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Welcome to the future. Anthropic is currently speed running it but this is what all LLM tools are going to look like in the next few years, once they turn the enshitification corner.

That's the pitch behind the Slate truck right? Just the basics to make it a functional vehicle and then you add only what you want.

Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.

I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.


They did report FCF before xai and also invested at least $1B before they merged xai

Given that it's one Musk company giving a mountain of money to another, and the only numbers floating around regarding SpaceX seem like marketing fluff, I don't think any meaningful conclusions can be reached until we get some real numbers giving a full look at the finances.

You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.

I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.

I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.


Retirement plan is rappelling accident before dotage.

Well can't argue with that lol

But if by some tragedy you don't die young, your older self is gonna be pissed at younger you for costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.


Holy crap, it's been a long time since I saw that dopey Obama/tea-party line. Fox News bullshit from the past seems down right quaint by today's standards

It's a fact though, so label it how you like but it happened.

You're gonna want to look into the context and framing. Elements connected to what you claimed are "fact". The framing is very much not.

If you still believe that nonsense after all these years nothing I can say that'll change your mind.

This is one of the all time greatest examples of "lying with facts". It's technically correct, the IRS absolutely singled out a bunch of non-profits due to administrative fowl ups, but trying to say Obama "targeted" the Tea Party intentionally was so hilariously stupid I'm amazed anyone bought it.


It's not gonna stay that way. Token cost is being massively subsidized right now. Prices will have to start increasing at some point.

This is hard to say definitively. The new Nvidia Vera Rubin chips are 35-50x more efficient on a FLOPS/ megawatt basis. TPU/ ASICS/ AMD chips are making similar less dramatic strides.

So a service ran at a loss now could be high margin on new chips in a year. We also don’t really know that they are losing money on the 200/ month subscriptions just that they are compute constrained.

If prices increase might be because of a supply crunch than due to unit economics.


Given the massive costs on training, R&D, and infrastructure build out in addition to the fact that both Anthropic and OpenAI are burning money as quickly as they can raise it, the safe bet is on costs going up.

What is your source on 35x more efficient? That seems like a wild performance improvement that I would have hears about.

My research shows claims of 10x efficiency, but that number is very questionable.


https://hashrateindex.com/blog/nvidia-vera-rubin-nvl72-specs...

Honestly some of this info is quite hard to parse. I think the efficiency is ~35X on the system level but 10X on the hardware level. I think this is due to Nvidia bringing in Groq in addition to chip improvements.


Seems like the real costs and numbers are very hidden right now. It’s all private companies and secret info how much anything costs and if anything is profitable.

Some say margins could be up to 90% on API inference. The house always wins?

That's like saying driving for Uber is profitable if you only take into consideration gas mileage but ignore car maintenance, payments, insurance, and all the other costs associated with owning a car.

Some could say anything when there’s no proof.

You can run Qwen3 Coder today - on expensive hardware - but fairly cheaply on a token by token basis. It's no Opus, but you can get things done.

Not sure which exact model you're talking about, but I've run the 30B and the 3.5 32B models and both can get some things done and can waste tons of time getting some things completely wrong.

They're fun to mess around with to figure out what they can and can't do, but they're certainly not not tools in the way I can count on Codex.


Legit Vitamix blenders are great though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

https://cybernews.com/privacy/meta-flo-period-data-privacy-l...

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/mega_scandal/Onli...

https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...

https://www.security.org/identity-theft/breach/equifax/

4 major incidents and a site referring to dozens more, and that's just a few minutes of searching.

And that's only tech companies'(or tech related) misconducted. If we broaden the scope to corporations in general I'm pretty sure I would hit a post text limit before I even got through a quarter of them.

It's like the old saying goes "Every regulation is written in blood". Regs don't exist because someone doesn't want technology to progress. They exist because companies have shown time and again, as far back as you'd like to go, that they are not responsible members or society. They're willing to do anything in the name of profits, including mass privacy violations, abusing customers, and in extreme cases allowing people to die.


And who was harmed, precisely, and how? The EU sanctimony complex regularly cites these things as if each were an infosec Chernobyl, but I've yet to see a real-world harm come from these incidents. The advocates say they're harmful because they violate privacy rules, and we need the privacy rules lest companies cause harm by violating them. It's circular. The rules are made up. They do not correspond to the prevention of suffering on the part of real people in the real world.

Even if we were to grant that these alleged privacy disasters causes harm, we'd have to balance them against the lost advantages of refusal to deploy the enabling technologies. It's like banning telephones on the account of everything crime anyone's ever organized over a phone call.


I personally know at least half a dozen people who were victims of identity theft thanks to data breaches. Costing them thousands of dollars and countless hours...

Regardless, your argument is predicated on the idea that violations of privacy and data collection is somehow fundamental to these services, in most cases it is not. Google and Facebook don't need to hoover up all your data to sell or use to advertise to you. They choose to, and the vast majority of users were/are unaware of it.

Beyond that, several of the articles I linked are for either negligence (failing to fix known issues) or collecting/using data without consent.


Rules are all made up (as tech is) for the purpose of enabling society and lowering suffering. Who was harmed? Everyone whose private personal information have been leaked without consent. Who was harmed? Who have been manipulated into voting? How has the damage not been diffuse and probabilistically significant? (otherwise, why would Cambridge Analytica even funded and paid for? As well as the whole advertising industry?)

