I don't think Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO at all. Word is that Anthropic will have $100 BN in revenues this year, and very likely OpenAI will get some similar amount. You IPO when you need money, and I think Anthropic and OpenAI are past that point.
Why would they not? The cost to do that is 0.000001% of whatever numbers they usually work with. The upside is that it creates a community of hobbyists, most of whom will us (consummer grade) Nvidia GPUs. Which are not a significant source of revenue for Nvidia anymore, but it’s nice to have a bit of insurance.
The 1 and 2 you listed can be summarized as client buys Nvidia GPUs with equity instead of cash. Clients like Anthropic or OpenAI are not exactly flush with cash right now, so such sn arrangement makes sense. Plus, it reduces Nvidia’s incentive to invest in training a frontier-level Nemotron model.
If they were buying GPUs with equity then it wouldn't show up on Nvidia's quarterly report as revenue, even if the net trade is GPUs for equity. This is the point of the structure, to make cash flows show up as top line revenue. Furthermore, the structure pushes the liabilities off-balance sheet. This means if the flows slow down, in-flows rapidly become out-flows as Nvidia has to cover its liabilities. This is the problem with the trade, it puts everything on a knife's edge.
Which is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right?
No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
The more accurate version is "Money does not bring happiness, but poverty really sucks."
A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc.
Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
The even more accurate version is "happiness is correlated to the log power of wealth". You need increasingly more wealth to increase happiness. An even distribution maximizes happiness because of diminishing returns.
I would much rather optimize for life satisfaction than happiness.
If happiness is only weakly correlated with economics then it is poor policy to use economics as a lever to increase happiness. Life satisfaction, on the other hand, is correlated with economic opportunity. It is also more durable than happiness.
I wouldn't say they're happier. They have other things they're stressed about. An undisciplined mind finds things to be dissatisfied with no matter what the financial situation of the individual. Billionaires have desires and aversions just like people living in poverty. Yes, those desires and aversions are about different things but its the mechanism of desire and aversion that causes unhappiness not the external situation.
Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level.
Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
I don't know about billionaires, but I do know couples who between the two are earning nearly a million dollars per year - yet because their spending has grown to match their income they are stressed about having enough food to eat the last few days of every month - even worse than poor people I know who have almost nothing. Sure they both are driving new cars, living in a large house (near mansion?), their kids are getting music lessons and many other things that make their life much better than the poor families, but at the end of the month they are out of money and stressed about it. This isn't stress about their stock value (I haven't asked but I suspect they are maxing out their 401k and so have a nice amount in stocks that they can't touch), it is about enough food to eat today. The stress is exactly the same despite a much richer life.
I don't understand the point of your comment. Am I supposed to feel sorry for the irresponsible upper middle class who spent themselves into debt? Do you think that equates at all to actually poverty?
No. You are supposed to understand them, and why despite having so much more wealth they often really do feel like they are in real poverty.
I don't have sympathy for them either. I'm working hard enough to make my own [slightly] more modest life balance and wishing I had some of the toys they do, but I can't afford.
> why despite having so much more wealth they often really do feel like they are in real poverty.
Why are you so concerned about the feelings of the rich who choose feel stress despite suffering little to no actual risk to their lifestyle, and so unconcerned about the poor, who suffer very real material risks?
You're trying to villainize people just because of their net worth. They're human just like everybody else and as such they have desires and aversions which lead them to stress and suffering like everyone else.
Like the commenter you're replying to I know people who live in poverty who are very happy and lead fulfilling lives. I also know people who are millionaires who are constantly stressed for multiple reasons; including financial and non-financial reasons.
> they have desires and aversions which lead them to stress and suffering like everyone else.
That's the point: they don't stress "like everyone else." Stressing over whether you'll be able to afford your fifth home is not the same as stressing over whether you're going to lose your only home.
When you're rich, stress is a lifestyle choice. Some people thrive on that kind of pressure. But the actual, real-world risks between the rich and the poor are not comparable.
I agree: Re happiness is greatly increased by not having stress of worrying about paying bills.
Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do?
My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
That is a matter for debate. Europe generally doesn't have a bad life. However depending on what you personally value you might find it could be better. Would you be willing to compromise the lower work hours for more money - that might be the better choice for some people.
Well, of course. But I think any list of well-run countries, societies, and so on that doesn't have places like Scandinavia and Switzerland tied for first is a little bit confused.
This is called "marginal utility of money" and is IMO the reason wealth redistribution is at minimum rational to the point that it doesn't disincentize needed growth. In this light (and this is obviously a gross simplification that doesn't even begin to capture reality) the main disagreement across the spectrum from communists to anarcho-capitalists is really: where is that point? and how much growth is needed? AnCaps say any redistribution is too much, communists would like no inequality gap at all. Presumably the pareto value is in the middle somewhere and changes constantly based on charging preferences, technology, and a trillion other variables.
This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
Wealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.
After the knee wealth is not the major factor in happiness, other factors take over like friends, relationships, weak tie relationships, etc etc etc. If you want to be happy optimizing for wealth only makes sense under the knee.
