One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
Thanks for the breakdown. I guess the bigger question is why? Don't they want profit? Or are they optimizing for something else like expenses and enterprise value (size of spend)
> Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Seems like the difference is millions of lines of code and thousands of servers now, vs none of either back then (unless you count some erlang ATT switching code for the phone call you make to the pizza shop).
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
I think the original business model included giving restaurants a fax machine and just faxing over the order. There is a lot of efficiencies with using an app and not having your guys tied up taking phone orders. Loop in credit card processing as well. Should have stopped there.
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Who is rich? The platforms aren't making a lot of money, they've been losing money for a very long time. The valuations were pumped by VC money and maybe the founders are paper rich.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
The companies are losing money so the C-suite are doing what most small business owners are doing and not drawing a paycheck so they can make payroll, right?
...right?
Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars despite dozens of his projects "losing money"/going bankrupt. I will stop "waving about capitalism" when it stops doing the same fucking thing while incredulous passersby go "surely it must be something else causing the problem".
The law is not some immutable thing, in fact its something that we humans evolve over time on a case by case basis to improve and adjust.
Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.
I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.
But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).
It's funny you compare it to bicycle racing rather than automotive technology which I imagine you would have to concede that pushing the frontier of things like fuel efficiency and safety would be good.
This stuff reads as cope by scientists who spent their entire careers chasing these problems. The idea that someone was just around the corner to solving a problem that's been outstanding for decades, and the model used their brilliant recent insights to crack it (ignoring the cutoff date, that would have to be fabricated as well).
Why aren't you excited for pushing the frontier of knowledge. Unless you think math is really a jobs program for gifted individuals keeping them busy and unproductive.
> "This stuff reads as cope by scientists who spent their entire careers chasing these problems."
This seems to be really hard for some people to understand:
The gripe is not how AI has "cheated" and wasn't "embracing the race", everyone agrees that it's the result that counts.
The problem is that researchers use AI as a tool, and the company owning the tool siphoned all data from the sum of all researchers, combined it and completed the research. Okay, result is reached, still arguably good.
But the company owning the tool now takes credit for the entire research.
"Inviting" selected researchers to be mentioned in the press-release is not fixing that, the entire body of work is actually based on what the sum of researchers did, even those who failed in their research and didn't publish anything.
This sort of argument becomes increasingly ludicrous with time. It requires that all sorts of results were made unknowingly by mathematicians but they somehow didn't realize it. It's actually a stunning indictment of mathematicians.
No, what is happening is that the AI is really good at connecting the dots and human mathematicians aren't.
So there were mathematicians who would have solved Navier-Stokes, Quasi-Riemann, and ETH, if only AI hadn’t snatched away and finished off their work they were just wrapping up?
People will be getting second-hand embarrassment when they read these comments in the future.
You seem to be coming from the position that the benevolent, independently thinking, fully aligned AI has graced humanity with a forever gift. But actually it's a privately owned company, built on the collective of human intelligence, apparently stealing from active research and blessing a small few with partial credit.
There are ways to do what they are doing ethically. But this isn't it.
Indeed, all credit should belong to the human researchers who collected the facts and traced the way.
However, with an eye on private AI as a business desperate for attention and profits, the only way out of this is to build open source research AI - better than anything the closed frontiers have to offer. It should be under the full control of the people who use it and trained to support the accepted ethics and citation discipline.
True, but then the 'closed source' research AI company will do what they just did: siphon up all your research, add a bit of their own and beat you at your own game. You can't win this by playing by the rules, they are using a different set of rules and with an entirely different level of funding. Think about it: the amount of money and compute they have at their disposal is larger than that that of all universities combined.
The point is that no human had access to the same data, because the LLM used the unpublished work of a number of mathematicians. The only way for a human to gain access to the same work, i.e. the same dots to connect, is to be in active collaboration with those mathematicians. In which case they would all be included in the resulting paper.
> No, what is happening is that the AI is really good at connecting the dots and human mathematicians aren't.
I watched a Zoom presentation yesterday {10/28/2026) at Courant by Maksym Radziwill on the QRH result with the constant 11/12. It used four known ideas, but linked them together in a way that mathematicians had steered themselves away from. He gave a short sentence with four phrases that he said, if they had been sent to him by time machine, would have let him work out the proof years ago. All the details were straightforward once that high level plan was in place.
The advantage AI had here was, in his words, it lacks psychology. Humans had a prejudice that a certain approach would not be fruitful, but the AI didn't have that. The AI could explore superficially unproductive avenues at great depth, not having to do as much pruning to conserve mental effort. And as it turned out one of those approaches worked.
AI is going to fill in a lot of blind spots, I think.
It does not. It's more like if all those researchers had been "labelling" stuff for the AI, so that the AI can now solve those problems. But they were not paid by the AI company for their "labelling" work, and they never agreed to "label" anything in the first place.
In that case, I'm glad AI could so handily improve collaboration for frontier mathematics. Progress should not be held back by a lack of willingness or ability to cooperate.
Processing results takes time. Sometimes months or years. They can meet up at conferences to discuss, publish their partial results, and the mathematics community can come together to understand and piece the true answer together. None of this requires crotchety old men hoarding results, trust me, those people are smart enough not to put that in AI. They made a small result that is highly likely dependent on some input they made to the AI. The AI collates everyone's work and puts the cherry(s) on top to finalize it. Of course there is work done by the AI that only requires the sum of public human knowledge as well. But you seem very angry and accusatory at researchers, like they're some secretive cabal hoarding gold, furious at the new "give everyone our gold" machine. The people that do this science literally live for sharing and speaking and disseminating this knowledge.
Have you every used AI for work on truly cutting edge at least graduate level academic research? It's nothing like writing software, i do both professionally. Every model I've had access to requires a LOT of hand holding to get it to do the right thing. No model is getting set up with a single prompt, told to go, and then solving a millennium problem (unless they've explicitly stated that, which i would still doubt). It takes a lot of guidance to get these AIs to solve any serious problem. It's not outside at least my reach to believe that openAI is taking these nudges from intelligent people and combining those with the internal, non public models to make great press releases as it tumbled towards an infinite debt wall. I don't think there's a thing they wouldn't do to save their company.
I think you're wrong, looks like models are just finding and writing up publishable papers on novel results now just by giving them a single prompt and telling them to do so.
"I would like you to write for me a short article that could be published in Physical Review Letters. I would like you to choose the question, do the analysis and write up the results. The constraints I put on the question are 1) that it should be in the hep-th set of topics (so that I have a hope of evaluating the arguments and results); 2) the answer can be written up in a short format of 5 pages or less; 3) the result is of significance enough that it can be published in PRL. I want to break up the task into several steps. The first is to find a good question, so give me three candidates. I’m also going to involve Claude in the process. Claude is going to find three candidates too, and the next step will be to evaluate each others’ candidate questions."
