@WallStreetApes is not a reliable source on literally any topic in the world (maybe besides how to make money by being a right-wing Twitter content farm). This being on the front page is a discredit to HN.
The “ask Gemini” thing was so bad, because it made people think that worked with other chatbots. I know some smart, well-informed people who have been under the impression that they can ask Claude if something is AI-generated and get an accurate answer!
If you want a direct example of the US subsidising a major AI lab, we can use Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Microsoft has the largest ownership stake - 27%.
Microsoft did not pay with money - it paid (mostly) with Azure cloud computing credits. MSOFT is then able to write this off as a loss against tax.
It is generally far more tax-efficient in the US to write a loss in this way than it is to write a loss for a cash investment.
In this case, I believe the difference was ultimately highly significant. When including MSOFT eventually writing-off the deprecating Azure hardware it had used to buy the OpenAI equity, the result was MSOFT's tax reduction being either close-to or exceeding the actual cash value of MSOFT's investment in OpenAI - IIRC.
These examples represent taxes that the US chooses not to collect - the US could choose to make investments like these less tax-efficient. Instead, by making them extremely tax-efficient, the US subsidises the transaction hugely.
Even ignoring monetary subsidies, there are the non-monetary ones: not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries, the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy, the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated.
That's what I'm asking - which monetary subsidies?
> not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries
That isn't normally how enforcement works, and it hasn't been very long since they disclosed those breaches. If the victims want to pursue legal action, they can, and they still may!
> the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy
So judges and juries are involved in the subsidization conspiracy, too?
> the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated
Sure, though if you think this isn't happening in China too, I have a bridge to sell you.
The original comments is "DeepSeek, and other Chinese models, are heavily subsidised by the Chinese government"
> That's what I'm asking - which monetary subsidies?
I am listing for you the non-monetary subsidies, which are just as real and equally important.
> not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries
If it was one of the Chinese labs doing this hacking, the government would be stepping in. If it was European labs they'd be stepping in. If it was you or I the government would be stepping in. That is a massive subsidy (they don't have to worry about the same legal fees and exposure) and being allowed to continue doing business is in fact priceless.
> So judges and juries are involved in the subsidization conspiracy, too?
There is no conspiracy. They are objectively operating by a different set of rules than you or I could operate in this market.
> Sure, though if you think this isn't happening in China too, I have a bridge to sell you.
I never said it wasn't, I'm saying that it's happening here and it's a very real subsidy.
All the major labs would be dead in the water if the government acted on the things I mentioned. If they treated the labs the way they would have treated us for all those hacks. Or if they enforced pollution measures (or god forbid ban on-prem turbines because of the climate damage). Or rule that training on data is not fair use, or that ingesting GPL3 code and then turning that into weights counts as a derivative work. Or. Or. Or.
Nah, nothing here is a special advantage of US firms.
The hacks are pretty bland as long as there is no mens rea and the hacked victims do not want to press charges. This isn't a "subsidy", it's just our normal legal process at work.
The pollution question is winding its way through court systems and getting a lot of pushback. I wouldn't call this a subsidy, just a slow bureaucracy. And at any rate this isn't special to the US; certainly China's environmental policy is far more lenient.
With the training data, again there's nothing specific to US corporations here. Anyone can use that dataset. It's just how our legal system works. You might not like it, but it's the accepted law right now. This doesn't meet any reasonable definition of "subsidy".
On the other hand, shoveling billions of dollars of taxpayer funds into corporations is by definition a subsidy. Full stop.
>Fair enough, but it sure meets the definition of 'helpful intervention'.
I don't see how. Anyone can buy electricity without any intervention from the government. An intervention is an action that changes what would happen by default.
I heard someone calling the key metric in Anthropic financial reports EBBT: Earnings Before Bad Things[1] :-)
[1] Where "Bad Things" would be the typical interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation plus the Anthropic specific employee compensation, LLM training (you know, for the LLM lab), revenue sharing agreements (which is a form of paying for infrastructure), etc.
A recent YouTube video by Patrick Boyle said the same thing. They are only profitable if you ignore all the costs that make them unprofitable such as paying employees and developing A models.
I made a statement about whether Anthropic was profitable I don't understand your reply.
Assuming you meant to reply to me and not someone else are you saying under GAAP accounting standards Anthropic is a profitable business because under GAAP accounting their only expense is electricity?
(I see what happened you skimmed the conversation and didn't follow what was being discussed.)
1. And that marginal cost is large, much larger than the marginal cost of serving a Google Search query
2. The marginal cost is electricity until the hardware overflows. So it's continuous for electricity and a step function for hardware capacity.
