> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Do you not see the problem here?
Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.
Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.
Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.
Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.
The actual quote and topic is far different than you’ve portrayed it. Here’s the actual quote: “ yet the company says that it expects to make $11.6 billion in 2025 and *$100 billion by 2029*, a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud.” from https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
He goes on to specifically discuss how unrealistic $100B by 2029 is given that OAI is structurally unprofitable.
The fact that you’re skewing your misinterpretation of what he said so much shows your own bias I’m afraid.
This is another case of missing the forest for the trees. In the scope of what Zitron is talking about, the difference of >$2 billion of revenue doesn't make a difference of his overall point of it not being close to enough to cover their spending.
I follow Zitron but the way he talks has been grating and it is even more obvious how biased he is when he has guests on. As if he's trying to lead them into agreeing with his more extreme claims.
That being said, why does this blogger get a pass at this criticism of just being blanket "wrong" when the point of the quote is still very much valid in context? It seems to be the same in the next article, quoted from Ed's blog with the same point. Is this more evidence of being "wrong" or did he correct a previously wrong value and came to the same conclusion (which seems reasonable to me in context)?
It seems like this blogger is guilty of the same criticisms he has against Zitron. They seem eager to find where Zitron is wrong, exaggerating the value of when he misses the mark and without looking at big picture. Then they make sensationalist claims based on those findings.
You’re missing the bigger picture concepts of value exchange vs. value extraction and how those magnify power differentials in groups.
> I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI
Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?
> if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.
Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?
> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible
Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.
Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.
It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.
> Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?
If I've said something around someone else or posted it online, then I don't feel I have a right to someone's use of that information, no.
> Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person.
And you decided to make this post on a forum that an AI is certainly scraping as we speak. If you don't want anyone or anything to "extract" your ideas then don't express them. We never would have left the caves if everyone had that mindset, but it's your right.
You keep saying "extraction" as if something is taken from you whenever a machine learns from you, but it's not a zero-sum situation.
Scenario A: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types. The world gains 1 point of value because Sam has gained 1 point of value.
Scenario B: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types, and a robot overhears it and tells 10 people. The world has gained 11 points of value.
Amazing how many software engineers don't do this and continue to fool themselves into thinking they're faster with AI. If only more people would track and reflect on their time use.
Writing out my nod of appreciation to counterbalance some of the negativity. I do enjoy the effort and thought you into this essay. I didn’t read the whole thing, just a few sections from the beginning, and I think you do a great job explaining how these concepts evolved from simple beginnings.
You’ve condensed down a lot of concepts I learned through research and trial-and-error over my career as a SWE.
Thank you for sharing Faza. Please continue putting in the effort and sharing these essays!
Thanks. Glad you liked it. That was my intention with these articles. To explain how most of the things which we take for granted evolved. Even I was able to learn so many new things and find gaps in my own understanding while writing it. I am only doing it because I felt other content on these concepts either just focused on the technicals completely or dumbed down the concepts too much so everyone could follow easily. This is just my attempt at explaining things in detail without making it hard to follow. Initially I had no plans of using any simulations, i was just thinking explaining things with just my writing and some diagrams, but I saw how I can explain things much better with a simulation.
About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
> About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all.
...and the top 10% by wealth own 90% of the stock market.
So even among the half that do have retirement savings in 401ks and the like it is on average very little compared to how much the truly wealthy have invested.
DeepSeek models are open-source so there are a bunch of third-party providers offering similar prices. Factoring in that DeepSeek have to train the model (whereas third parties can make a small profit over just the inference costs) I'd assume that on net they're spending investor money, but I wouldn't think that's any less true of OpenAI.
Yes, DeepSeek is open-weight, but these third-party providers offering similar prices are subsidized with VC money as well. And you can find a range of prices for deepseek-v4-flash going up to and over $1/Mtok.
Even that $1/Mtok provided by Together AI is heavily subsidized by more than $1B in VC money.
This makes it unclear how the true cost curve is progressing. It’s not possible to confidently comment one way or another on the rate that cost is coming down when the entire industry is so heavily subsidized.
> Even that $1/Mtok provided by Together AI is heavily subsidized
Can you link this? I'm unable to find them offering deepseek-v4-flash. I think you could even host the pro model for a bit under $1/Mtok. You can get ~1000TPS out of the box on a B300 that you can rent for ~$3/hr, so around $0.83/Mtok.
Regardless - Alibaba, DeepSeek, NovitaAI, AtlasCloud, Cloudflare, DeepInfra, SiliconFlow, GMICloud, Morph, Baidu, Parasail, DigitalOcean, AkashML, StreamLake and likely others all seem to be offering it under $0.3 per million output tokens[0].
> This makes it unclear how the true cost curve is progressing
For no actual improvement in efficiency to be presented as a 10X yearly improvement since 2018, we'd need to currently be getting 100000000X more intensive models than we should be for what we're paying (a $1/Mtok model actually costs $100000000/Mtok). Presenting, say, a 9X actual yearly improvement as a 10X yearly improvement seems feasible, but for much beyond that I think the exponential just compounds too fast to reasonably fake.
Unless your insider is the CFO, I wouldn’t trust these sources to have the access, knowledge, or insight to determine whether they’re running inference at a profit.
Simple test: can they get their hands on a data center contracts and financials?
Search isn’t anywhere near as high profile as the profitability of AI inference, and yet, even aspects of the Search org were walled off from the rest of the company such that other employees couldn’t see what we see.
I say the following not to brag but to offer up some more perspective for you: you’re comp is in the lower-mid range of the market. Comp was there for remote, startup eng positions back in 2017.
As you move up in comp, the market actually gets more difficult, not just because the market is more competitive but because some companies won’t even interview qualified engineers with FAANG on their resume because they don’t believe they can afford them.
So I can understand why you might have an easier time compared to other engs.
> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Do you not see the problem here?
Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.
Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.
Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.
Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.
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