I think part of what's getting the goat of some mathematicians is not that OpenAI is getting results, but that OpenAI is telling mathematicians that priority isn't something they care about. The indifference is more threatening to the current traditions of math than if they were actually fighting for priority. The indifference gets reinterpreted as them trying to "steal glory" but that's not what they're doing. They're bulldozing glory.
> But the company owning the tool now takes credit for the entire research.
They didn't take full credit for Navier-Stokes; unless I'm mistaken, they're letting the researchers who almost solved it have first authorship on the "official" paper, which the researchers are writing to have a human-readable breakdown of the AI's proof, and OpenAI has announced.
If anyone was close to solving the Exponential Time problem, they could come out and claim so, and they would be taken seriously; and if they have any evidence in ChatGPT logs, I expect OpenAI would announce an official explanation paper with their name on it. Credit is cheap: ChatGPT does get some credit because it did make the final leap, that doesn't mean researchers don't.
> the entire body of work is actually based on what the sum of researchers did, even those who failed in their research and didn't publish anything.
I don't really see how this is significantly different from them scraping the entire human knowledge, distilling it into weights and then selling the results.
Sure, this argument is about the _new_ data that researchers feed into the machine voluntarily, but I don't see this distinction as significant.
Not making a moral judgement here, just stating that this is consistent with the way those companies operate in general.
> "I don't really see how this is significantly different from them scraping the entire human knowledge, distilling it into weights and then selling the results."
Well, so far those companies offered this distilled human knowledge as part of a service, with all the (unresolved) criticism associated with scraping of other peoples properties.
In this instance they did the next step, created a combined output and are celebrating themselves for the result, inviting others to join.
It's the difference of scraping all books to build a language model from it for sale to others, and outright announcing a new Harry Potter book after extending an offer to JK Rowling to join the press-release.
(and I guess I need to clarify: I don't compare scientific research to writing a novel, I compare the handling of both scenarios)
Am I missing something, if you a paid subscriber, LLM service providers OpenAI/Google/etc by default will not trained on your input data unless explicitly allowed by the users.
If this is not enabled by default then it need to be the default policy within EU by the enforcement of GPDR, for example.
> everyone agrees that it's the result that counts.
I don't know if I agree with that. That presumes that the entire point of mathematics is to produce results. I don't believe that at all.
I believe that the entire point of mathematics is to produce human understanding and mental models that are useful or beautiful to humans. (I also believe there's a mysteriously deep connection between those two notions, but that's a different discussion.)
At any rate, I think that the old process, where humans had to cut the paths themselves before the clearing emerged, is one that led to understanding first, then a distilled result. And then the secondary task of distilling the understanding down to a clean proof is the icing on the cake. Some mathematicians are very good at keeping the intuition and understanding clear when presenting proofs. Some are not.
However, very often, the end result and proof is not where the real understanding lies, and that is one of the reasons why mathematics has been such a social endeavor. Often you can't glean the "hidden truths" behind austere proofs before you engage with people who can help you see the picture behind it. Many people who went through Baby Rudin as an undergrad can maybe relate to what I'm saying here. For a very insightful analysis about how intuition and discourse lead the discovery of mathematical truth, I highly recommend Imre Lakatos' amazing book "Proofs and Refutations."
What the models are producing is not what we had before. They are producing the cargo cult equivalent: Equations and words on paper which by means of tracing through the steps might take you from A to B. And after a while, humans might discover the true facts behind why that path from A to B exists, and then understanding emerges. And only then.
But when the process is done through AI, no one (no human) learns how to make discoveries and connections on their own. We are not letting people exercise the cognitive apparatus which is used to gain intuition and understanding. My fear is that after a while, fewer human mathematicians are able to gain the understanding mathematicians before them did.
It's as if someone removed all the barbells from a gym and made automated hydraulic jacks do all the lifting. After a while, people would wonder why our power lifters aren't as strong anymore. "But weights get lifted! That's the entire point, right?!"
Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery - Imre Lakatos
I appreciated your defense of mathematics as a communal process of developing human understanding, not just a way to solve problems and generate proofs. While the latter is important and valuable, replacing mathematicians on an industrial scale will destroy the cultural context that cultivated the field over generations.
You actually think recent chats were used in training of these models to THEN complete the proofs? This seems incredibly far-fetched and almost impossible based on how LLMs train. Occam's Razor says that simply the models are getting increasingly more capable in these domains.
Would you do this work but not expect credit for your progress? Especially if your career depended on it?
Not many people create things and refuse to sign them, and believe in anonymous contributions to humanity. I’ve had coworkers present my work uncredited with the implication that it was theirs. Not many people would be fine with that.
There are a few, but not many. Suggests to me that what you call “gold stickers are actually important.
> Why aren't you excited for pushing the frontier of knowledge.
In mathematics specifically, having answers to open problems is often not inherently all that useful. The value of open problems typically comes from new theories and techniques that mathematicians produce attempting to drive towards solutions. The open problems themselves are a means to an end.
Suddenly having the all the air sucked out of the room by having all of math’s open problems solved—without producing fruitful new areas of research—is not inherently a win.
About the only general lesson I can extract so far from these announcements is that apparently we underestimated the extent to which major open problems are amenable to known approaches (possibly from very disparate fields), if they are combined judiciously by a virtually omniscient search engine. Frankly it's a little disappointing to me that these problems didn't require major new creative advances (e.g. the invention of new subfields) for their solution. And arguably that's a loss, if humans, with their inferior search and recall capabilities, would have been forced to resort to more creative solutions.
It's still possible, and I suspect likely, that many more problems will require new creative advances. Creative advances that may have arisen in the regular course of attempting to solve these problems that were nevertheless amenable (often in a very alien brute-force way) to combination of existing techniques
Maybe this is too pessimistic an attitude, but we may be ten years from it not even mattering.
I’ve heard Grant Sanderson’s take. But I suspect math is going down a dark road where humans have little reason to pursue it any more. We’ve crossed a threshold where computers are regularly solving problems that have remained open for decades. Humans barely stand a chance today; ten years from now we’ll be irrelevant in terms of pushing the field forward.
AI might be around to produce new techniques for other AI. But will it be relevant for humans? Will humans even need to be part of the loop? Will the new techniques be presented in ways that are intended to be conveyed to humans? Will there be humans interested in or capable enough to use them? I have my doubts.
We seem to still be a long way from an AI equivalent of Grothendieck (i.e., creative system-builder). Maybe AI is close to replacing a problem-solver like Erdos.
I think OP is saying that the work should not be credit to OpenAI.
They are basically rehashing the research from someone else. Previously with the fluid problem they sang glories to themselves only to be exposed. They not only tried to shut up the researches but also displayed several concerning behaviours.
There is nothing that guarantees now that they will not steal your ideas and publish themselves.
