> I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure.
Maybe that will be true someday. But, right now, they are burning billions of dollars every quarter. Their expenses far far outweigh their income and they are nowhere near profitability.
silly valley stopped letting the subtraction of two numbers dictate their reality since the start-up era. while the money and vcs stopped trying to finding the next uber and went all in on llms, they didn't get wiser in how they gauge if something is worth investing in
The parent post was arguing that they can do this now because they are lighting stacks of cash on fire. And once they stop doing that, their LLM lead will be gone in a hurry. They appear to not have a moat, like other more established players do.
> The hardware to run deepseek is still incredibly expensive.
Deepseek API pricing is very low compared to Anthropic/OpenAI API pricing.
For many, the 300% difference in pricing may be difficult to justify, if the quality difference is very small. And there will be many tasks where the most expensive/the best model, is not needed. Currently many people end up using Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 for many tasks without thinking about it.
Near zero probability of that. The model is more efficient and the company who trained it did not blunder trillions of dollars to do so. China has better electricity infrastructure than the US too, so the likelihood they can scale out before the US ever could is high. Long term deepseek, Alibaba, etc hold the most cards for sustainable AI even despite the attempted Nvidia embargo
I am not shilling China, this is just what is happening right now.
I think the Chinese government works differently than the US government. I think China has been subsidizing their electricity grid for decades and leading the world on sustainable electricity namely solar. While the us has let their infrastructure rot and laughed at government inefficiencies for about half that time. The US has data centers running on gas right now while waging wars blowing up gas infrastructure world wide. It would be comical if it wasn't an environmental disaster. Most of them have no hopes at even getting enough power in well established areas short term.
I realize what I am saying may come off as propaganda because the US holds net negative views on China so here are some links.
I think because openai spent so much money upfront showing how it was possible to do this and laid out a product roadmap China got to get on board much cheaper and easier. I see no reason to not believe any of these companies when they say they didn't squander tons of money to do what they did because I don't know how openai has even spent all the money they have it's actually ridiculous to think about.
It's not really about that. China is eating the US's lunch when it comes to ai. Don't get me wrong opus is the strongest model out there today, but that's the us's only advantage right now. Deepseek,qwen,kimi, etc all have fundamental research making the models smaller, more efficient, scalable, etc. in the US the plan is to buy all the hardware, write legislature, embargo other countries, keep models and research closed, so people cannot innovate for the next two to five years.
Unlike the us chinas focus is on research and sustainable building. China also has really good infrastructure for energy, etc. it is also to their advantage to drop 5 billion instead of 2 trillion and beat the us while turning a profit.
Chinas focus in ai is less flashy and because they are the biggest manufacturing super power in the world right now, it directly feeds their economy. They aren't looking for applications or to replace thought workers with slop bots, they have natural needs for this technology. Us manufacturers can't compete so they have to keep companies from selling their goods there see byd. China sees it as commoditizing their complement, the us is risking its entire economy and it's environment and resources, kind of scary.
> Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby"...
And that is OK, as long as they provide a way for you to disable it. I do not want my laptop to be doing things when I put it in sleep mode. Nothing at all. Save battery life above all else when sleeping. But Microsoft does not appear to provide a way to do that. At least none that I can see.
> Whew, very glad that a leading scientific voice like DiCaprio is speaking of this to world leaders.
General public does not know the scientists by name. When they say something, few people listen. When a famous person says the same thing, many more people listen. That is the world we live in.
I'll take DiCaprio or any famous person promoting a good cause any day.
Mark Jacobson for example proposes “low-cost solutions to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of WWS [wind, water and solar power] across all energy sectors in the continental United States between 2050 and 2055”
This proposal uses unrealistic assumptions, for example it uses "copper plate model" to model electric grid of United States - it assumes that the future electric grid could transmit electric energy without any capacity limitations and the buildout of this grid would be cheap.
The proposal assumes gigantic buildout of hydropower to be used as backup solution for the times when solar and wind could not generate enough electricity. To be precise: increasing hydro capacity by 13x, which would result in water discharges that would regularly dwarf historic 100-year floods and wash away population centres on America's major river systems.
With unrealistic assumptions you can get any result you want.
Mark Jacobson has done PhD research on the role of black carbon and other aerosol chemical components on global and regional climates, under atmospheric scientist Richard P. Turco - who developed and popularized the science of nuclear winter. Because of this I think Jacobson is trying to get world of nuclear weapons, nuclear technology and nuclear power by any means necessary, even if this means publishing unrealistic proposals.
Jacobson's push toward 100% WWS is not a realistic solution to decarbonize world, it's just way to give politicians and celebrities arguments against nuclear power. "We don't need nuclear technology anywhere in the world, because in future we will have 100% wind, water and solar power energy".
Jacobson should say load and clearly the truth: I don't have realistic proposal to decarbonize world, I just want the world to get rid of nuclear bombs.
> It’s in the Constitution. There isn’t that much anyone can do.
We have modified the constitution before. It is not easy, sure. But, presidential pardons are being abused so thoroughly that it does warrant people making the effort to change things.
I currently use lightweight VMs (Proxmox containers) and git worktrees. I can fork an existing VM in in seconds. It is not entirely clear to me what I would gain from using your solution.
> As a person who believes in democracy, I'm pretty on board with it.
As others have stated. This war will not bring democracy. Bombing Iranians have united them with the regime.
Also, US and Israel do not want a democracy in Iran. Israel would prefer a non-functioning place like Palestine or a mostly non-functional place like Lebanon that they can easily control.
Maybe that will be true someday. But, right now, they are burning billions of dollars every quarter. Their expenses far far outweigh their income and they are nowhere near profitability.
reply