Traster

It's a good business. Maybe even a great business. But it's not going to justify a valuation like Space X. In the same way that Tesla has slowly become less competitive in automotive, I don't think it's sensible to assume Space X will have some durable edge in building data centres, especially when basically everything going into those data centres are commodities. And if it is just a neo cloud, then you have to contend with the pro-cyclical nature of that. It's also just clearly not their plan, they're not promising to be a neo cloud. They're promising to own the full stack.

I'm still waiting for the real news to drop- in the next 6 months we're going to start hearing some big moves from Space X AI. Early this year they lost pretty much all their leadership, it's very clear they failed to keep up with the frontier models and Musk has essentially given up for now - renting out their compute to Anthropic and Google. But that's not sustainable, everything they say about their IPO is that AI is the core value driver. So at some point Musk is going to have some decisions to make about who he brings in to drive that. I imagine once they get that person in and start building a team around them the deals with Anthropic and Google will be ended.

I guess the cursor guys will be happy because they got their pay day, but I'd be very aware if I were them that their future is at the whim of whoever Musk appoints and it's difficult to tell who that would be right now.

I guess now is the time to take bets, so I'm going to bet an early OpenAI employee like Sutskever gets the job and they acquihire him in. Here's a bit of a laugh - at this stock price Musk could probably tempt Demis to come over, that would be wild.

The CEOs ideology matters due to the fact it impacts the product design. The reason people don't want to use Grok is because it's bad, and it's bad because the team behind grok have to spend cycles crowbarring in far right white genocide conspiracy theories so that it doesn't embarrass their boss on twitter. One of the things we learned with Anthropic is that you have a lot more success being focused on the core product - coding agent, than trying to do that and chase internet chatbot users.

To be honest I almost think the numbers are irrelevant. In 2024/25 there was a lot going on - will AI replace authors, film makers etc. Will it replace social media (anyone remember Sora?). A tonne of that stuff didn't work out. At the tail end of 2025 a real product market fit emerged. Coding agents. They work. They do a job that you can actually profit from.

So everything else is kind of academic. Of course they were losing money in 2025, they had a technology that was kind of cool - clearly eventually going to deliver something great, but they didn't actually have anything somebody should pay for. Now they have a thing that people will pay for. So who cares what they lost in 2025?

So what's important today is - how competitive are they with Anthropic in delivering that product. How do the economics of companies using AI agents for coding work. That's all. I don't think there's really an argument about them losing money on inference any more.

This seems smart. Apple, despite not really leading in AI themselves, are right on the hot path of where developers are going to yolo slop into the ecosystem. Make a tonne of sense to define a nice clean API that places like Anthropic can build on top of and expose to developers.

It's also smart for them to make sure the billing is going direct from Anthropic to the developer. The initial thought is "That means Apple's not taking a cut", but from the other side of it, developers who use this API are going to have to expose that cost to customers somehow, and that translates to subscription/InAppPurchase etc. on top of which Apple will get it's 30%.

Look at what the EU have done with Apple intelligence. Knowing the EU it wouldn't be long before Anthropic are on the wrong end of some regulation to force open model weights or some such madness.

Because the question they're asking isn't "What is the best way to solve this problem" the question they're asking is "Where can I shove my AI into this product".

Why are there so many flagged comments in here? They all look fairly banal but yet still flagged.

It's already in the public domain (thanks to the OpenAI trial) that Grok distilled OpenAIs models. Listening to the data going into the models in the data centre would be very similar thing. There's some downsides (you're passively listening, not controlling the queries), and some upsides (way more data). But it only ever gets you to some percentage of the existing production model. It doesn't get you what Musk wants - an AI company capable of designing and deploying leading edge models. It gets you to fast follower status.

Seeing both OpenAI and SpaceX trying to yeet themselves into public markets as fast as possible I've got to wonder if the music is slowing. There's a neat rocket company with a satellite business in here somewhere, but it's massively over-shadowed by totally underwater social media site and a failed AI experiment, both of which have been bailed out. I think the best thing you can say is that atleast we aren't aware of any other massively unprofitable bad bets Musk has made that he's going to need to bail out soon.