I don't know what "the credit" means. They're spending tens of millions to solve these problems, hire academics at insane salaries and give out millions in research credits. You care about language on some press release?
Academics are paid tiny sums at post doc and professor levels. Oai comes along paying millions to these people and giving them the tools and support to actually solve problems.
Society paid academics just barely enough to survive and do math (and probably we optimized that amount a little bit too far toward minimal), so you had to really love math and not really love anything else to do it.
OAI pays lots of money for doing math, and doing math makes them lots of money (or they believe it does), so your love for math has to be upper-bounded by your love for money. Loving math helps, of course, but not loving math is okay too, because you can substitute that with your love of money. But when money and math conflict, your love of money has to win.
I contend that:
1) Within the process of doing math, the second type is better in some metrics (eg speed) while the first is better in others (eg readability of prose);
2) On the first order outcomes of doing math, the first type is better (eg elegance of mathematical objects)
3) On the second and higher order outcomes of doing math, the first type is better (eg respect society has for the field, sustainability on long timescales)
How to weigh each order when choosing a winner is a decision each civilisation gets to make.
This comment box is sadly too small to contain an argument for why higher-order should matter more, but it suffices to say here that only caring about higher-order outcomes is “having your head in the clouds, hoping to catch a glimpse of Heaven” and only caring about lower-order outcomes is “making a deal with the devil, your soul ends up in Hell”.
IMHO it makes no sense to admit you don't know what "the credit" means and continue to participate in this discussion. You don't seem to understand the culture and motivation of professors and postdocs doing research level mathematics.
This technology lets you do research a lot more efficiently. It's all there. If you're interested is solving interesting problems there has never been a better time. If you're interested in being the first to solve outstanding problems from decades ago, maybe not as good, but then again let's be honest, chances are you weren't going to solve them anyway.
"Let's be honest": Why would I care that you care so much that these problems were solved automatically when you yourself don't even seem to be aiming at a better understanding and talk in disrespectful ways about the people who seek a deeper understanding? You could read a book about the history of mathematics, for example Roger Penrose's Road to Reality.
> Academics are paid tiny sums at post doc and professor levels. Oai comes along paying millions to these people and giving them the tools and support to actually solve problems.
I mean if I was one of them I'd be super pissed that a piece of silicon got more funding than I did and of course it's gonna have better results. I can't steal my peers' research but AI can.
The problem is where this is going. We've gone from thousands of researchers to one company. I don't care how much better the results are, it is a terrible idea to centralize knowledge evolution.
So you believe math is a jobs program. We do more work, don't need as many mathematicians, although there doesn't necessarily mean fewer as they're now a lot more productive.
Knowledge and discovery isn't the point, it's that this particular group of people are in sole control of the pace and what gets discovered
You can't say they are spending 10s of millions on that.
First, you cannot calculate their usage cost by what they charge you.
Second, if the prompts from the math researches were not there they would not be able to solve the problem, and they know it, and that's why they are trying to silence people or make noise enough so people don't realise what they are doing
Your comment about academics is not based. If you take the time to read any of the papers they published you will see most if not all are pure garbage nonsense.
Read Terence Tao about ai, or anything about the "supposedly" improvement in the FFT. Their claims are all nothing burgers.
OP here. I compared it to a bicycle because a bicycle is a tool.
I could also compare it to a car, but a considered a bicycle more appropriate (maybe because of the "bicycle for the mind" analogy for computers by Steve Jobs).
But comparing it to "Automotive technology" doesn't make sense, because "fuel efficiency" and "safety" are not tools but the properties of a tool.
Scientists are working with tools, and now one of those tools has silently turned this into a race for publication with all the users of the tool.
As per OP, you're inferring a "healthy competition" between the cyclist and his bike. How would you expect cycling as a whole to evolve under such circumstances?
But I think you're talking about something entirely different, I leave it to someone else to answer.
They're wrong. They're right about it being cope, but the cope is not from people in fear.
The people who feel fear about AI taking their jobs or doing worse things are not coping. They're saying all this is real and impressive and that that is why they are terrified.
The people saying it's bad and lies and they stole the answer and a million other things are just in tribal mode throwing whatever at the wall to defer to the pre-existing conclusion that AI is a corporate hoax. AI would have to be real to fear it in this professional and existential way, but they know it's fake, so they're not afraid.
It's sometimes done with more subtlety, like "it just comes up with some proofs by connecting existing things, it is not producing new insights, it's not creative or truly generating ideas". Which may be partly true. The denialism is shifted into refusing to acknowledge that within 20, or 2, years it probably will be producing new insights.
> Why aren't you excited for pushing the frontier of knowledge
They are excited. They just hate getting scooped [1] because it means that precious tenure status and niche community name recognition stays out of reach.
That's not me endorsing or denouncing what's going on. Just one professor trying to rationalize what the big deal is all about.
Yes. That's completely reasonable. It's sort of like how 100m sprinting is also a jobs program. People like watching very fast individuals compete in it and not, say, people on motorcycles.
It's actually reasonable too. I don't think math is just about results and theorems. It's also a question of the limits of what people know, how they came to know it, and how others can also understand it. It's like the difference between climbing Everest and taking a helicopter up. Both reached the top but surely the person who climbed it had different experiences that might be useful? In my opinion, most published math results are not going to have much application outside of the math community.
That's fine if they can find someone to sponsor their "job", but at least quit bitching and moaning about how no one should ride motorcycles because it makes your sprinting feel less meaningful.
The role of science is to advance human knowledge and understand what's true. The role of engineering is to bridge the current world to something new discovered by science. Until recently, the new things were the domain of scientists, so many of them understandably feel like their existence is threatened by AI.
Another aspect I haven't seen anyone talk about is how big tech poached a generation of millennials from grad schools ~15 years ago. I think a lot of those people feel like this is a comeuppance for unnecessary or bad faith gate keeping in academia.
>> pushing the frontier of things like fuel efficiency and safety would be good.
That is a done task. There all manner of techs to support those goals. The issue is cost and politics. There are a host of IC advancements that are being actively ignored as companies give up on IC in favor of EVs such as rotational non-piston engines.
Safety wise, cars today are extremely safe, to the point that there it little to be gained in making them any safer. The only real gains will come from improving driver behavior through monitoring (ignition interlocks for alcohol/drugs/tiredness) or restrictions such as hard speed limiters. The market has steadfastly rejected such things.
AI could deliver a dozen new IC engine types. They would all be ignored. AI could propose new traffic rules. Those would be ignored. AI could identify potentially dangerous drivers prior to any malfeasance, and those recommendations would too be ignored. There isn't much room for AI in this field.
