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I admit that I read this stuff for self-soothing, although the self-sooth is not about AI going away, just that SotA will become expensive enough that everyone

I admit that I read this stuff for self-soothing, although the self-sooth is not about AI going away, just that SotA will become expensive enough that everyone stops shilling digital garbage everywhere all the time. If SotA does not go up in price (ala open weights), then everyone will continue to shill digital garbage AND the stock market will presumably get ravaged. So I'm really crossing my fingers about cost increase and- full circle- this hope is why I like to self-soothe with these articles (i.e. I cannot attest the articles' veracity but it makes me feel good that a human writer is speculating convincingly about instability). That said, I sense that the ravaging is a forgone conclusion, unless someone pulls a(nother) rabbit out of a hat. I'd qualify agentic coding was a rabbit, so it could happen again I suppose.

dofm 2mo ago
I think the big picture is whether the big two can mask the real cost of tokens (inference and training) long enough to survive; that OpenAI is seeking government investment suggests that they can't. Ed Zitron helps you see the broad absurdities in this situation and more importantly helps you understand that at various levels there is chicanery: they need more money constantly so they make weird unprovable claims to people who lack the skills to critique them, they exploit not jusT FOMO but actually fear of their own products to market them, their suppliers are making such ruthless use of SPVs as to conjure a possible apparently entirely legal Enron-scale disaster, they are attempting to scare the US government into backing them, and they have tried to get the index funds to back them before they have any hope of profit. None of it is normal; much of it is operating in the face of whatever still passes for principle in the US tech and finance industries. The broad picture is obscured by smoke. But as fascinating as it is, it's only background information and it only broadly supports one's instincts; anything can still happen. For me, the main instinct it provides some support for is that the market is so terrifyingly lacking in verifiable fundamentals and stable predictable pricing that ultimately people will be driven to open weights and local models to keep control of their businesses; anything else is not a sane bet. So it broadly supports my instincts about my local-first approach, to find sustainable value. The thing about pulling rabbits from hats is that the rabbit was always there; it's not a new rabbit. With a bit of understanding about how GPTs and LLMs work it is clear that code analysis and generation is not just a good application, it is the utmost practical and profitable one, because nowhere else in broad human effort do we communicate only in context-free grammars. Nothing else is actually going to prove to be more valuable financially). (Formal pure maths is the "purest" one which is why we see its value in chugging through maths puzzles. But is there as much money to be found there?)

dofm 2mo ago

I think the big picture is whether the big two can mask the real cost of tokens (inference and training) long enough to survive; that OpenAI is seeking government investment suggests that they can't. Ed Zitron helps you see the broad absurdities in this situation and more importantly helps you understand that at various levels there is chicanery: they need more money constantly so they make weird unprovable claims to people who lack the skills to critique them, they exploit not jusT FOMO but actually fear of their own products to market them, their suppliers are making such ruthless use of SPVs as to conjure a possible apparently entirely legal Enron-scale disaster, they are attempting to scare the US government into backing them, and they have tried to get the index funds to back them before they have any hope of profit. None of it is normal; much of it is operating in the face of whatever still passes for principle in the US tech and finance industries. The broad picture is obscured by smoke. But as fascinating as it is, it's only background information and it only broadly supports one's instincts; anything can still happen. For me, the main instinct it provides some support for is that the market is so terrifyingly lacking in verifiable fundamentals and stable predictable pricing that ultimately people will be driven to open weights and local models to keep control of their businesses; anything else is not a sane bet. So it broadly supports my instincts about my local-first approach, to find sustainable value. The thing about pulling rabbits from hats is that the rabbit was always there; it's not a new rabbit. With a bit of understanding about how GPTs and LLMs work it is clear that code analysis and generation is not just a good application, it is the utmost practical and profitable one, because nowhere else in broad human effort do we communicate only in context-free grammars. Nothing else is actually going to prove to be more valuable financially). (Formal pure maths is the "purest" one which is why we see its value in chugging through maths puzzles. But is there as much money to be found there?)