In some ways this looks like Meta. Meta throws off a tonne of money with it's ad business, but you have to discount it because Zuck has control and an attitude that it's his toy. So you have to discount the ad revenue business because there's a good chance that Zuck just pisses it up the wall. The difference here is you've got a speculative idea that SpaceX might eventually become a massive revenue driver, but Musk is already pissing the money up the wall.

I get why this makes sense for Musk - get SpaceX public, use the stock to merge with Tesla, it gets all his companies under 1 roof and gives him enough voting rights to do whatever the hell he likes. It makes sense for SpaceX early shareholers - they need liquidity.

I do not know what sense it makes for any investor. The absolute best you can argue is it's going to be a meme stock.

I guarantee the reason that number is so high is so that SpaceX can offer to merge with Tesla and the end results will be Musk having over 50% control in the combined entity. He's been very clear that's what he's been attempting to do with via his compensation packages at Tesla and now he's found a different way of acheiving the same thing.

I don't think this is right. Anthropic's growth in the last 6 months went hockey stick in quite an unexpected way (eclipsing OpenAI), so they've done what is sensible - they've increased their compute spend. I don't know if what they're buying from SpaceX is good value, I think there's plenty of reasons to think they got a fine deal. X AI failed. Everyone left. So SpaceX is sitting with a bunch of empty server farms. Yes, Anthropic are desparate for compute, but SpaceX are desparate to IPO a company with double digit billion dollar revenue for $2T so I think there's good reason that this deal represents reasonable value.

The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.

Apparently neither do a big chunk of HN readers.

To be honest I'm more worried about the data centres spaceX is powering through gas turbines just sitting in a parking lot.

Tesla self driving kind of works. In a very similar way to how it kind of worked back in 2016. It's better than it was in 2016, don't get me wrong. But even today they haven't solved the problem and Karpathy left in 2022. And other companies notably have actually surpassed Tesla over that time. I don't think anyone could reasonably say he walked away in 2022 because he thought the job was finished.

Well Karpathy left in 2017, and all the sort of commercial stuff didn't happen till a while later - for example they set up the structure to take external money in 2019 and that's obviously the point at which they'd found the pathway that justified doing massive training runs and all that. So Karpathy was out very early (left at the point that Musk thought OpenAI had basically failed).

Karpathy is probably one of the biggest names in AI, I do wonder where he fits now. He's sort of bounced around Tesla back to OpenAI back to independent. He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point, and he was at Tesla for a long time and they didn't really deliver what they wanted on the AI side. Now he's bounced around a few places. I understand that the leaders in this market play this silly game of trying to buy up the names like trading cards but I wonder what this turns into.

It's logic that is incompatible with about 60 years of affirmative action policies that the United States has carried out.

Is this the right view? I would imagine Elon Musk has essentially infinite demand for lawyers. The choice for the lawyers is probably work on this absolutely dead case where all the facts are not just against them, but highly embarrassing for their principal, or work on some other case where there would be perks like having the possibility of winning the case. I'm quite certain highly trained, highly successful, expensive lawyers aren't jumping up and down in excitement to work on cases they quite well know are meritless.

They'll do it, because that's what Elon Musk wants them to do and he's paying them and they want his other business, but this isn't what gets them up in the morning.

Can we just bring some reality to this conversation. The non-profit still exists, it owns a significant chunk of a now almost trillion dollar company, and the for-profit wouldn't be profitable if it weren't for Billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft.

There is no counter factual where OpenAI exists as a non-profit and still inexplicably gets handed billions of dollars of compute to train LLMs. The for-profit company is a different thing from the non-profit and it exists for perfectly understandable reasons and I'm unsure why anyone other than Elon Musk pretends this doesn't make sense.

What is your proposed counter factual where the non-profit entity retains all ownership of the venture, but somehow finds hundreds of billions of dollars to train LLMs?

I think you're being too generous, one of the big take aways from the trial was that Musk's other AI effort - xAI is a total shit show, and that most of the experts here don't think Musk understands how to run an AI lab. Which is a problem since Musk wants to IPO SpaceX with a story about AI. Admittedly there's been lots of other news that also embarases him in this area.