Its also, very much cope for academia not performing to spec except as a paper mill for the last few decades- ever since the cold war ended. The world needs academia to work - and that machine churning out discoveries feeds us all, if it finds a better haber bosch. "Wes Brot ich ess des Lied ich sing! Erst kommt das fressen dann die moral!" and this machine produces the food the world is in dire need off. Git good or git gone!
They lured scientists into sharing their prompts and ideas and either trained the model directly on that or kept the prompts in a database to be added to the context when solving a problem.
Unlike academic mathematicians, ai labs are actual businesses earning their money by providing services and attracting investment. Academic mathematicians simply live off eg tax money if its a state university.
I think his point is that the people that are against the technology will never change their mind, regardless of what you do to assuage them. It's a lost cause.
Everyone and every business makes mistakes. We don't go on an apology tour every time we make a mistake. On the net he believes he's doing good in this world.
For instance, a mistake he spoke about was not providing strict enough guards on operators, allowing them to conduct unlawful searches. He's since corrected that and looks for new ways to restrict and audit platform access. What's the point of dwelling on this? Is the anti-flock lunatic cutting down cameras going to read the press release and think "gee, Flock is turning a new leaf", obviously not. It just adds more fuel to the fire taking away from the good work they do.
Correct, flock is broken at a conceptual level and that means really no amount of implementation details will fix it.
That doesn’t mean that flock should just keep doing what they’re doing. Quite the contrary - flock should not exist. It is anti-American to its core, and there’s no salvaging it. Flock can only exist if it changes in every way possible.
Providing private mass-surveillance as a product for our government is, fundamentally, broken. It’s not a good idea, and no amount of twiddling will make it good. Similar to how running a hit-man business is fundamentally bad. Doesn’t matter how many background checks I do on the hitmen. Doesn’t matter if I extra triple check they’re only murdering bad people. The concept itself is immoral and deplorable.
hear hear. imo the constitution should be read as eyes open tradeoffs. the 4th amendment is an clear one and this is a great case for it: its not that flock couldnt theoretically reduce crime. it that the reduction isnt worth giving up the power to the government to do so.
this. and note that while it is likely true that bots were driving awareness of the anti-flock campaign, that does not mean that the anti-flock campaign is wrong - in his cognitive dissonance, he is affirming the consequent.
If allowing unlawful searches to be done is just a little whoopsie, then all the actions by those "lunatics" you're complaining about are even less than a little whoopsie.
Flock enables mass surveillance of a type that destroys liberty, and is opposed by sensible people who understand freedom, history, and who respect the brave men and women who have fought for our rights.
Flock is defended exclusively by pathetic, weak little men who are afraid of their own shadows, and who (wrongly) believe that unchecked government power is a good thing.
I am a pro-flock real person. I'll get down-voted and likely flagged for saying this so you may believe I don't exist but I do.
Crime has gone down considerably in the last two years.
> The declines were reflected in several of the FBI’s long-term measures. The 2025 robbery rate of 49.4 per 100,000 was the lowest in 20 years, while the rape rate of 36.1 was the lowest since 2012. The murder rate was the lowest in the past 20 years.
I imagine giving police the ability to apprehend violent criminals through technology is driving this reduction in crime. Not a stretch. You can think that this is not worth the tradeoff, but if you think giving police a tool like Flock will not have an impact of apprehension of criminals you have your head in the sand.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey in San Francisco is pro-camera-enforcement and I was glad to be able to meet him and thank him for his efforts both for speed cameras and for ALPR in San Francisco. For my part, I'm not wedded to Flock so if people get upset about the brand name, I'm happy if the government uses Axon instead to provide the same outcome. The use of drone policing, ALPR, and speed cameras has substantially improved safety in San Francisco.
Yeah, I am generally pro-surveillance of public spaces and public property, but I think Flock has taken a particularly careless approach to the project. I would much rather have another vendor simply sell the cameras to the municipality and have the government administer the network, rather than have a company like Flock retain the data themselves and make it available to unknown third parties. You can maintain public oversight much more directly that way.
In Houston, three cameras near an attempted child abduction had been cut down. Police Chief Noe Diaz said investigators consequently could not use them to identify and track the suspect's red sedan.
Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals. It obviously does. It only makes sense that a police officer having access to cameras that track license plates in real time would help apprehend criminals escaping capture. Come on, you don't seriously believe this. What would have to be true about the world, police, criminals etc of this not to be true.
The issue, of course, isn't how cameras can be used to help apprehend criminals. It's that they can be abused by people who have access to them, in ways we haven't even imagined yet. People don't trust that appropriate safeguards are in place, and it's not clear how to defend against abuses, or that it's even possible. In a society that supposedly prioritizes liberty, privacy, and innocence until proven guilty, such technology should be treated with maximum suspicion.
> Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz said three cameras near the reported attempted kidnapping of a third-grade student had been cut down before investigators could use them to identify the suspect’s vehicle.
That's such a weird way to phrase it. The cameras were, presumably, cut down before the incident?
I'm sure they can help individual cases. It's less clear to me that surveillance societies have less crime. Criminals adjust.
Maybe if you can point to the crime-free paradises that have been enabled by pervasive surveillance, you'd have more people on your side. If you're just selectively pointing out individual cases where they helped, you're not really proving the overall point.
> Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals.
Seems like a strawman, i dont know anyone saying the cameras dont help police solve crimes at all. The issue is you have to balance crime benefits against civil rights, and the benefit right now seems pretty small, but the privacy implications are enormous.
Reducto ad absurdum: mandatory ankle monitors on everyone would help police apprehend criminals. Is that worth it? No? Ok, then where is the line in the sand? Flock's system is effectively tantamount to a gps tracker on every vehicle that uses surface roads.
You can imagine that, but at least in my city, no, crime was going down before Flock, and continued its trajectory; Flock did not cause that. Same for, e.g., SF.
Suppose there was a technology where, when you report your car as stolen, police would be able to track exactly where this car is currently and it's history over the last 2 weeks.
You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?
> You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?
Speaking as a San Francisco resident: No. SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property.
Speaking as a USian: Even if it did lead the cops right to the car and provided unimpeachable evidence that what the footage showed was a theft, rather than something legal, I still don't want these electronic mass-surveillance systems to be deployed. Dragnet surveillance is plainly unacceptable.
If -somehow- we can magically build such surveillance systems to be completely unable to provide data that's unrelated to a search warrant or other such court order, I'd reconsider my stance. However, building such a system is simply impossible.
You hold such a ridiculous position I don't know how to argue with it. Cops don't care about crime or stolen property? Why have cops at all? It's like arguing w a third grader
Cops have limited resources, so they must prioritize. Even the Supreme Court acknowledges this.
Because of this truth, SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property. It has been decided that they spend their limited resources elsewhere.
> Why have cops at all?
Yeah, that's a really good question that folks who are poorly-served by their federal, state, and local police forces often find themselves asking. Folks who are well-served generally ask themselves that question far less often.