After that, it's other factors, and extreme wealth may even harm those due to inequality.
There's a dramatic difference in having the kind of money that allows you to look forward to retirement and having the kind of money that allows you to alleviate the boredom of you and your closest 5 friends by taking a 6 week retreat to Bali.
Sounds like your argument is that wealth is objectively a good measure of a good life. Below some level of wealth, your life sucks, above it, it's great.
You're just pointing out that it's not linear, but sigmoidal. There's a range at which small changes in wealth rapidly improve or deteriorate ones life, but outside of that range, being much poorer makes your life suck only marginally more, and being wealthier makes your life improve marginally more.
I think it is a mistake to optimize for happiness instead of life satisfaction. The latter is more durable and manifests as more productive social outcomes, since it is strongly correlated with self-actualization. There is no upper bound on life satisfaction with respect to income.
Overfitting for happiness is actively destructive to people being able to achieve their individual potential.
Money buys convenience and comfort, but it does not buy friendship, belonging, love, virtue, or purpose. The latter have usually been seen as more essential to the good life.
You can look at the wealthy and get a sense of this. A lot of the artistic output of the 1920s was from rich people who had realized this: "Catcher in the Rye" is about a rich kid who finds life meaningless, and "The Great Gatsby" kills himself when he can't get love. (I think a lot of the current malaise comes from the rich people ["elites"] of that era discovering their meaningless existence--hence Postmodernism, and the rest of us buying into their assessment.) Trust-fund kids are known to go off the rails. The English upper class had a purposelessness (see Dorothy Sayers' main character of her mysteries, a the guy that Jeeves' serves; both again from the same period). In our own day, Elon Musk seems like a guy who is running around like mad, subconsciously covering the emptiness inside. Or our own culture, which is the wealthiest in the history of the world, yet we have rampant ADHD, depression, anxiety, and widespread drug abuse (I see more marijuana dispenseries than liquor stores--we cannot even relax without drugs).
I don’t think you need an additional law for that, I think the current laws cover this already.
> If the HF hack were perpetrated by a human, they would certainly be charged. WHY has no one been charged???
I don’t think a crime was committed at this point. But I am sure HF’s lawyers are having a chat with OpenAI’s lawyers as we speak. And, being smart, they do that out of the public eye.
The title does not follow from the stated facts. At most one could say that the US Army has used "virtually all" of its long-range munitions. But the war in Iran is mainly prosecuted by the US Air Force and the US Navy, not by the US Army. Is it possible that the USAF and US Navy also used most of their long range munitions? Maybe, but on that the Reuters report does not have anything new compared to guesses by everyone else.
> The agreement also requires OpenAI to train its personnel on the INA’s anti-discrimination requirements, revise its employment policies, and be subject to departmental monitoring and reporting requirements, to prevent future discrimination.
Being subject to inspections from the Government to monitor your implementation of X or Y is not fun. I've been through that. The company spends an unholy amount of resources to make sure the results of those inspections are positive. The legal risk if the inspectors don't like what they see is simply too high. The punishment for the first offense of 3 mil is nothing, lighter than a slap on the wrist, but the second could be devastating, and the upper management does not like to entertain the possibility. And even if the consequences of a repeat offense are not entirely devastating, it's is extremely likely that a few people will lose their jobs, even if only as scapegoats. And people don't like losing their jobs. Those people in high positions that are at risk of losing their jobs will direct lots and lots of people under them to spend lots and lots of time in lots of meetings, writing lots of reports, just to make sure the inspectors are happy.
The first is the compute. OpenAI and Anthropic secured huge amounts of compute, Google, Meta and xAI have their own huge datacenters. Now anyone can rent some cloud machines and start serving Kimi K3, but it's going to be impossible to get to a similar scale as the big 5 above. And inference has economies of scale: the more people you serve in parallel, the more efficient you are.
The second is the data. By now (and maybe even by one year ago), all the data on the internet has been used for training. You need new data. The big AI companies sit on top of trillions or quadrillions of tokens that they have generated over the years. They can use that to train new models. That data is gold, and the proof is that SpaceX was happy to pay $60B to acquire Cursor.
If you want to overtake the frontier labs, you have 2 options: use their models to generate synthetic data, and provide lots of (cheap, maybe below cost) inference to generate your own new data. The frontier labs know about the first, and I'm sure they try to limit how much others milk their models. As for the second, that's the "honest" way to compete, but it's not easy.
compute is not a moat, it's a rapidly depreciating physical asset. buying up all the shovels in a gold rush does not give you a moat, it gives you a slight advantage for the time being. someone else will just start making shovels. and the data is clearly available, hence the number of open-weight models.
well the boards have been laid across the two shores, and the enemies are now climbing the walls, i guess is what i'm saying. if they had a moat, it's been breached
your post helped me realize a change Meta is pursuing on Instagram that is to give more weight to captions and long text posts so they can have more data to training that would usually go to websites/Google. Even AI slop is good for this.
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