Plus you don't address the core point. Frontier AI is capital intensive. A lot more capital intensive than regular software. The existing clouds supporting the entire internet (!!!!) were built for a fraction of the cost of AI infrastructure, and there isn't even an end in sight to this continuous hardware investment.
Let alone hardware refresh cycles.
AI is basically investment into roads.
Software used to be a magical place, closer to selling music albums but even better.
AI is a much worse business margin wise than regular software.
If the "fixed costs" kill you unit economics won't save you. Scare quotes because true fixed costs generally have a long shelf life. Right now AI models die every 6-9 months.
Indirect subsidies are an accepted economic concept and well studied. The posts you replied to are obviously talking about indirect subsidies and dismissing them because they didn't say "indirect" everywhere is just sophism.
The government, specifically Trump's government and the current money circle in AI inflating American company stocks. In addition to all that American models do not share their papers like Deepseek and Qwen do. So you can literally say Chinese models are doing it for charity at this point.
Sure, but I couldn't say that a US company writing about some work they did in paper form is charity. At least not seriously! If it were charity, Google might be the most charitable company of all time, since their researchers published "Attention Is All You Need." But it is not.
Google has published a lot of open source software and a lot of research papers: I do believe they used to be very charitable even if they are less so today.
They have other issues as well, but among other things, I'd classify them as somewhat charitable too.
The US regime, which includes the ruling class: the US VCs and megacorps are just as much of an extension of the US regime. They're incredibly intertwined.
It has Apple Wallet, but for whatever reason Southwest's thing doesn't work with it, only works on mine. So I have to screenshot it and send it to her. This illustrates how silly it is, cause the screenshot works fine without all these moving parts, and I even do that when traveling solo cause I don't trust the wallet.
Every Door has a very confusing UI (lots of unlabeled buttons with unclear icons), unfortunately. I would love to use it, but even the web-based iD editor is so much easier to figure out!
The Street Complete UI is just perfect for mobile. If I'm walking down the street with a phone, I don't want to edit polygons or accidentally move a road. I just want to fill in missing data on existing mapped points.
I agree and I've been thinking about making something similar to Every Door but that takes advantage of AI to let you snap a photo or just send a voice note and then have the appropriate tags generated for review based on some very strict schemas. Would something like that be of interest to you?
I was thinking it would be ideal to have something that lets you walk down a street holding your phone out, capture a series of images and then process that in to changes you approve manually at home. Could even be processed locally on a computer after the fact.
Being able to process it later on the computer would definitely be great! That's kinda what I already do via notes but it's fairly painful to match up the photos I took to the notes and times.
On the other hand, Rust's borrow checker is very picky, and even a frontier LLM still sometimes struggles to respond to roadblocks sensibly (refactoring so whatever it's trying to do can be done safely) rather than stupidly (introducing some horrible global arena thing so it can make the borrow checker go away). A lot depends on how good your instructions are, and how good the existing code is, since bad input begets bad output.
I've (more or less; I've read quite a bit of the code) vibecoded several houndred thousand lines of Rust and I've not seen this happen a single time. It sounds like something it'd do when you ask it to "write a linked list while satisfying the borrow checker". Are you sure you haven't (possibly unknowingly) been giving it instructions which ended up luring it into doing these things?
Yep! In our tests, we found Zig to be a pretty good fit to translate C++ codebases.
And static analysis + agents are good enough at keeping the memory management in check. Compared to Rust, there's no magic so it's easy for devs and agents to reason about.
This article has some inconsistencies with what I experienced. For example, my label absolutely had tracking before being intercepted. In fact, it made it all the way to my city's distribution center.
I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.
If it’s small percentage then you could spend just that few dollars in API costs or lower subscription and the rest is profit. So you're not saving anything, just reclassifying that opportunity cost to feel better about your subscription’s value. I know it's pedantic but it's useful to be aware of opportunity cost trying to trick us.
I try to do the same thing, but I just don't see these very large savings. I can't even really justify the $200 or $100 tier off of it. I usually can match it immediately or beat it with just some brief Googling. I simply don't think the price arbitrage just really exists in any reliable way, month to month. Its more of a bonus if it happens to work out.
My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings:
- Two one-way flights
- New OLED 55"- 65" TV
- Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs
- Expensive, specialized medical device
- Variety of car parts
I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.
What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…
For example, I needed two rental cars that could each carry seven people for a trip to Maine. There's so many different combinations of ways to search for this that it would take forever to do manually. I have membership in Avis, Hertz, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.
I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.
Can even have it look for (and enter) sweepstakes within your interests, autonomously, if you give it access to its own email that you don't mind getting blasted with spam.
For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive paid services already out there, but I can at least customize it a lot more to my liking to avoid a lot of manual search effort.
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