lost the plot.
I hadn’t considered that before Marc was talking about how much time he spends chatting to LLMs.
A lot of the younger Big Tech CEOs are notoriously averse to human interaction, so I’m sure there’s some of that at play.
With the rise of agentic coding, this has become a sign of quality for me in my own PRs and reviews: New features implemented in less than a thousand lines of productive code.
When I'm working on code that was heavily vibecoded, most of my PRs are reducing LoC by a couple hundreds of lines while fixing bugs or implementing a new feature.
My job kind of feels like being a garbage man, luckily my current employer appreciates it. Personally I think the current style of vibecoding only kinda works, because models are getting better fast enough to keep the shitpile from overflowing completely. Betting on the harnesses + models getting good enough to clean up after themselves is a bet, and I don't like gambling, but even I admit the odds don't seem to be bad.
Could you maybe in brought strokes explain what you are working on? I think it is very plausible that the disconnect is between people writing front ends/rest apis vs people solving things like graphics.
In my case this is not simply "rest APIs". It's is a fairly complex code base. Not trivial work. But the code base is fairly clean and so localized understanding can be sufficient for many tasks.
I tend to agree. Taking shortcuts are one thing, not daring to refactor along the way another. I would only do this in low stress situations due to the risk of producing new bugs or issues, and just lacking the time to properly update tests etc. Opus 4.7 sometimes makes suboptimal design decisions, especially in terms of overcomplicating things, but I have not seen it produce an actual bug in smaller changes in a long while.
The other is using Agents as critical reviewers. I've let Opus 4.7 review PRs by very senior people. Most of the suggestions are meh, but usually there's at least 1 or 2 that improve the code base unequivocally.
Also there are still considerations like domain, team expertise, org ecosystem etc. to consider. I love to use Rust for most things, but now I'm working with an org that primarily has expertise in Java, and I'm not going to rock the boat for barely any reason. Python is also still useful for most ML stuff, and Django is quite a pleasure to work with (although it wouldn't be my first choice).
The great thing about LLM-assisted coding is that an experienced software engineer can acquire decent familiarity with a language quite quickly. And then has a useful sparring partner for understanding and using the quirks and features of a new language.
Same here, working with a team that knows Java, so I'm letting Claude write Java.
If I compare the results to another team that uses Python with Claude I see slightly better results on the Java side. Not because Claude knows that better, but because the tools are more rigid by default which creates more of a self correcting loop for Claude. The Python side has Pydantic, but it's a bit of an afterthought, while in Java you can't skip the type checking.
In the end you can do the same things on both sides, it's 95% a team/engineering culture difference. So pick the language that the team knows best.
There is labor that is necessary for our societies to function, but a direct threat to the people doing the work. Someone has to do it, and it should be seen as a great service to society and rewarded accordingly. In a just world, we would be paying significantly extra for threats to health that come from work, in the one we are currently in we use threat of worse harm instead.
Someone has to do it, and it should be seen as a great service to society and rewarded accordingly
You are just too priviledge to understand people: many people would be glad do do it for the minimum wage, I would fight to have that oportunity (I live in west EU).
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