Nothing has changed in decades regarding this. People just like to pretend something new is happening, because they're extremely desperate to proclaim a fundamental turning / ending of the US (which is why every single event brings out those claims: this time is different! America will never recover from this! etc).

US tech companies were previously forced into compliance with PRISM or threatened with destruction (see: escalating fines to infinity against Yahoo, forcing their eventual compliance).

You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.

The US has already ended. It was destroyed in 9/11/2001. America is a shadow of its former self.

Bin laden really did win

The outsource-prompting-to-India stage will almost entirely be skipped (it already has been).

Developing nations that were looking to tech to climb the economic ladder, are watching that ladder be pulled up.

Most of the upside will go to the US and China. Europe is lagging shockingly on AI spend, they're extremely far behind (but with constant plan announcements). If you didn't know any better, you'd think Europe believed the year was 2010.

OpenAI is sitting on top of a $100+ billion ad revenue business just waiting to happen. Those 95% of users not paying anything are about to start paying something.

They can't afford to wait.

OpenAI every day is closer and closer to collapse, they urgently need an IPO to pass the hot potato to someone else.

They have 35B USD in the bank.

They did 13B USD in revenue in 2025, and in 2026 they plan to spend 55B USD.

They are already dead if they don't find new people to lend them money.

One of the solution is to sell the company to fools (the general public / IPO), so founders and investors can get away with it and, buy a bit of runway for the company.

There's nothing special about art re humans and it doesn't require feeling or lived experiences. That's an arbitrary wall you're putting up.

Demonstrably wrong. The most highly regarded AI artist today is Refik Adanol. His work was recently described by Jerry Saltz as a "glorified lava lamp".

I don't think this is a demonstration of impossibility, just a lack of demonstration of possibility.

Why should anyone care about either of those two people?

The art establishment clearly does. Refik has a show at MoMA at the moment. Saltz won a Pulitzer for his art criticism, so I guess the Pulitzer committee cares.

But normal people doesn't care about the art establishment, it has no impact on their lives, it could die tomorrow and almost nobody would notice.

FedNow is what has PayPal's former investors so terrified (so much so that investors don't even think PayPal warrants a double digit multiple).

No cost instant financial transfers between US financial users is coming over the next decade. The Fed has 1,400 banks onboard so far, up from 900 the prior year (that's 1,400 in two years). Half of PayPal's business goes away over the coming decade.

I think PayPal and Venmo will be just fine with FedNow. They will work the same but with faster transfers. They will be pseudo-banks with internal transfers, FedNow transfers to others, and instant transfers to bank accounts. They will be alternative to bank apps. PayPal's purchase protection could be important for purchases unless banks work something else out.

Zelle is the one that is doomed since they are bank-run instant transfers that FedNow directly replaces.

We have free instant payments in the Eurozone, UK has had them for about a decade and I'd say PayPal is doing fine (unfortunately). So what's the concern?

Not sure anyone gets an API at no cost for those US transfers ... for person-to-person, they will be/are awesome, but for commerce, pretty sure it will not be a free service.

They're going to become PayPal. There's no scenario where that doesn't happen as they get larger and larger and larger. Especially as competition is eliminated.

On the consumer facing side Paypal is something I use when paying, but AFAIK I can't use Stripe (yet?). Stripe is used by businesses to let me pay with a credit card (or Paypal, Google Pay, etc etc).

Stripe link is a white label checkout page like what you're talking about. I believed all of shop pay also goes through stripe

Stripe Link is their answer to “using Stripe on the customer facing side”.

Stripe is overvalued by about 10x judging by Block and PayPal.

Best case scenario: Stripe gets larger, gets bloated, slower, eats some competitors, becomes their competitors. The street presses down on their valuation as their growth races toward single digits. Congratulations.

Block is fetching ~13 times op income. PayPal is fetching ~7 times op income.

Not sure about Block and Paypal, but AFAIK a good portion of transactions on Stripe are made as part of recurring subscriptions or similar. Those can't be migrated to other services easily, so for the time being Stripe will likely continue profiting from them and from the growth of whatever businesses use it for such subscriptions.

And it’s still private. So no proper price finding has occurred yet.

People always want the upstart hotness. Look at the shiny growth (which is meaningless if they're just going to end as a slow growth obese giant anyway, it's all rinse & repeat).

Maybe Stripe sees the end writing on the wall and they're going for it while the bubbly action is there.

An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors - those that want out - to liquidate out in a big way by dumping to a very large mass of investors. There is no other means to do that without signaling a gigantic loss of confidence.

Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.

> An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors

Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.

Open source should acquire greater, multiplied value once the new scaffolding is put into place. The open source community is still using the past approach, which is going to be largely washed away.

More people with more agents freely contributing more to even more concentrated and scaled-up projects.

Those agents will get more potent. The projects can get more ambitious.

One user with N Claude usage. 100 users with 100x the Claude usage. Who can build the superior product? If you put the right structure on it, the 100x wins by a drastic margin. Those 100x Claudes benefit in combination courtesy of the open source effect, their potential additive value is greatly enhanced.

The 1x outcome will end up being relegated to triviality (the one page homepage as website). The bar is about to be raised really, really, really high in software if you want to be relevant. This is merely a very short transition period.

It's software eating everything that it can as capabilities and reach are added. This has been going on since the earliest software programs launched.

It's identical to Craigslist hollowing out offline classified ads. Classified ads used to be a hyper lucrative market for newspapers (both local and national). That market imploded from ~$17 billion ($32b+ adjusted) in 2000 to $1-$2 billion last year. Once it could, it did.

AI should enable software to touch more things more cheaply (more efficiently in many cases). As it can, it will. Expect a lot more wipe outs.