I loved this game. One of my favorite memories from being a kid was playing either Pirates or the gold edition remaster on my sega genesis via a cartridge that had a proto-Netflix for games service on it. The cartridge had a coax port on the back that you ran a cable from the cable company into. You got a menu of like 30 games that rotated every month and you could download them to the cartridge to play them. Pirates and the sega version of Shadowrun were the two that I wore out.
Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.
Yeah I worry about this too. I have a remote agent that writes PRs for my job, and at the request of other devs I implemented a simplified writing skill that does the technical english thing mentioned elsewhere in these comments. It's definitely easier to read and the other devs seem to like it, so I'm okay with keeping it, but I haven't changed my personal claude settings because I never had a problem with the density of the output myself. Probably a side effect from having a multi-disciplinary background.
Yeah the rose colored glasses some people seem to have about how fun doing everything by hand was in the past and how well most people did those things continues to astonish me
It's also not $1,500 per month per engineer. It's that per month per engineer per tool. Which means it could easily be at least $3,000 (Claude Code and Cursor) or $4,500 if Codex was also an option on top of those two.
And as you have written on your blog it's a soft cap that can be exceeded with justification.
No reason to doubt his journalistic integrity? He's not a journalist for starters. He's a PR flack who does PR for AI startups on the side while blogging on substack. There is every reason to doubt his journalistic integrity.
The PR-thing was always openly communicated by him and is not some secret or gotcha. It's essentially "fleecing the boosters", which I fully approve of and do similarly myself.
I'll gladly tell my customers all the most glorious stuff about AI and big tech while spending a significant chunk of the money they pay me on supporting AI-/tech-counterculture, such as doctorow, zitron and quite a few other writers, journalists and activists.
It's the old "you live in a society" counter-point against anti-capitalist activism. Needing to make ends meet does not imply that your points or principles are meaningless, it just implies that you have no interest in being homeless and that way losing your chance to actually change things.
So that's fine to me. But: I stated it for a reason, because I know others don't agree. I, personally, consider him trustworthy. You do not, and that's fine. I suspect we both await anthropic's Z.1, which will be able to settle a big chunk of the debate.
He was right about the cost changes, which he predicted quite some time ago. People shouted at him that he was making it all up - yet it was correct.
He was also right about AI-video and sora in particular being a fundamentally flawed idea.
He was also right about the dangers and problems with the general inaccuracy of LLMs and people relying on it.
Also about the expected triggering of ROI-checking in companies, such as Uber is doing now. His prediction is, ROI is negative. And I'm awaiting the society's consensus on that.
The general direction seems correct to me.
He's not a technical guy and does not have the knowledge to critique models on a factual basis. I do wish he'd just focus on the stuff he _does_ know about, which is the financial side of things.
He is a much needed counterweight to the unhealthy hype going around, imho.
> He was also right about AI-video and sora in particular being a fundamentally flawed idea.
He specifically predicted that AI videos have plateaued in 2024 which is egregiously wrong.
> He was also right about the dangers and problems with the general inaccuracy of LLMs and people relying on it.
He specifically predicted that accuracy won't increase but accuracy has increased over the time significantly to the point where you can't get it to say anything inaccurate using the reasoning models.
> Also about the expected triggering of ROI-checking in companies, such as Uber is doing now. His prediction is, ROI is negative. And I'm awaiting the society's consensus on that.
The whole Uber skepticism is a good point because all of those people were wrong and Uber is profitable now.
You didn't address my other criticisms - he claimed that revenue would drop in 2024 and it skyrocketed. He claimed that users weren't interested in ChatGPT but now it has a billion users (6x jump).
Because it doesn't. Not for the tasks where using Opus instead of a lower tier model is appropriate, at any rate. Benchmarks show this, as do revealed preferences of actual users. To believe that Qwen is as capable as Opus at 1/20 the cost you have to believe that every person who does not make the choice to use Qwen over Opus for a given task is some mix of ignorant or delusional. This is certainly an opinion you can hold about other engineers, but it's definitely a questionable one at best.
The benchmarks between the two are close and the engineers that have used both (like myself) can attest that the differences aren't so wide as you might believe.
I'd say that yes, ignorance plays a role here because a decent number of engineers are looking strictly at the benchmarks and choosing Opus just for that reason.
But I'd also say that a major factor for Opus use is because Opus is being purchased for the engineers by their employers. They don't get to pick which models they are using.
I find myself rarely reaching for Opus nowadays, it's just too slow. I assume there are tricky use-cases where it's really useful though, just not super relevant for my day to day. I much prefer a faster, "weaker" model.
Fiduciary duty but for AI, interesting. I think there's some potential there, though of course you'll end up confronting the classic sci-fi trope of "what if the system judges what's best for the user in a way that is unexpected / harmful"? But, solve that with strong guardrails and/or scoping and you might have something.
I'm starting to get to the point where I'll only listen to AI energy use critiques if the commentator tells me up front they abstain from all forms of social media, especially video-based social media, first.
Note that I did not criticise the AI energy. I criticised tech as a whole. Tech is part of the problem (the problem here being "we are killing our only planet").
