Did you make big bets on specific things like memory? He had insight, he made money, didn't have enough experience to handle it well, but still made great returns after his "downfall"
I read the announcement honestly sounds like they are doing some cool things.
A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.
For a lot of companies these tools exist in the world of shadow IT spend, so they can go on being paid customers with no usage, tied to various IC accounts/credit cards for a long, long time.
Ah yes let’s ruin someone’s life over $200 but nobody look at Trumps accounts. He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
the problem with Poe's Law is that when someone else violates it by misreading your sarcasm you're the one who has to pay the fine in fake internet points.
> He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
What proof do you have? On what planet would major banks piss off the most capricious and unrestrained president in modern US history? What possible upside could there be for them? Trump (34 time fraud felon known for scamming everyone he can and using his position in government to massively enrich himself) was almost certainly "debanked" because he is doing more of the same shady shit that he's known for and the banks are obligated by the law to treat him like anyone else.
Capital One closed hundreds of Trump's accounts in 2021. Trump is suing them, claiming it's a political debanking. CapOne fighting back because they feel their AML team was correct to close those accounts.
> He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
No, if this was serious, it would read "he was definitely debanked for political reasons. He was not laundering money". Or even better, it would have deflected and claimed something unrelated about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton.
Although I have to grudgingly accept that not everybody is fluent in sarcasm.
How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact? It probably shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place so I’m with you let’s block it there next time. But in the meantime… we should just let it get built?
That is not what this debate is about. The debate is about whether we know that the point of focus can be described as massive GHG when compared in proportion to other emitters.
How much is the plant actually going to emit? Is the number the largest because the field is dominated by many many smaller things that cumulatively sum to a figure so large that if any one value (even if the largest) is removed, it makes no meaningful difference.
What happens to the fuel if they don't use it? Does it get used by someone else who would otherwise had used renewables.
I don't think it is unreasonable to have the relevant information to hand before making a decision. I might make the same decision as you have already done. I'd just like it to be based on actual information that I have.
We have all the info we need to know this is not something we should build if we want to preserve our environment. But yeah keep pretending we don’t or whatever.
More regulation. Specifically requiring worker-owned means of production: re-organize the AI model companies as mutuals and mandate (by law) that their only customers can be individual-contributor-level workers or worker unions. Ditto with robotics.
Do the math on that one. There are 8 billion people. OpenAI revenue -- not profit -- is ~$25B, which is ~$3/year. That's if they have zero expenses for engineers or land or equipment or electricity, which isn't the case now and never will be. Their current profit is a number of substantial magnitude with a minus sign in front of it.
The funny thing about all of this is that it's basically taking revenue from the major media companies to the benefit of OpenAI's customers more than OpenAI itself, which is exactly the redistribution of wealth people seem to be demanding, but that's not how it gets characterized because the media companies are the ones characterizing it.
And there is some case to be made that disincentivizing human content creation is bad, but what that case really looks like is the argument against having the AI users free ride on an investment made by Sony or Comcast. Then what their proposals end up looking like is a tax paid by everyone where the money goes to those huge corporations. And of all the things we shouldn't do about this, that's the thing we shouldn't do the most.
Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.
> Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening.
Eh. Most LLM output is significantly transformative. The challenge here is that some of the output is similar enough to a work in the training data that it could reasonably be considered derivative. And evaluating whether it is when you have both of them in front of you isn't even the hard part.
The real problem, from the perspective of LLM users, is that you don't know when it's happening because you haven't seen the original work to notice how similar it is to a particular output, and now maybe you have problems if you start making copies of it.
> The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.
Those big corporations are the likes of Sony and Comcast. They're the ones who would prefer to be able to sue OpenAI. But that's also the thing which is trash, because if the money went only to them then it's just propping up the incumbents while spitting on small independent content creators who get nothing. Whereas if you actually included everybody then we're back to ~$3/year and it's not even worth the administrative costs compared to just having them pay ordinary taxes on their profits to the extent that they eventually have any.
Microsoft is one of them too and they've been one of the primary funders of OpenAI. And that's to say nothing of the many recent mergers between software corporations and film studios.
