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Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and di
by manlymuppet 1mo ago
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
- abixb 1mo agoYes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health. I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep. Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
- herpdyderp 1mo agoExcept for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
- abixb 1mo agoLina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.
- timcobb 1mo agoI miss the Biden administration
- jacquesm 1mo agoLarge numbers of people outside of the United States probably do.
- mushi_shi 1mo ago[flagged]
- jacquesm 1mo agoNo, just people that prefer the largest economy and military power in the world to be as stable as possible.
- Gigachad 1mo agoChina and Russia are loving things right now.
- nozzlegear 1mo agoI miss him from inside the United States too.
- platevoltage 1mo agoThat's a sad thing to have to say, but yeah.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Danox 1mo agoI miss every administration back to Roosevelt.
- timcobb 1mo agoI dunno, Nixon, :thumbsdown:
- dakolli 1mo agoThe president who helped kil 15k children? Why do you miss him, he should be in the jail cell next to trump.
- 028363922092 1mo ago[flagged]
- timcobb 1mo agoNot here pls
- smelendez 1mo agoI think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.
- tiahura 1mo agoYellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist. And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
- Grombobulous 1mo agoKahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences. IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided. Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.
- kaonwarb 1mo agoiRobot is now 100% owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics of China. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726000006/exhibit991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726...)
- Grombobulous 1mo agoYes, that's a very good company to be the owner of iRobot, because they are just a robot factory and not a near-monopoly e-commerce retailer. They are essentially on equal footing with other robotic vacuum manufacturers. iRobot didn't go out of business or get absorbed into a larger company lowering competition in the marketplace. It's also not the FTC's job to ensure that companies, especially ones with zero/trivial national security or domestic labor force value, remain under domestic ownership. Amazon itself is not really a "domestic" company, it's publicly traded. Anyone from any non-sanctioned country can buy shares of Amazon.
- elictronic 1mo agoI miss her. Actual government for the people.
- theendisney 1mo agoNow that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.
- gmueckl 1mo agoWon't work. Businesses need a proven track record before they can buy. With no established history of successes, this plan is already dead on arrival.
- theendisney 1mo agoDepends who does it. If someone with the track record and budget pulls the rabbit out of the hat swiftly existing customers would at least investigate. If you maintain a list of shortcommings or good new features it could sound like a sweet deal. If the company was aquired to shut it down it would work even better. Marketing is increasingly expensive. Any hype is valuable. One might as well design the product for the promotion.
- alightsoul 1mo agoYou can torrent and seed these models via torrenting. They are not piracy so there's no problem hosting them besides maybe not having enough bandwidth
- addag 1mo agoInteresting ideas, maybe the real open alternative will indeed be torrents.
- Gerard22Aug 1mo ago... You wouldn't steal a car ... you wouldn't steal a bag ... piracy is a crime. (Girl cancels the download and walks away from the PC. Remember? :-)) That is what will happen to torrents. Followed by VPNs. China, Russia and Iran had paved the way already. Can't you see the puzzle coming toghether?
- alightsoul 1mo agoAi models are not piracy, because you never had to pay for them and simply seeding them and downloading them does not break their licenses
- matheusmoreira 1mo ago> I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep. Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
- elictronic 1mo agoCurrent US government is pay to play. As in buy my cryptocurrency and you get a pardon or case dismissal, no backroom deal required. Payment directly. Blatant corruption sucks. If the House or Senate turn that might actually stop or slow down. The market falling by 30% when the AI bubble eventually pops would also trigger it.
- rablackburn 1mo ago> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects. The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
- Eji1700 1mo agoYeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.
- Gigachad 1mo agoCounter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production. Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.
- bbor 1mo agoIf we survive, that is.
- nickysielicki 1mo agoWhy would China want to crash the AI industry? Their goal is not to damage the United States, necessarily. Their goal is to have the best domestic AI on the planet. They intend to do that through the way that they dominate every other industry: good enough quality at a much greater scale.
- fsuts 1mo agoSurely crashing the Ai industry (in terms of reducing commercial revenue) makes it harder for the leaders to keep raising money and so keep investing in r&d to the same levels. Thus allowing competitors without access to latest American hardware to keep up.
- tannertech 1mo agoWhen did apple stop charging more for their memory upgrades then gold by the ounce costs?
- skohan 1mo agoThey didn't, but their price increases haven't kept pace with general memory price increases (yet) so currently their pricing seems reasonable.
- root_axis 1mo agoTrue, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
- make3 1mo agoI think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible
- drTobiasFunke 1mo agoNvidia is a public company. What VC money?
- DeepYogurt 1mo agoWe're entering consolidation
- gscott 1mo agoThe Government plans to regulate open source ai. Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor. Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control. A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.
- Gerard22Aug 1mo ago100x this: "The Government plans to regulate open source ai." and ... s/regulate/restrict