Suppose there was a pre-pardoned, unaccountable, masked band of brownshirts in Temu youtuber military wannabe gear, stalking the streets with impunity, terrorizing people who aren't white, holding down American citizens and emptying guns into their backs. Suppose they have been given access to every database that the US has at its disposal, as well as sweeping powers to demand data from anyone they choose.
Suppose Flock's license agreement additionally said that they could give data to anyone they wanted to, as it does.
Suppose the leader of these brownshirts frequently talks about his opponents, protestors, etc., as enemies of the state and domestic terrorists.
How great do you feel about this nonexistent mystery technology of yours now?
So your position is that if you can predict someone's arguments (valid or otherwise) before they make them that those arguments are less valid? Maybe if you had pre-countered them but looking at your comments here and the linked blurb that doesn't seem to be the case.
It wasn't a hypothetical, the op was listing things that both literally are happening and that ALPR's (and flock specifically) are enabling. "Hypothetically" was a bit of rhetorical flourish.
About 20% of US GDP is social spending. What percentage of GDP will get us where we need to be? Why does California have so many notorious problems when, compared with many other states, its social spending is so generous?
Social systems are not as simple as "give people more money", particularly when millions of people have already been socialized into criminality. Thinking this is a total misunderstanding. Most criminals are not stealing to get bread to feed their family. They commit crimes because a) it's fun b) it's what their peers are doing / needed for their social standing and c) it beats working for a living. Yes, a well-socialized conscientious person would never do this except in cases of severe hardship - but that's not the reality of what's happening.
California notoriously does not house the homeless nor feed them, leading to massive amounts of crime by people with mental illness having to live on the street. It also has some of the worst wealth inequality on the planet. When a 1 bedroom shack costs >$1M, you've basically taken a sledge hammer to any concept of a society.
20% of US GDP goes mostly to social security, imagine how much crime we'd have if we didn't spend that and every senior citizen had to scavenge for food! I would say at least 99% of of the money we spend on police and the military should instead go to social support and local infrastructure improvements.
3% of the US GDP is spent on defense - I don't have good numbers for LEO. So your argument is that if we spend 3% more of our GDP and move from 20% to 23%, that will solve crime? [1]
You are mistaking me as an opponent of social spending. I am not. What I am an opponent of is the obvious untruth that we can spend our way out of our social problems. This idea is not only wasting enormous sums of money, it's degrading the justice system (by getting criminals released) and the education system (by lowering standards and ruining the education of conscientious children in the name of keeping all kids in school, no matter how bad.) This is an actively destructive idea.
[1] This is an extra curious idea because of course, for the most part, military spending is a jobs program for young 20 somethings, veterans, and engineers, and obviously even if the police were net-neutral, that would be a jobs program as well. So the hypothesis is that firing the millions of people employed in these sectors and spending more on social workers and benefits would somehow be a net positive over that.
Edit: Small correction. 20% of GDP is dedicated to government social spending. 33% is on both private and public social spending. So 1 out of every 3 dollars in the US is spent on social programs right now. And your contention is that 36% is what’s going to move the needle?
Can you quantify how much it improves? How much will say, homicides go down if we eliminate police and defense spending and put it toward social programs?
Can you explain why 33% -> 40% will make such a huge difference? Why didn’t the first 33%? Why are most other countries able to spend much less? At what dollar amount can we safely gauge whether it is working?
Obviously you can't quantify exactly how much it will improve. My point being that instead of spending our money to make the world a worse place, making our actual country a better place will very obviously reduce crime. The money is helpful, but eliminating police and our military presence around the globe are the biggest wins. We need to stop employing sociopathic sadists armed with heavy weaponry and we need to stop imprisoning so many people (US has the largest prison population in the world).
> Why are most other countries able to spend much less?
Because they don't have an armed force of "police" constantly damaging their society and they don't ship off their children to commit terrorist acts abroad and allow them to come back violent, radicalized and full of PTSD. We should follow their lead.
We need to imprison more people. The single biggest predictor for future crime is past crime. Multiple offenders are doing almost all the crime. Your hypothesis that we should just let them all out and stop arresting them and they will just stop committing crimes because there are no more mean cops to persecute them is so absurd it beggars belief. Do you know any of these people?
From my perspective, you seem to be making a common error that do-gooders make: projecting your own psychological state onto that of the average criminal. You wouldn't do any of these things, as a conscientious, decent human being, except under severe duress, or perhaps relentless persecution - so they wouldn't either. And that first part is true. It would take a long period of intense suffering, breakdown, and resocialization before the average upstanding citizen began engaging in common criminality.
But I assure you this is not how the average criminal thinks. In millions of tragically unfortunate cases, they were socialized from the beginning into criminality. You cannot fix this with feel-good interventions like therapy or 'equitable' interventions in schools. You are dealing with a different culture. You cannot fix it except maybe through a very long and arduous process analagous to the one that would turn you into a criminal. The will to do this does not exist. It would require prison reform - but not the kind you would approve of.
Consider historical cases, like that of the Comanche - it took many wars to stop them and force them to stop just killing people for sport. Surrounded, at gun point, and under forced re-acculturation, with many 'incidents' still breaking out, you have many examples of them grousing that living like this is just not worth it, compared with riding around having fun killing and looting while your slaves did all the work. This is the sort of situation you are dealing with when it comes to the average criminal mindset. You are dealing with an alien culture in your midst. And it spreads! Social disorder is contagious and breeds itself. While you pooh-pooh the idea of simply removing offenders from the population, a hundred kids are missing out on an education because of three ineducable kids disrupting the school for everyone else, who can't be removed because that wouldn't be fair. Someone down on their luck has their car get stolen with no consequences for the thief and wonders what's the point of doing right. A young unemployed adult with some criminal friends decides to go out with them one night - nothing's happened to them so far, after all. A teenage girl ends up pimped out in LA, and ends up so deeply misocialized by the experience that even when the cops do manage to rescue her, she just goes back to it.
There's always some base rate, because people with low impulse control / antisocial disorders / aggression always exist. But you get beyond that, like we are now, when criminal subcultures emerge. And you absolutely cannot fix it by spending more money - they'll gladly take your benefits and keep stealing and killing.
The only solution, besides radical re-education camps, is removing these people from the general population. Fortunately, most career criminals are already known to the police and are the ones committing most of the crime. Lock up everyone with 2 prior violent crime convictions and violent crime drops by 50% overnight. That's quantifiable.
> From my perspective, you seem to be making a common error that do-gooders make: projecting your own psychological state onto that of the average criminal.
I know many people who have broken the law. Like most people, I break it all the time. The US already has the largest prison population in the world. Clearly that doesn't work, and common sense would agree. Putting people in prison is not just costly, every person has connections to society that get damaged. And that's not even getting into over-armed, sadistic police running around everywhere. The real crime is that my tax dollars are stolen to support this fascist force.