The interested parties are the taxpayers, and in this case the legal mechanism for that was the California Attorney General approving OpenAI's restructuring. Here's the MOU: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Final...

There is no loophole here.

The person you're replying to is making the argument "Would you object to a book publisher that only signed writers who were white" or "Should a coffee shop be allowed to only hire white barristas". Which is a sound logical argument if you ignore the entire history of racism in the United States.

I'm always a bit sad that silicon valley just doesn't get free speech. Or rather, their view of free speech is "I can say what I want". The damning part for Tan here isn't the defence that Balko makes of their work. It's this

>The DA’s office, which should have been prosecuting the people attacking Asian Americans, was orchestrating a media hit on the journalist covering those attacks.

A reporter being in contact with the prosecutors office and getting their view is a core part of the reporters job. It would be malpractice for them not to be getting that view on this story. To characterise it as the government "orchestrating a media hit" is just flatly wrong. It's just straight up defaming a journalist for doing their job.

And this is a consistent trend in silicon valley - that reporting they don't like is actually just corruption. This is a fundamentally anti free speech view and it's toxic and you see it all over silicon valley.

> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy

I'd really like some context here. Because for some people this is like "My M4 is out of date now the M4 ultra is out" and for others it's "I think computers really took a step back when when we started to talk about Gigahertz and Gigabytes, a 386 is all I need".

I think it depends on what you classify as siding with Iran. I don't support any part of Iran's regime, but they didn't start this war. I don't support any part of Iran's regime, but this war seems to have empowered rather than destroyed the most objectionable parts of Iran's regime. I don't support any part of Iran's regime. But the actions of the US and Israel in this war have breached a lot of international rules that we would decry if it were Russia or China - and in doing so have created much more risk for countries in Eastern Europe and Taiwan.

I'm always weirded out by this process because it's such a squishy thing. How much are the rights worth? Well, take the revenue from the last 5 years and project it out. But they released a new album in 2022, so that year is going to look strange isn't it. Oh and they have a documentary this year so presumably that spiked some stream as well didn't it.

Also, if they hadn't sold they would've benefitted by releasing new albums they would got an extra bump from people listening to the old stuff, they don't get that now. Oh and how do you model the revenue bump when Flea dies and everyone streams RHCP non-stop for a week.

It's also a weird principal agent problem because RHCP primarily influence how much revenue these rights are worth, but once they sell the rights then the rightsholder's revenue stream is highly sensitive to what RHCP do in the future. What is RHCP sell the rights, then come out as Nazis, then buy the rights back and then recant? You know what I mean?

I think it's interesting that the data suggests that novices can increase productivity by a third and experts not at all. That sounds very similar to Dunning-Kruger- the novices literally don't know what productivity looks like.

I'm finding it difficult to agree on document creation now being zero cost whereas consumption is high cost. I think you can actually spend time giving AI enough context to consume docs for you.

I think the other thing worth pointing out with the article is understanding what your company will recognise. Yes, it's totally correct that your company won't thank you for poopoo-ing the idiot with AI. Yes, they'll run into a buzz saw when they hit a stakeholder who can choose to buy in. Don't burn your career protecting theirs. In fact it's not even certain that the idiot is damaging their career (for many reasons).

This was a really interesting article.

I don't think the author is right. I think more or less it's fine let trusted people have permission to do bad things. Because trying to figure out ahead of time what things are bad is impossible and default denying stuff is a productivity killer. The obvious answer here is that your AI agent shouldn't be you. It shouldn't have the same permissions as you and that is the mistake, because you're handing over the keys to the car to a drunk.

>Why does a public-facing API that can delete all your production databases even exist?

Because it takes time and effort to build an API, and even if you build an API with a structured permission system so that only an admin can delete stuff the users probably won't spend the effort to use it. Because they're running a rental car SAAS business not a mission critical mars mission.

The best I can say is that with the advent of AI these choices could be different now, but I don't think they will be. I think fundamentally a fuck up every few months at a rental car SAAS company in exchange for 30% higher velocity/30% lower cost is probably fine.