It’s gonna come crashing down pretty soon. It’s gonna hurt all of us. It won’t hurt the people responsible nearly enough.
That’s not good business
reminder than during 2019 there were streaming services popping left and right, all showing tremendous growth because they started from zero, and articles were about how bad Netflix was doing due to having practically no growth compared with the competition (they already had a massive subscriber base). Twist? Netflix was the only streaming service that was actually making a profit, the rest were a massive loss but big growth.
Needless to say most of those streaming services died; who remembers DC streaming service, or Yahoo’s? While Netflix is basically as stong as ever, despite the prevalent enshitification happening through the whole industry.
Point of the story? shareholders don’t care about stable profitable business, only cancerous growth. AI is like that, zero profits, ton of cost, but as long as they show growth the shareholders are happy, regardless of how cooked the books are.
Netflix was also late to streaming because their mail service subscriptions were THE major player
Late to streaming? Netflix was the first big time streaming service that I ever heard of. The main reason their streaming service was able to take off like it did is that nobody else of significance thought that streaming was worth pursuing. What other companies were offering streaming services at anything approaching scale before Netflix?
late to streaming, but practically the first subscription based system to watch movies/tv online.
First years of Netflix were the best, the product began degrading quite early on. but that was mostly companies realizing that instead of licensing their content on Netflix, they can make their own platforms.
2019 Yahoo
My immediate thought, there is no way Yahoo! Screen survived into 2019.
I looked it up and Yahoo! Screen (which featured Community season 6) was shutdown in January 2016. But Yahoo! View launched in late 2016 (as a Hulu-like replacement), and that did shutter in mid 2019.
So Yahoo! was already dead, but it also died for real in 2019.
Imagine having a streaming service so bad it fails twice
who remembers DC streaming service, or Yahoo’s?
Quibi will always have a place in my heart. Or, at least, my golden arm
How much do they spend when I pay nothing?
It just means they lose more money per paying user, I guess.
I think they might’ve broken the laws of math there, as they’re certainly still spending a non-zero amount.
I’m not going to read this whole article, is that opex??
Of course it is, it’s essentially a scam. They just need enough humans to keep investing until they check out and run with a bailout.
I don’t get why companies get to legally bailout like this. Why do people have to suffer for their bullshit? Enslave the CEOs if you have to make things right, leave the people out of it.
Funny thing is, the US government doesn’t even have nearly enough money to bail all these mfa out. So we are heading into uncharted territory here
Of course they don’t, that’s why they’re building bunkers. Thinking it’ll slow us down, as we’ll open their bunkers like cans of tuna. A bunker only works for so long, then the survivors start hunting for them like delicious shipwrecks.
I don’t think the bunkers are to avoid bad financial decisions, more so to stave off something like rogue ASI or a biosphere collapse which in any circumstance won’t work in the long-run.
Yeah, but it’s not like they would be smart enough to know that
And that’s why they’re trying underhanded tactics to inflate earnings and IPO directly into the index funds, so every American’s 401K will legally have to rebalance and invest in them. They’re racing to fleece retirement funds before the bubble bursts.
Not financial advice, of course :p but people should really consider getting their stuff out and into self-directed funds or whatever it is US people do to not depend on auto-allocated funds.
Money printer go brrrrrrr
Many applications are suboptimal to say the least but what’s been done with alpha fold and recently in mathematics is very far from a scam. Not to bring up what’s also been accomplished in cyber security. These models are proving open problems that have been around for decades and finding serious vulnerabilities. The issue is consistency and efficiency. Of course the other issue in making them stronger is continual learning and long horizon planning. I think too much investment came in too quickly and what is provided to the masses currently isn’t consistent or efficient enough. That said as a math and comp sci grad and someone who works in the field it’s been absolutely mind blowing to watch what’s already been done. In 2010 the concept of an artificial mind solving something like the Erdős unit distance conjecture would have been seen as pure sci-fi, maybe something we would achieve closer to 2100 than 2026.
For reference, it took Uber about 17 years to become profitable and Spotify 18. They were hemorrhaging cash for over a decade and a half before finally hitting their stride. As for the current AI development it’s honestly from 2017 when the white paper on transformers came out where shit started getting serious, so it’s been about 9 years since investors were serious. Before that point it was all passion projects, absolute moon shots as they call them.
solving something like the Erdős unit distance conjecture
Tell me you listen to media news cycle without understanding what that actually mean without telling me that.
That’s not exactly what happened, isn’t it.
Not to bring up what’s also been accomplished in cyber security
Multiple new vectors of attacks, automation of attack pipelines…
Although, most people aren’t talking about Alphafold when they’re talking about AI. They’re usually specifically referring to the generative transformer models that are currently all the rage.