> Consider historical cases, like that of the Comanche - it took many wars to stop them and force them to stop just killing people for sport.
You're talking about the genocide of Indigenous Americans. You know the Comanche aren't the bad guys right?
We're too far apart to continue this conversation.
> I know many people who have broken the law. Like most people, I break it all the time.
Clearly, it is worth making a distinction between crimes like robbery / theft / assault / murder and speeding.
> The US already has the largest prison population in the world.
In absolute numbers. Per capita, El Salvador does, coming on the heels of dramatically lowering their crime rates from some of the worst in the world to the best in Central America...by arresting everyone who caused problems and jailing them. The homicide rate went down by 98%, to 1.3, better than many European countries.
That's the sort of change that obviously makes a real difference.
> You're talking about the genocide of Indigenous Americans. You know the Comanche aren't the bad guys right?
Either you don't know very much about the Comanche, or you believe in some sort of alien Nietzschean morality, in which case we are definitely too far apart - but either way, I wasn't making a moral statement, simply illustrating how difficult it is to assimilate people with radically different norms who aren't interested.
Correlation is not causation. Do you actually have any data or research to support your claim from an unbiased source? A far right blogger is far from unbiased.
FWIW Benn Jordan, who has his own biases, analyzed this data in his latest video and found it had no impact on most crimes but did have a small improvement in clearance rates for one category.
Have you tried zooming out on the stats at all, or analyzing any other variables? You realize there was a crazy spike in crime in the wake of the pandemic, right? Certainly a reversion to the mean might happen alongside the implementation of cameras.
My own city's police (Redwood City, CA) credited Flock cameras with an increase in the clearance rate from 12% to 13%. Pardon me if I don't go out and celebrate.
Crime has been going down since they took the lead out of gasoline. The world and the US especially has been getting safer every year since before the 24 hour news cycle. Seriously, you are safe and have been safe for decades from random crime. It wasn't some busybody's cameras.
The police (and larger state apparatus) turning antagonistic toward the public will certainly increase crime, not decrease it. When cops go to war with literally everyone, the "law" will cease to apply in any meaningful way. A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.
> A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.
You can't destroy public property because you disagree with a policy. Let me give you an example.
Suppose I am against abortion. Firebombing an abortion clinic is a "crime" that wouldn't exist had these places that kill unborn children not been constructed in the first place.
He already has been. Flock cameras routinely draw the police into situations where they're not need and cause shootings/high speed chases that end in dead bodies.
In yesterday's video from Benn Jordan [0] there was a Flock employee that told 911 multiple times "I'm not sure if they are armed." when reporting that a few people were filming from the perimeter of a Flock office building in Georgia.
He also said several times that "we're under lockdown here."
/shrug Seems like he was certainly trying to cause some form of harm.
Good did not hit an officer with her car, and was driving away from him when she was shot through the side window of her car.
Pretti was legally armed and was shot and killed while face down on the ground.
This is all corroborated with video and contradicts statements from the involved federal agents. Charitably they were “mistaken”, realistically they lied to cover themselves.
There are many more instances where federal agents lied about what happened and their accounts were later refuted by eyewitness testimony and video. Just in those cases the victims did not die. Look up all the cases that were thrown out of court because government’s case rested on falsehoods.
How are people so chill about police killing anyone? These people are literally paid by the community, to protect the community. Anyone dying at their hands is an insane level of failure, we shouldn't need hundreds of examples when every single instance should be an outlier in the data.
These aren’t the only two protesters shot by federal agents in the past year, they’re just two that died from it. More have been shot and killed, but they were targets of ICE stops, not protesters.
There are more cases of people being shot by ICE agents, then charged, then charges dropped because agents lied and/or evidence was tampered with or destroyed.
I watched the videos of Good and Pretti being killed. It looked like vengeful executions than anything else. It should deeply bother everyone of any political party.
What's questionable about them? If people in power see that they can callously murder people and everyone is as apathetic what do you think will happen next?
I don't think the equivalent of waiting periods make sense.
If anything they should just ban advertising. Simple, worked for smoking for the most part, and we have precedent as it's harmful. Why does every sporting event have so many ads and sponsorships by these betting companies.
The worst thing about these sites is that they're necessarily net negative. If you win regularly, you'll be kicked off these platforms. They only want dumb money. True prediction markets are different since they're don't market makers and just enforce the contracts and there are people on each side. But the whole draft-kings type gambling markets are just awful
The online crowd harping on about Chinese models is disconnected from reality imo.
I won't use a Chinese model. Why would i bother? I pay $100/m for the frontier model, understanding it's marginally better than much cheaper alternatives. I get so much value from the product it's not worth shopping around
Think of it like apple and android. Plenty of people pay 2k for their iPhone every few years when android at 1/4 the price is just as functional. Why? Because they get so much excess value from the device it's not worth shopping around. For most people it's their only personal computer. From booking airfare, to filling out their kids permission slips, it's a device they use 10+ hours a week. They don't bother, until a paradigm shift happens and something is 10x better than the iPhone. I imagine llms will follow the same trajectory
You aren't paying API prices. Anthropic (or OpenAI, SpaceX, etc) are almost certainly losing money on your subscription. How long they'll be able to continue to subsidize your usage is an open question, but they definitely won't be able to do it with everyone (currently, their solution is to make enterprise users pay per token, but that might change). What that means is that for the customers that the frontier labs need to be profitable, going with a closed weight provider isn't "marginally better intelligence for marginally higher (or even lower) prices" but "marginally better intelligence for much higher prices".
I get (sometimes) frustrated with people that don't work in the tech industry over this concept, and having them rationalize that their usage is heavily subsidized by the distributor of the model.
The costs in compute, electricity, cooling, etc. per token is much higher than most people (I feel) who work in the industry realize. Which, cognitively makes sense: they just want the 'magic 8-ball' to give them a tasty dinner recipe that meets their specifications, for example, and don't care how the 'sausage' is made.
However, economies generally equalize with supply and demand, and this (most likely) will become cheaper as the technology progresses and optimization passes/new algorithms are discovered.
Exactly, like it has done in cycle after cycle in the past. It would be very naive to assume that once you have a moat it will stay that way with a thing like this.
Unless new data has come out, we don’t know if they are losing money on subscriptions. We know that there is a big difference between subscription and API costs per token, but that alone doesn’t mean much. Subscriptions may be underutilized, or margins on API tokens may be very high. Both are probably true.
I would happily bet that > 50% are already doing just that. Whether you'll be able to collect the data is another thing but they'd be fairly stupid if they haven't at least checked out what is available. It would be next to irresponsible not to do so and given that they're in the S&P 500 you would have to at least give them some credit.
I can understand that they might be cautious about sharing their data with a Chinese company.