This doesn't solve any of the problems. It's not a 19th century factory running on leather-belt-harnessed steam engines. There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old (because there are relatively few of them and no one to dilute the aggregate back to your preferred leftist mindsets).
> There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old
You're not clear here, but it sounds like you're talking about employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
But then you misunderstood me. I was talking about the workers who use the tools those companies make.
In the plan in my comment
* OpenAI, Anthropic, employees would be working for a mutual, as in a customer-owned company. Those "few dozen" robber barons wannabes wouldn't be getting any big payout.
* The workers I was referring to were all the employees who use AI tools to perform a job. They would be the only customers of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. in their personal capacities. Their employers would not be allowed to buy those tools directly, they'd have to hire a worker to use them, who could then capture a lot of the value instead of the company.
Sounds great! If I'm a worker who owns the means of production and I want to sell that stake to someone else, am I allowed to do so? If not, do I actually "own" anything?
No, the means of productions are owned by _the workers_, not by you as an individual. You want to stop working there? You're welcome to trade your spot with another worker.
And before any "uuuuh this can't work uuuh people want to get rich uuuh", you are literally talking about the community that has made open source software, the most commie thing imaginable on earth.
You realize that the folks with these fortunes are the workers who built the companies, right? If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. And the VCs who also ended up with stocks did quite a bit of work along the way-- as well as investing capital.
We're not talking about widows with a pension who are just interested in dividends. This isn't some utility.
I don't know where you get the idea that startups only give stock to 12 people. The main reason that Google went public is that they had given stock to close to 2000 people and the law requires certain things when the cap table gets that big.
And many companies give out RSUs which act like shares even if they're not.
The reality is that startups ARE worker owned.
It's the old, unionized companies that aren't-- although many are embracing options and RSUs.
Odd that you're choosing sexist language like that.
Are startups not owned by the people who work there?
Cooperatives are more complicated legal structures, usually designed to unify a group of producers like farmers. The workers at cooperatives are often paid an hourly wage and nothing more.
Do the workers at a startup own shares? That means the workers own part of the company. If they chose to raise more capital, that's their decision. Even the most socialist leaning coffee shop will raise capital to pay for capital improvements.
A nice thought. But the early options/shares issued at a startup have been gamed to the point that only the principals can ever get a significant cash payout. THe rest of the employee shares are of a special class that may as well be called 'worthless paper'.
That's really a different point. Most startups fail -- and it doesn't matter whether they're owned by the workers or some distant capitalist. And, yes, sometimes people are ripped off through dilution.
But the reality is that startups workers usually have shares and the shares make them owners. Whether they benefit or not from the ownership isn't the question here.
All you need to do is look at some union-run cooperatives that fail to understand that "worker owned" is not magic.
Many ownership agreements come with limits. Some stock funds limit how much people can withdraw each month. Home "owners" associations put plenty of limits on what people can do with their "property."
Do you think that some magical worker-owned cooperative would let people sell? No way. I know folks that worked at a vegan restaurant cooperative. They wanted to get another job-- but the cooperative wouldn't give them anything. Why? If they weren't working each night, they weren't going to get a percentage of the business they built.
There are good reasons for lockups and, of course, you don't need to take the job.
They abandoned central planning, not state control of the economy.
Unfortunately, their priority is not worker welfare, but more like national greatness.
And they're performing way better than "capitalist" economies, which all look downright dysfunctional in pretty serious ways (e.g. selling off strategic manufacturing capacity to make a quick buck).
I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
Ah yes, the most capitalistic country on the planet, where billionaires quite literally buy out public officials isn't capitalistic enough, and isn't "real capitalism".
Watch out, you're almost sounding like the "not real communism" boys.
>Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism.
Some would say leaving a few million people die of thirst and hunger every year because it's "not profitable to fix it", or having a population of dozens of millions in your own country suffering of mental health problems, inability to get basic healthcare or even living conditions for the past 50 years might be a sign that your favorite system is fundamentally immoral, but hey.