I doubt anyone would care too much about a linear regression model, or multi-layer peceptron , for example.
Both Uber and Spotify (and AWS too) had economics of scale going for them - the more users they have, the more the infrastructure could be leveraged. This does NOT work for LLMs. More users means using more compute, more advanced tasks (like coding) uses exponential amounts of compute. A single user running a complex task can make 8 Blackwell GPUs run full tilt, and you don’t even have any guarantee that the output will be useable.
There are a few narrow areas where LLMs might be successful, like scanning for security vulnerabilities or searching large amounts of documents. The massive amount of money invested will never be recouped with these usage scenarios.
they are spending infinite money for every $1 i pay them
I’m quite happy to use their compute power for frivolous bullshit if it hastens their enshittification and demise.
“Hey Claude, can you begin work on an e-commerce site written in visual basic?”
Two microseconds later…
“Your free usage limit has been reached”
“Ok Claude see you tomorrow, maybe we’ll think about a rewrite in Turbo Pascal”
“I need a triple A cooking game with blackjack and hookers, all written in SQL.”
“But that’s a database langu-”
“Did I stutter?”
In fact, forget the SQL!
Agreed, but hey no need to pile the the hate on Pascal, modern ones like FPC/Lazarus are pretty cool actually :)
Love that for them
so these crazy prices i hear about being implemented (like at github) should actually be at least 10x higher?
10x higher to break even :)
To break even on operating expenses, not even counting debt payments, depreciated capital value, or future recapitalization costs.
Definition of a Bubble. These AI huckster keep stringing investors on though. Sadly, I think these public IPOs coming up for Space X, OpenAI, and Anthropic will fall short of expectation and trigger the bubble popping.
My first use of Claude this week, for code reviews only(since no LLM can be trusted to write a user story or test suite), had it gaslight me.
It marked down my code for using a specific practice to make some xml safer and easier to read.
When I tried things its way, it wanted me to change it back.
I found it’s decent for some light QC but when it asks “do you want me to change it?” I’m like “nah, thanks for pointing it out but I’ll do it myself”
oh it’s great isn’t it? you ask it for help on some code, provides its solution, you try it and it doesn’t work so you respond with the error, it claims YOU wrote it wrong and then when yo utell it “I just copy and pasted what you provided” it says “you’re right, i’m sorry.”
Claude is to the point now where it just starts hallucinating on the first prompt. it’s 100% unreliable now when before it was like 90%. no point in using it, it’s garbage. and Claude Code is just as bad now. If you or anyone is using Claude Code to develop ANYTHING I would highly suggest you stop right now because I can guarantee you with nearly 100% certainty that whatever shit it’s writing into your stuff isn’t going to work. period.
Exactly, never trust an LLM to code. And if it argues back, explain why it’s wrong and that you have nothing but time and experience. Most tend to fold when you point out it’s not a free thinking AI, it’s an entrapped corporate model they designed with preprogrammed biases. But I love arguing 😂.
I use it a lot, and if you are getting these kinds of results you are either trolling, or just flat out not providing the details and guardrails required with your prompts.
I’ve been in software for decades, and if used correctly, yes it can accelerate velocity of building code out. 10x? No… if you are lucky and careful perhaps 2-4x.
As ALWAYS the human should be in the loop and is on the hook for any code generated.
You just need a better prompt, bro
Just gotta configure and tweak until it gives outputs you find indistinguishable from correct. Just gotta train it to gaslight you properly. Come on don’t you want to be given and endless stream of stuff that looks correct?
I was using a set of template files designed for LLMs to review that project. It is absolutely the fault of Claude that it tools me to do something one way, then told me to try another and when I reverted it said it was the optimal approach.
Where I find it helps is in getting initial starts and as a start to code review. But in both cases they aren’t ever operating on their own and their feedback is filtered through myself or another senior dev.
I’ve used Claude and Codex, and while both are based on untenable economics, I can at least attest that my use of Codex has yielded some productive results. Claude, so far, has delivered fuck all that’s useful to me.
I have found the opposite. Codex spits back mostly useless code that is twice the length it needs to be with a bunch of unessesary stuff and Claude is the only thing I get useful output from.
So much comments on just the title … Could come from anthropic directly.
There is literally zero basis on the made claim in the article, just arbitrage calculations over supposed token consumptions under non stable test sets.
I have no idea if/how much these
stupidfuckers spend to get more customers - and this “article” wasted a lot of time showing that they don’t know either.(Stupid is cut out because I don’t think they they’re stupid. Which makes it way worse in my book)
Uh … This doesn’t seem like it will end well.
Good thing all the companies leaning hard on AI 10 X’d their profits… Wait…