But them being the most successful companies means that they can just buy their own hardware. And run whatever models they can get their hands on in there.
Even if those models are Chinese. They (the companies running them on their own hardware) would be in full control then.
Only because anthropic&co will price themselves just below the cap where people contemplated switching. In so, the Chinese models still set a sort of cap on the prices they can charge, even if not directly.
It's not about quality, but more about processes, for example we handle EU, US personal, financial data etc, we have strict rules about it (company rules, and gov ones), and there is no place for chinese model here.
Yeah. People have very strange ideas about competition and choice and moat. If all you needed to unseat the entrenched was a competitor then Bing would be going toe to toe with Google, and Edge with Chrome. They have a billion+ devices they can stick those options as defaults and still nothing. There are many examples.
People are naturally sticky. If they're satisfied with a product, they'll stick around unless something comes along that is so much better it gets people talking. Open AI's 1B+ customers won't give a shit about Chinese models. Enterprise customers won't move to Chinese models, especially just to save money. They are a non issue, especially if the M.O is just going to be playing catch-up.
You're wrong. Are you sticky about your search engine? Now try having your search engine charge you $100 a month and tell me you'd stick with google search. Open AI's 1B+ customers will give quite the shit about cost if chatgpt stops being free.
Because I might look elsewhere if they starting charging several orders of magnitudes more then I'm not sticky. Does that remotely make any sense to you ?
They're sticky, but not for everything. There are common goods where the market has commoditized greatly because customers are conscious of quality and not provenance. Something like apples.
Most people buy their apples from the same grocery store every week. They're not shopping around every month to find who has the cheapest apples or 'best' apples. They go where they're accustomed to going, and as long as price and quality are satisfactory, they have little reason to change. Walmart, price-sensitive as they are, have relationships with fruit suppliers they've maintained for well on a decade. Even in commoditized markets, people are sticky.
Google, the titan mega-corp with more money than they know what to do with and a billion+ android devices to ship gemini on and it's made no dent for ChatGPT's consumer growth and adoption. Yet some plucky open source chinese models will?. It takes more than that.
Yes it is. Tiktok's content and content recommendation algorithms are much better than Instagram. Users spend more time on Tiktok than they do Instagram and it's not close. Tiktok's engagement rates are several times better than Instagram. Reels did nothing to dent it (yet another example in the book). Again, nobody will care about Chinese models if they're just more of the same. They can take a piece of the pie, but this idea that they'll spell doom for the frontier labs is nonsense.
At $100 / month (or $1200 / year) it may not be worth it, for you. But many of us would be spending a (large) multiple of that and then thinking about how much you spend, where you spend it and who you spend it on can make a big difference. For companies there are other considerations at play as well, for instance trust.
Wish there were more case studies on what people were actually doing. Building out an entire factory sounds amazing. Are they actually getting that level of value out of AI?
Sounds like this will be another one of those things where everyone makes their money and it then will eventually become something experienced people 'blog' about.
> Wish there were more case studies on what people were actually doing. Building out an entire factory sounds amazing. Are they actually getting that level of value out of AI?
I don't doubt it.
> Sounds like this will be another one of those things where everyone makes their money and it then will eventually become something experienced people 'blog' about.
Or not. The problem is that right now you and a whole bunch of others are trying to outrun a pack of lions. The lions have already taken down a couple of your group. The people further ahead have seen what the lions can do and they are attempting to speed up to the point that they can outrun them. Whether that will work or not depends to a large degree on what the other people are doing and they are not going to make it easier for them to keep pace.
That partially explains the lack of deep insight blog posts, besides everybody is just too bloody busy.
Yes. And yes you can churn slop. And I’m sure many will and many will get stuck with a source base that grows bigger than LLMs can cope with and becomes unmaintainable.
But you can also have many engineers operating it, testing outputs like you would in a real factory, etc.
Will be interesting to see how this pattern evolves. If it even makes sense.
Don’t know why this was downvoted but basically correct. OpenAI is in a price war with Anthropic right now for enterprise api consumers and that’s the biggest revenue line item for both.
They were counting on a duopoly so they could split the market between them but then someone decided to spoil their little party. To what degree that was an accident is anybody's guess but the timing is certainly interesting.
First off, $2k is the price of the new iPhone Duo. Suggesting that that is basically the same thing as a $500 Android phone is... strange.
But also, I don't think you should use individual consumer behavior as a proxy for how the overall LLM market behaves. Current estimates are that individual users represent a pretty small share of overall genai revenue. Most of it comes from enterprise contracts. Those might be more price sensitive because the CFO gets a say in which vendor they choose.
For a couple years now I've been accustomed to choice of foundation model being a heavily scrutinized design decision because it's just about the easiest way to manage COGS. I can certainly imagine scenarios where, given the option to pay 1/2 as much in inference costs but with a 5% reduction in output quality, the boss would say, "Nah, that's a bad deal." But I have yet to encounter one in the wild.
> First off, $2k is the price of the new iPhone Duo. Suggesting that that is basically the same thing as a $500 Android phone is... strange.
Okay fine, it's $1,400 for a latest iPhone Pro with 512gb of storage. Point still stands.
> Most of it comes from enterprise contracts. Those might be more price sensitive because the CFO gets a say in which vendor they choose.
I think enterprise contracts are even less sensitive to price than consumer. That's the whole idea behind enterprise pricing. You'll see companies charge multiple times as much just for SSO for instance.
There are limits to this obviously, but to think that major commercial enterprises will switch over to some Chinese models to save some money is laughable.
> Okay fine, it's $1,400 for a latest iPhone Pro with 512gb of storage. Point still stands.
So you switched away from the specialty product, but you're still comparing a top of the line 6.3 inch iPhone to a mid-market Android phone. Why not compare it to a Pixel 11 Pro with 512GB. That way they're at least comparable devices. But also, that would cost $1,220, which I suppose doesn't go well with the intent of suggesting iPhones are several times as expensive as Android phones.
The reason why I'm digging in on this is, when you start your argument with such a transparently silly comparison, it gives the impression that you're dealing in superlatives and willing to say just any old thing. Which undermines your own credibility.
So, getting back to corporate - multiple times how much for SSO? Okta Essentials is $17/user/month, which is a little over half as much as the base price for Cursor Pro, and about 2/3 the price of a basic ChatGPT seat.
The whole point of the comparison was that people pay $1500 for an iPhone while a $500 Android phone could theoretically provide much of the same experience for a fraction of the price.
Comparing two devices at the highest price point is besides the point.
tbh iPhone genuinely doesn't have anything over chinese models, and if there is any illusory sense of privacy, that is purely marketing. Genuinely people thinking iPhone is anywhere close to worth it lose respect because they are at the end of the day just tribes that love one thing
lol you created an account just to rail on iPhone tribalism? I wish people would realize that you can have multiple smartphones, and there is no one correct path.
