4 ms·

Nobody can rebut 10k words of rambling across half a dozen of separate arguments in a forum post. It'd be too long, and there is no readership for a point-by-po

by jsnell 2mo ago

Nobody can rebut 10k words of rambling across half a dozen of separate arguments in a forum post. It'd be too long, and there is no readership for a point-by-point rebuttal for the dozens logic errors, misreprentations and various sleights of hand that the arguments (such as they are) are built on. And if you try to just rebut one thing, well, that wasn't actually the core argument but just incidental. I've seen people talk about how compelling they find these articles, but literally never have they been able to point at a good argument. Like, in a paragraph, what's the most compelling and impactful argument in this article? What are a couple of numbers that make it so?

ragall 2mo ago
Juho, you have a well known blog and enough people would read it, so please go ahead and write a rebuttal.
- ofjcihen 2mo ago
  It would be nice if he would. Then we would at least have something other than “I just don’t like him” to debate.
ofjcihen 2mo ago
Here, if this is just misrepresentations and logical fallacies than it should be easy to explain the main point away: How are OAI and Anthropic reasonably and reliably going to make the profits they need to to hit these targets? By Q1 2028: OpenAI ≳ $10B/month Anthropic ≳ $10B/month Combined ≳ $20B/month / $240B ARR By 2029, according to their own projections: OpenAI ≈ $184B/year Anthropic ≈ $174B/year Combined ≈ $358B/year And remember, this is also in competition with open models that are increasingly encroaching on SOTA capabilities while costing less and allowing you to do more.
- jsnell 2mo ago
  The immediate fallacy here is implying they need to make a profit to pay for compute. Profit is what's left over after you pay for expenses, not what you pay the expenses with. The sleight of hand (yours) is that those numbers don't seem to be from the article. Like, none of those numbers appears in the article except the years, and the years are used in different contexts. Likewise what you say is the main point ("the labs can't grow fast enough to hit these targets") is not something the article makes an argument about! In fact, the only even related thing in the article is an this assertion: > To be clear, “growing super fast” is no longer sufficient for OpenAI and Anthropic. Which is obviously nonsense, but also at cross-purposes with what you say. So neither what you say is the main point nor the numbers is in the article at all. Seems pretty sad as demonstration of how compelling the article was.
  - ofjcihen 2mo ago
    Ah, forgive me, I’d thought with the way you were attacking his work that you had more of an idea of what his consistent line of reasoning was. The numbers I’ve provided are the basis for just about every article he has written regarding the AI industry with his main point being that the spend is unjustified and unsustainable and more importantly unwarranted considering the usefulness and returns (which are not small but in no means justify the enormous estimates of profitability being assumed by these companies). So, no sleight of hand, just an assumption that your acidic regard for his work was rooted in having read it. So, do you care to provide a rebuttal to the article or his main point about profitability? I don’t imagine calling his theory “obviously nonsense” was as far as your reasoning went. Care to expand on it?
    - jsnell 2mo ago
      > So, do you care to provide a rebuttal to the article No, I already explained why rebutting the whole article is impractical. I might have been ok doing so for a single argument just as a demonstration, but your unwillingness to point out the most compelling and impactful argument of this article makes it pretty clear there was no point to it. It was 10k words of padding. > or his main point about profitability A message ago the main point was about revenue growth. Now it has shifted to profitability. So, no, I'm not going to waste time rebutting an ill-defined, second-hand, moving target argument either. > I don’t imagine calling his theory “obviously nonsense” was as far as your reasoning went. Care to expand on it? It's nonsense by definition? The claim is that companies have too low a revenue to pay for their compute spending commitments, and growing super fast can't fix that problem. Super fast revenue growth is exactly what solves the problem of revenue being too low! It's a very strange thing to assert, but it's what he did assert, and it's the only bit of this article that's even close to what you claim is his main point. ("Oh, but super fast growth can't happen because of blah blah blah as explained in some other article", you'll say. Maybe so. But blah blah blah is not what Zitron wrote in this article, in this one he wrote that revenue growth won't solve the problem of low revenue. Rebutting a 10k word ramble is merely impractical. Rebutting an amorphous blob of 1M contradictory words is impossible, there's always going to be some explanation about how what he really meant is somewhere else.)