And, a fundamental right does not need an existing harm to be justified into existence: it is a right as first principle.


> [Privacy] is a right as first principle

If you want to axiomize privacy, you can: that's a coherent philosophical position: but it's one I find curious. You're arguing that privacy breaches are harmful not because they cause harm, but because they are harm. Why is privacy, not progress, the summum bonum?


Privacy is a fundamental right, not the end of everything.

And you axiomize progress.

Although the question isn’t one against the other. It is whether progress justifies treating people as objects, as data providers without consent. That’s not a curious axiom, that’s the basis of all rights-based systems since 1948. Or 1785 (Kant). Or 1215 (Habeas Corpus). Or 1750 BCE (Hammurabi code).


No related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol


Good for you! It’s fun when you realize it’s a constructed language that also tends towards precision. While accounting is not my favorite, financial models as a whole are incredibly powerful reasoning tools. On par, for me, with engineering or physics based first-principles reasoning.


Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?

I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.


> Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?

That’s a subject that fills many volumes on accounting, finance and economics. I don’t think you should be looking for one best theory, because there are valid differences of opinion in all these fields.

> I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.

The ‘social picture’ is what’s called welfare economics, which is a whole field in itself. I wouldn’t jump straight into welfare economics though, you’ll probably need to start with introductory economics to understand the basic terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics


> Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?

The most-powerful ones for individuals are the micreconomic mechanisms. Understanding how leverage, tranching and moving risk (and reward) across stakeholders and time, work, for instance. The necessary mechanisms and tradeoffs one must make, as well as the ones one should.

If you're looking for a formal model, it's the balance sheet. But not the accountant's. The financier's. Sources and uses, and uses and sources. Payments in, payments out. How do they balance over time; how do they change exposures to different layers of economic and legal control.

The primitives of these models are transactions and people. When you look through them, they're defining human wants and ambitions, faults and fears, patience and mortality.


That’s such an overly complicated answer. I’ve noticed people from a financial background often do this. Why? Does it make you feel special? Lmao.

It’s all basic stuff, often wrapped in jargon to throw people off.

If the fella wants to be properly informed, he needs a very strong understanding of fundamental microeconomic principles, along with macroeconomics. On top of that an understanding of financial accounting.

And… on top of that an understanding of corporate finance and valuation. Aswath Damodaran (look him Up on YouTube) is the go-to person for this.

Only then you will form a complete picture of what’s going on and make well informed statements about the future.


@crisscross Lmao down voted my post you panzy? Be a man and accept I’m right - your post is full of so much hot air that it deserved popping.


Nicely done! When I started moving up from being an individual contributor to corporate management years ago, the brass would casually say things like "P&L" or "EDITDA" and I had no idea what they meant. I read textbooks, took online classes, and it was a big deal when I finally could lead a conversation related to our finances.


It's such common language in business that I didn't even realize I was writing so much jargon. I hope you inspired some people to look up the terms. It's really not that hard to understand.... Even CEOs can do it.


With the way I've seen some companies run, I'm not so sure CEOs can lol.

It's been interesting so far. The tough part for me is a the literature is all wrapped in "make your company more successful and profitable", and to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it that. I'm doing this for me, and because (especially on the age of AI) understanding this stuff is more important than ever.


They can, but they might not. Richard Branson famously said he didn't know the difference between gross and net even though he was at the head of Virgin Records.


Any recommendations ?


I'm just stating out on this, so I haven't gotten through everything I want to read yet.

Right now I'm reading Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and and Joe Knight. There's different versions, but I choose the one "for managers". So far it's done a good job making the material understandable for someone who doesn't have a degree in finance. This the one that's more relevant to the post and will help you start understanding how companies operate at a financial level.

For personal finance I have read

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and A Random Walk Down Wallstreet by Burton G. Malkiel. The first sounds "click-batey" but that's because "I will teach you the boring effective way to manage you're finances" doesn't sell. The latter gets more into the weeds on investing. Bother are great (though Random Walk has been edited many times and the beginning of the book has become bloated, so I'd recommend skimming it a bit since it's just history on epic financial crashes).

I'm planning to read:

7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt

The Outsiders — William N. Thorndike Jr.

The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham

The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel


Thank you.


I have a bachelor from a school of business and I have no clue.

What did you read that worked?


I'm going to copy/paste a reply I left for another commentor, so I don't have to retype everything lol

I'm just stating out on this, so I haven't gotten through everything I want to read yet. Right now I'm reading Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and and Joe Knight. There's different versions, but I choose the one "for managers". So far it's done a good job making the material understandable for someone who doesn't have a degree in finance. This the one that's more relevant to the post and will help you start understanding how companies operate at a financial level.

For personal finance I have read

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and A Random Walk Down Wallstreet by Burton G. Malkiel. The first sounds "click-batey" but that's because "I will teach you the boring effective way to manage you're finances" doesn't sell. The latter gets more into the weeds on investing. Bother are great (though Random Walk has been edited many times and the beginning of the book has become bloated, so I'd recommend skimming it a bit since it's just history on epic financial crashes).

I'm planning to read:

7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt

The Outsiders — William N. Thorndike Jr.

The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham

The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel


The Art of Deception.

You do not need to study anything else. You can even be very successful in every stages of your life with it.


This was my favorite bit, "We're going to steal countless copy righted works and completely ignore software licenc... wait, what? You aren't allowed to turn around and do it to us! Stop that right now!"


‘You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!’


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