But if you’re a heavy user you’re probably paying $100 for something that costs $1,000. Hence Anthropic’s problem. If they charged real prices to the masses the massses would flee.
I spend extra on a smartphone because I use the thing all the time, see it all the time, hold it in my hand all the time, it's my camera, music player, note taker and so on.
For AI? Prompt comes in, tokens come out. The value of the 'ecosystem' is roughly zero to me. Switching costs between models are essentially zero. The UI and UX is the same whichever LLM runs underneath.
If you do use llm some, then the $20 tier makes sense, but that's not where the money is. If you use it a lot then a $100 sub probably makes sense. But if you're a BigCo that heavily uses it and pay API prices and suddenly you pay $200 million a month, well, maybe it's worth buying a bunch of hardware and stick it in a basement somewhere, and you won't upload all your secrets to your future competitor to boot. If US labs didn't care about the competition from Chinese models they wouldn't lobby so hard for banning the evil, unaligned, super dangerous communist models that want to steal our freedoms and make our gas expensive.
Ultra-cheap models like Deepseek are also very nice if you need to burn billions and billions of tokens.
It's really marginally better and in some cases actually worse. If 100 dollars is throwaway money for you, and prices don't increase sure why switch. For heavier users, and for people with less money(most of America is struggling with bills and food) it's not attractive at all.
There's been a headline circlulating lately: 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from 1% of their customers. The $100/mo or however much individuals are paying doesn't seem to be material.
I was playing around with OpenCode on Omarchy over the weekend, working on my Android app, and was struggling to spend a single dollar with DeepSeek. The quality difference from the frontier models I use at work was hardly noticeable (where I typically rack up at least a few hundred dollars per month).
LLMs are not a luxury brand that individuals buy. Companies are always looking to save money. And their enterprise consumers are all developing their own models, so idk where you are getting this "analogy" from.
Anthropic doesn't care about sub users. At all. The real target is pay pig enterprises that give their employees access to the API and allows them to go buck wild spending $1000 on fable in a day.
I thought you would have also mentioned the use they make of data collected from loss leader subscribers, from at least those that don't disable collection.
With that, there are at least three distinct reasons to care about subs: PR, hook and training data.
People buy iphones due to network effect, android was late to the RCS game and now it's a moot point anyway.
How many people use an iPhone to its maximum? Isn't it the same with models? I think engineer's like to flex that they need a top of the line frontier model for their shitty corp projects. A Chinese model will write your Jenkinsfile just fine.
The LLMs don't have the moat that Apple has. Apple has carefully built their walled garden to keep people in. Their messaging, their cloud services, their media store, it all keeps users in.
LLMs don't have that. For at least 90% of users, the model in the back end is completely irrelevant to them. Switching to Kimi won't lose them their iTunes music.
You won’t use a Chinese model, and I won’t either. But both of our bosses have much higher incentives than we do to routinely shop around, and unlike us they can convince an Anthropic sales rep to give them a discount.
When the chinese or any other party releases a model that is Opus 5.5 level, there might be a shift to other providers as especially people in the EU are trying to get rid of their dependency on american stuff.
That's a great way of putting it and something I have come to realize as well. I'd rather just pay for the frontier model if I trust that it is indeed at the frontier and works reliably. Same with the iphone.
> Why would i bother? I pay $100/m for the frontier model, understanding it's marginally better than much cheaper alternatives. I get so much value from the product it's not worth shopping around
Wait until you are forced onto an enterprise plan...
Then he would bother and change to chinese models. And OpenAI/Anthropic would lose that profitable subscription which would not really help them at all.
"I am spending a provably untenable amount for a services that will have to degrade to meet my price point, the cheaper options and processes are beneath me"
Wait, it fell from 140% growth to 45% growth and that's a good thing? If they fall to 15% growth in Q4, will that be even better? Where are we supposed to be on the adoption curve?
Anthropic increased short term profits by jacking up their prices for enterprise accounts - by starting charging API prices instead of plan prices. It is possible we soon see customers fleeing Anthropic once they find a good alternative
Yeah, everyone I know paying enterprise prices is really looking at them wondering if it's worth it. Most of them think it is, but they're also looking at alternatives...
It does not seem as bad as it sounds like. The numbers are quarter-by-quarter and the market is fluctuating day-by-day basis. To me, growing in this fierce market by 45% qoq seems amazing by itself.
Roughly a week after Dario has rung the bell. Note that the growth in absolute sense hasn't peaked yet but the curve itself is already flattening and everybody with some sense for stock prices will read that as a very relevant signal.
The party that wins here is NV, Anthropic, not so much. But that's good then Dario and his sister can go back to improving the world. Let's hope they take Altman with them.
I think that's related to the snarky "controversial" takes that humans are way too into group acceptance and irrationality.
It's irrational to return the wallet if you were to consider just your well being. However, being we value being part of a group, and that group is the kind that returns wallets it finds.
Overall most of the answers are pretty much reddit tier cringe, but I guess here it's just echoing what is found online. LLMs are capable of novel insights but to produce them, you have to let the LLM grind a bit. I would be curious if someone asked why or what are the implications for a few hours.
> Humans are more loyal to belonging than to truth
> Why?
> Belonging to a larger group is advantageous to survival and reproduction
Most species compete at the critical boundary, crowd out competitors.
Humans on the other hand co-opt, arguably, sort of like a virus. Our ultimate foe isn’t other organisms, but nothingness, because you can’t co-opt nothingness into an ally or tool.
It's not irrational, because you will likely loose your wallet too eventually and then the best thing for you would be if someone return it. You need to assume everyone "runs the same software", and then you achieve the outcome you want by making the decision to return a wallet if you find one.
A rarely talked about solution to ethics: when you decide what to do yourself, analyze it as tho a chunk of other people will make the same decision, and then choose which would is better. Works very well in practice - especially if an answer can be probabilistic - pick up trash on the beach you didn’t put there five percent of the time, not never like asshole selfish people and not always like annoying do gooders.
I have taken the golden rule to be a sort of absolute standard: whether or not people treat you well, you still treat them well. This one makes it a sort of utilitarian argument but where you don’t fix your own identity, but assume different people are in the same boat, and then make the decision about which outcome is best. I haven’t read Kant
There's more to it: it's irrational to return a wallet to somebody you'll never meet/see/extract value from... but not doing that can injure your own self-image
Often doing "the right thing", in irrational circumstances, is nevertheless self-protective.
Otherwise you get friction in your social programming that you might never overcome.
You can also brag to people about how great you are because you returned a wallet and expected and/or received nothing in return. With the expectation of receiving social approval.
FWIW, you don't actually have to return the wallet to claim you returned the wallet. In fact, you don't even have to find one. The fact that lost wallets get returned makes me think telling people about it is not the motivation.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
I wrote more about it here
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-food-de...
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