> I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US.
Free market capitalism won't save us from a future were automation reaches a point that it creates a large, unemployable underclass. And that's the future the tech and business elite have been promising us (at least until they belatedly realized that was the quiet part they shouldn't be saying out loud).
I'm going to take their word on those promises, when considering regulation to constrain them.
> Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
I would like a communism that is basically capitalism, but with the capital more-or-less evenly distributed among the workers. Keep a lot of the economic system, but replace it with other things: mutuals, worker-owned businesses, maybe 50-50 JVs between labor and investors, some "all of the above" combination, etc.
Countries under embargoes are failing?! Countries that cannot get oil, electricity, goods because the most imperialistic country on earth cannot see them succeed are failing ? Well golly gee how could that be
cuba has a longer life expectancy than the US despite all of that btw
> Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past.
Yeah, won't anyone think of the poor oligarchs, openly fantasizing about creating a permanent underclass?
And the only thing that didn't work out well in the past was central planning by state-owned businesses with 20th century technology. The structure I proposed is nothing like that.
It seems like that just supercharges brain drain by incentivizing all the smartest and richest people to just move away to a place with lower taxes and less bureaucracy.
if the trend remains without the USD being the reserve currency then maybe? Id lean as a first guess that easy access to lots of free money is the bigger driver
Billionaires can hold the global reserve currency in a different country/state with lower taxes and less bureaucracy. e.g. Marc Andreessen can move to a different state or country and start incentivizing companies to form in that new jurisdiction. We are seeing this already with many corps relocating from California to Texas.
>lots of free money
What do you mean by free money? Who's getting free money from whom?
Is there some way to disabuse people of the notion that higher taxes would help here? Taxes don't really affect entity size. In significant ways they do the opposite, because business expenses are deductions, so using profits for expansion becomes more favored over paying them out as dividends the more you increase the tax rate.
What you need here is antitrust enforcement and lower barriers to entry so that there are more companies that are each smaller, and correspondingly more millionaires and fewer billionaires.
Using graduated rates for corporations isn't used because it doesn't work. The formal entity size is disconnected from the business size.
How many entities is "Google"? Is it one or is Search one company and Android another and YouTube another and so on? If they need to get the size of each unit below some threshold they can just file more LLCs.
Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? If it's Vanguard then every public company exceeds the largest size threshold. If it isn't, they can use something which is formally an investment fund as the parent company and get as big as they want.
And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.
> Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard?
Could you maybe tie it back to majority control? Alphabet is one company because it actually has a controlling stake over Google, YouTube, Android, etc. Whereas Vanguard is just a minority shareholder in Google.
> And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.
The idea is that you wouldn't need to government to actively break up companies, they'd do it themselves (or get outcompeted). I will admit that this is very much unproven theory though (but I'd certainly be interested in people investigating the theory more formally if nothing else).
> Could you maybe tie it back to majority control?
Then you get three corporations that each own a one third stake in all the things that constitute Alphabet and a variety of investment instruments that allow anyone to buy shares in all three of them at the same time.
Things like that wouldn't work if they had an actual individual majority shareholder, but the larger the company is the less likely that's the case.
> The idea is that you wouldn't need to government to actively break up companies, they'd do it themselves (or get outcompeted).
And then we're back to the original point -- business expenses are deductions so raising the tax rate actually gives them the incentive to spend money expanding rather than using it to pay dividends, so if anything it does the opposite of that.
You’d think competitive brands could launch to bring joy but everyone is so cash strapped that those brands lose since the mega corps price cheaper even if it’s worse/shrinkflated. Or they just get bought and rolled into the oligopoly!
Nobody cares that their TV is cheaper when it now smashes ads in your face while using your bandwidth to serve botnets and sends a heartbeat even when offline. Everything that actually matters, like good healthy food or youth sports, is increasingly expensive or shrinkflated.
It's because of rent. Rent keeps going up and this gets passed on to all people who buy things, live, or work, but it rarely flows the other way - rentiers spend all their rent acquiring more rent, not on productive things. And so you have this constant leeching away from the real economy.
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