lenerdenator

> a less sympathetic administration would create significant headwinds,

I find myself wondering what "less sympathetic" and "significant headwinds" mean in the minds of people in the upper echelons of the AI industry.

Rules for training frontier models? Requirements for renewables to power data centers? Actually having to pay people for the content you train on? Data center rules that would end them going behind the backs of local electorates to get governments to approve the building of data centers?

I don't think it'll continue on linearly, but it will likely continue.

We're getting the Claude efficiency talks at work. We're looking at all sort of optimizations, including local models and graphify, to reduce spend. There are people dedicating their nights and weekends to dropping token consumption and cache rebuilding. A few of these will likely catch on and be brought into common use. That will relieve at least a bit of the pressure, and enable some of the scaling to continue.

Capital only means anything if you can spend it to buy resources like compute and turn those resources into additional value.

Hardware's ridiculously expensive. Then, there's no good place to put it, because the new breed of tech bro managed to propose the data center buildout in the most exploitative, alienating, and electorate-angering way possible. So compute's hard to buy.

Graft, regulatory capture, and monopolies increase prices.

Also, Congress can do more than one thing at once, if it puts its mind to it.

If you can get application integrations running on an emulator I would seriously consider switching my team over. I know that's technically outside of Firebase, but we use a Frankenstein's monster of GCP and Firebase for our services.

Elon's honestly their biggest problem. Can't focus on finishing one thing to save his life and alienated the shit out of the European market with his fascist beliefs.

They've gotten hooked on the data sales revenue. It's now expected that you'll both give them the money and the information.

It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.

> investors accelerated their move away from technology stocks on fears of a data-center buildout slowdown.

So, approximately how many of those investors are going to lose their jobs and their money for betting on data center buildout while also going about the data center buildout in the most obnoxious, exploitative, electorate-alienating way possible?

Marketers need to realize that it's rude to not compensate people for those people helping with marketing.

I think a story of how you saw a dude drying off his gluteal cleft with the hand dryers in the locker rooms would be an appropriate "experience" if the payment is nothing.

Oh, they do that too, but it's cartoonishly evil to go in and ask for property tax abatements and for the local ratepayers to support your infrastructure when you have valuations in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

You could probably see some of those bans reversed. You just need to have companies go into communities and act like they're a multi-trillion-dollar company instead of begging for tax abatements and shoving off the cost of the infrastructure on the people who feel like they might lose their jobs from AI.

> How do Chinese owned industrial factories in Brazil differ, apart from being more efficient and able to pivot to new markets better? Which seems like useful properties in a war footing?

The factory stops being efficient and easily pivoted the second the people running said factory want it to stop. That, in turn, depends on how friendly you are with the country running said factory.

Let's say there's some sort of negotiations going on between the country that hosts the factory and the country that operates the factory, which, in this case, means a country with a government that has a very deep cadre system that gives them control of almost all enterprises, state-owned or otherwise.

The negotiations (whatever it is, let's just say they're economic for an example) reach an impasse. You are the country that has control over the factory. Sure, the host country has the factory, but they don't have the institutional knowledge, intellectual property, or supply chain deals that your firm does.

Do you ignore this leverage? Hell no. You say "it'd be a real shame if we had to find a new place to make our products for your market", which would imply a serious loss of employment in the region and a massive factory complex sitting empty and decaying.

Unless you're talking about the sort of relationship the US and Japan have, the factory's host country now has to consider that possibility.

> Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?

That's literally how pretty much all industrialized and post-industrialized nations' defense manufacturing sectors work to one extent or another. Some munitions and defense systems are incredibly complex. You can't just move the knowledge about their manufacture over in a few corporate wiki pages; you have to have the greybeards teach the young guys by doing. This happens all the time, particularly with nuclear weapons. If you don't do that, the greybeards retire or die off and no one knows how to make this system that the military has speced, tested, approved, and gone through the bureaucracy of acquisition for. This means they either do without or get to start over from scratch at tremendous cost.

You mean the countries that still have native automotive industries and an understanding of the strategic value of heavy industry in both economic and martial terms?

> voting is a chore

compared to the other way of creating political change, it's a vacation.

We're 30-35-ish years too late.

The first time we found a provable case of malicious hacking, whether by individuals or nation-states, the result should have been the termination of that entity. Nothing says "stay out of my network" like a bloody head on a fencepost.

> Sure, smartest CFO's on the planet together with CEO's just collectively buying vaporware. Most of them have access to best metrics on the consumer side, and internals on where the industry will be in 1-2 years.

That's exactly what the zeitgeist was in 2007. The "smartest" guys were loading up on collateralized debt obligations. They were the sure thing. The music was never, ever going to stop.

Something you need to realize is that the "smartest" in our society aren't really the smartest. They are members of a group that exists on inertia and a desire to maintain an egotistical and social incumbency. They rarely suffer real consequences, least of all from their own decisions and actions.

These are the same kinds of people who looked at Elizabeth Holmes' business idea and were going to have your health decisions guided by someone who couldn't finish a bachelor's degree in biochemistry, or any other bachelor's degree. They were in tech, they were in academia (though apparently not at the University of Missouri [0]), they were in finance, they were in media. These phenomenons build upon themselves because it's a bunch of people in a club who can't admit to each other that the lemonade is really piss.

When there are questions being posed by people who are actually informed, who don't have a vested interest, those questions need to be answered. Even if the answer is "piss".

[0]https://www.darkdaily.com/2019/07/15/skeptical-missouri-path...

That bailout was unpopular in 2008.

That was with a US government that was significantly less indebted than it is now, both in real terms and as a percentage of annual GDP. The crude birth rate is about 30% lower than it was in 2007. The generation that was coming of age at the time is the first in American history to have a lower quality of living than their parents.