by jsnell 2mo ago

ragall 2mo ago

Juho, you have a well known blog and enough people would read it, so please go ahead and write a rebuttal.

ofjcihen 2mo ago
It would be nice if he would. Then we would at least have something other than “I just don’t like him” to debate.

ofjcihen 2mo ago

Here, if this is just misrepresentations and logical fallacies than it should be easy to explain the main point away: How are OAI and Anthropic reasonably and reliably going to make the profits they need to to hit these targets? By Q1 2028: OpenAI ≳ $10B/month Anthropic ≳ $10B/month Combined ≳ $20B/month / $240B ARR By 2029, according to their own projections: OpenAI ≈ $184B/year Anthropic ≈ $174B/year Combined ≈ $358B/year And remember, this is also in competition with open models that are increasingly encroaching on SOTA capabilities while costing less and allowing you to do more.

jsnell 2mo ago
The immediate fallacy here is implying they need to make a profit to pay for compute. Profit is what's left over after you pay for expenses, not what you pay the expenses with. The sleight of hand (yours) is that those numbers don't seem to be from the article. Like, none of those numbers appears in the article except the years, and the years are used in different contexts. Likewise what you say is the main point ("the labs can't grow fast enough to hit these targets") is not something the article makes an argument about! In fact, the only even related thing in the article is an this assertion: > To be clear, “growing super fast” is no longer sufficient for OpenAI and Anthropic. Which is obviously nonsense, but also at cross-purposes with what you say. So neither what you say is the main point nor the numbers is in the article at all. Seems pretty sad as demonstration of how compelling the article was.
- ofjcihen 2mo ago
  Ah, forgive me, I’d thought with the way you were attacking his work that you had more of an idea of what his consistent line of reasoning was. The numbers I’ve provided are the basis for just about every article he has written regarding the AI industry with his main point being that the spend is unjustified and unsustainable and more importantly unwarranted considering the usefulness and returns (which are not small but in no means justify the enormous estimates of profitability being assumed by these companies). So, no sleight of hand, just an assumption that your acidic regard for his work was rooted in having read it. So, do you care to provide a rebuttal to the article or his main point about profitability? I don’t imagine calling his theory “obviously nonsense” was as far as your reasoning went. Care to expand on it?
  - jsnell 2mo ago
    > So, do you care to provide a rebuttal to the article No, I already explained why rebutting the whole article is impractical. I might have been ok doing so for a single argument just as a demonstration, but your unwillingness to point out the most compelling and impactful argument of this article makes it pretty clear there was no point to it. It was 10k words of padding. > or his main point about profitability A message ago the main point was about revenue growth. Now it has shifted to profitability. So, no, I'm not going to waste time rebutting an ill-defined, second-hand, moving target argument either. > I don’t imagine calling his theory “obviously nonsense” was as far as your reasoning went. Care to expand on it? It's nonsense by definition? The claim is that companies have too low a revenue to pay for their compute spending commitments, and growing super fast can't fix that problem. Super fast revenue growth is exactly what solves the problem of revenue being too low! It's a very strange thing to assert, but it's what he did assert, and it's the only bit of this article that's even close to what you claim is his main point. ("Oh, but super fast growth can't happen because of blah blah blah as explained in some other article", you'll say. Maybe so. But blah blah blah is not what Zitron wrote in this article, in this one he wrote that revenue growth won't solve the problem of low revenue. Rebutting a 10k word ramble is merely impractical. Rebutting an amorphous blob of 1M contradictory words is impossible, there's always going to be some explanation about how what he really meant is somewhere else.)