IMHO, unless there is some massive geographic and societal divider that stands between the likes of Sam, Dario, et al. and the rest of the country at the time of any sort of collapse, they'd be far, far better off just taking the losses and not bothering American society again. It won't be pretty if they come asking for a handout.

> Tech giants before the AI boom made a heck of a lot of cash that they had nothing they could do with it. Remember before AI when the existential crisis was stock buybacks? That was a bunch of companies who had so much profit that all they could think to do with it was buy their own stock back.

I'm just spitballing here, so bear with me, but maybe increasing the value returned to the people doing the actual work that created the profit in the first place.

The goal of God In A Box wasn't a good goal anyways.

Most people can't agree on what God In A Box (AGI, the singularity, whatever) even is. We don't have a widely-accepted definition for it.

The SMART criteria for creating goals has been around since 1980 [0]. Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This is stuff that they teach most people in bachelor degree-level college course. Not even. Maybe in high school or associates degree-level courses.

If God In A Box was the goal that SV sold all of these investors on to the tune of over a trillion dollars of investment, the best thing we could do with everyone involved is have a massive settlement where all of their money just goes to pay off a fraction of the national debt and they're banished to live in the Alaskan wilderness, never allowed near more than $50 at a time or long-distance telecommunications devices again for as long as they live.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

> Uber drivers are welcome to no longer drive for uber if they don’t enjoy the experience.

Are they?

The drivers have a certain set of capital and skills, and Uber (and to a lesser extent, Lyft) have created a near-monopoly on the market to buy services produced using that capital and skills. Since the ability to execute a transaction in that market is severely compromised if you don't work by Uber's rules, you are effectively outside of the marketplace if you no longer drive for Uber. You make no money. You go broke. You don't have the capital necessary to effectively compete in the market for giving rides in exchange for money. They own your skills and capital in all but the legal sense.

If there were either real, multi-company competition for Uber's market share, or a larger amount of regulation upon their monopoly, it'd be a different story.

Of course, there are people who think that monopolies are good, but that seems to be counterintuitive to anyone with a basic grasp of human nature and history.

Uber and AirBnB were things we should have taken far more seriously.

That being said, they weren't effectively offering unregulated gambling on any difference of opinion. Gambling is a vice. We've made it a regulated vice, but it's very much still a vice. If you get rid of the "regulated" part, people, including those with the ability to present a case in front of a grand jury, are going to see you as a 1980s cosa nostra capo and act accordingly.

Until we stop relying on SV as the standard-bearer for tech culture? Absolutely.

They might still be living in that world, but they also live in a world where they can do exactly $0 of R&D of actual rack server SKUs and still have people buying their high-end MBP SKUs at halfway-decent used car prices.

So I get why they don't care.

I've read that the build out of this current wave of AI infra is going to be about $700 billion [0]

I don't have the math behind that number, but it sounds somewhat in-line with what we know the market to be. You have a few companies seeking trillion+-dollar valuations at IPO, and the spends from established players make that number sound plausible.

Given that the infra costs are going to remain stubbornly high for the coming 3-5 year period you specified, I don't know that even $200 billion is really that much in the grand scheme of things. If things keep going at more-or-less the same pace they have been with advances, and SV pulls their heads out of their asses about getting data centers built out, maybe.

[0] https://fortune.com/2026/10/10/big-tech-bill-miller-wellsky-...

Claudish is a perfectly cromulent word.

Seriously though, it'd be nice if we started using a more shared and less vendor-specific jargon to refer to what these latest features are. We're getting into JVM vs. .NET Execution Engine distinctions and they just muddy the water on what goes on in the market.

As an aside: that's just the problem: we don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison, or his ilk.

If we did anthropomorphize people like him, he'd be in a lot more trouble than he is. Instead we legally and socially treat him like a lawnmower.

> They have infinite money to burn so they aren't going to optimize.

IPOs aren't the magical moment that they were in decades past. You get to answer to a bunch of retirement fund managers and "the market", meaning less-savvy retail investors. You have to open up your books.

It seems like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. are doing an IPO because they are literally out of other options. Older IPOs like Facebook felt different, like the hard part had been done, and they just had to scale. There's a difference in selling something because you want to, versus selling something because you have to. Facebook was just relying on the idea that they were a platform that more people would inevitably sign up for. For the most part, they did. It seemed obvious. They likely could have continued on by simply operating privately, but the IPO gave them capital to dominate the market.

Anthropic and other hyperscalers cannot continue on privately. They're facing a systemic shortage of capital to achieve their goals. They need the infrastructure, and there's not enough capacity to make enough for all of these companies to survive.

Art, music, writing... those are all cheap. They've also already got plenty of good models out there, and people will judge you for using them.

The places where American society needs costs cut or needs an increase in labor - healthcare immediately comes to mind - are places where you'd be asking Anthropic (or any other AI player) to take on massive amounts of liability.

If you screw up someone's drawing, you regenerate the drawing and charge the hack/fraud for the privilege. If you screw up a blood bank order, you pay the survivors a few million dollars. Since you've created a system that can scale blood bank order up-screwing, you'll be doing that a lot. There's not profit in paying out medical torts.

Given that SV-based companies work to dismiss liability even more than most American companies do (which is saying a lot), I don't see that working well for them.

"ohhh, la-di-dah, this guy's got tens in front of his two nines instead of just 9.9" - github, probably.

Business pressure. Always business pressure. Sales sold a bill of goods and now you need to deliver ASAP. Hardware was cheaper than dev time. Was.

Yes, they're getting their bonus. No, we can't hire and onboard more people to deal with the insane demands being made as a result. Why do you ask?