1. LLMs are remarkable and they've uncapped a supply/demand loop for software that has previously been much more tightly constrained than anyone realized. It turns out that if software is much cheaper and faster to make, people find ways to use a lot more software, so much so that the world is temporarily completely out of all the parts you need to make the machines that turn electricity into software.
2. The leading tech companies have spent wildly on something that seems likely to turn out to be a commodity that sells for a few points over what it costs to provide it on the expectation that the gains in software developer productivity would also apply to every other industry in a reasonable time, replacing human workers and increasing productivity.
Recklessly taking a trillion+ in debt to corner the market, only to find you can't actually corner it and can't built a real moat with this technology as long as everybody knows how it works (and everybody that wants to know, knows how it works), seems precarious, to me.
They have to make a lot more than $100/month off of everyone using their services for this to work out for them, and nobody wants to spend a lot more than $100/month for these services. People start looking around for alternatives the moment Anthropic says, "Well, first one's free, but we're going to take away the best model on the subscription plans pretty soon, of course."
Ed may be wrong on some points. But, it's hard for me to look at how much money the big guys have spent and not wonder, "Who's going to buy the services at the prices they need to charge?" It isn't going to be me.
He (and I) might have been wrong on how useful the LLMs could get, but time isn't proving him wrong on his claims that the usefulness doesn't justify the investments around LLMs
It is the fundamental question of is there enough willing buyers. And I am doubting that very much. Next step is to question if there is enough willing buyers and they are replacing white collar workers. Do these customers then have enough willing buyers? Is building data centres and infra to service them a viable way to replace most of the economy?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Hard to know of Zitron actually believes what he writes, is trapped in some type of mania, or keeps doing the same bit to pay the bills. Probably a mix of all 3.
He's a grifter who uses his followers to make money. He tells his followers stuff that he likely doesn't believe in himself but his followers want those things to be true.
Your comments are casting aspersion without showing that you have looked into the work or its author. This project is a case study in good work done with heavy ai assistance while it is clear that there is a skilled person leading. I predict that this will become very common and welcome here.
Why should anyone put serious time and effort into using/understanding a product when the author hasn't put serious time and effort into making it?
I could make this exact same thing over a weekend and post it on Hackernews. But I won't because I would be embarrassed to do so.
The bar for posting something to HN should be high, the bar for wanting people to read your code, your writing, should be putting serious effort and thought into it. Not just vibe coding something up with a vibe coded README and 100% vibe coded code and not even a novel idea or implementation.
I think you are putting more effort into arguing it’s not worth it to read the link, than just reading the link would take. I am not sure what you think your comments are accomplishing, they are not useful, just pedantic
Apart from the 'Approve for me' in Codex where it has massively regressed.
With GPT 5.5 it never got in the way.
Now it's infuriatingly deciding to reject the most basic actions used hundreds of times before. It just gave me this gem:
> The push to GitLab was blocked because the repository's privacy status couldn't be confirmed. Since the code is private, do you explicitly authorize pushing it to the configured origin on gitlab.com, so the merge request can be opened?
This is not a new project, and Codex has opened a hundred merge requests without issue before.
I'm tempted to try it out. I'm not keep to move but Fable rejected some work i was working on recently and frankly it's infuriating lol. I've been on Claude x20 for like 8 months now and now i'm tempted to switch out of spite.
It is surprisingly offensive.
The only friction for me is the general expensiveness of trying out top tier models, eg OpenAI's Fable equivalent (Sol?) to run for a trial period. I'd like to see a like-like comparison, eg buy x20 on OpenAI and see how much Sol i can use, how well it works, etc.
edit: Though surprisingly Claude seems to think Codex doesn't have hooks? That'll be tough, i use Claude hooks quite a bit.
> Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online
Agree that we should work on reducing the stigma around reading (which, incidentally, feels ridiculous to type); but very clearly one of these exercises your mind and one doesn't. People should want to learn things!
What about fiction vs non-fiction? Travel vs escapism? This is hugely subjective, and very personal. What one person finds educational could be a navel gazing time wasting pursuit to someone else.
You need the right products and services. If you know what those are, then you need employees to build them. Until you figure out what those are, you are (sadly) better off with fewer people.
Yeah this lightweight startup could really use some guidance on how to make products with global reach it's a pity they don't have any experience with that.
Yeah, I was very excited for Fable to come back to use it for work after using Opus 4.8, but now I guess I'm just excited for Sol/Terra/Luna (unless they have the same restrictions)
It's very likely that OAI models will have even more restrictions. Firstly because now they know what feds will do if you don't tune the safety classifiers towards more false positives and secondly, OAI models were always more restrictive than ANT.
The upside of using this is that AI shops might pay you for your content. Realistically, they just won't use your content, there is more than enough free (or synthetic) data out there. Not even to mention their contracts with firms like Mercor etc.
I guess I don't understand who this is for. If you want your worldview reflected in the latest generations of models, you probably wouldn't use this. If you don't want your worldview reflected in the models, why would a few pennies change your mind?
I think that's a pretty wild statement: there isn't just one type of content!
Twilight fan fiction? Claude probably won't pay for that.
But critical programming documentation that its bots (and their human users) rely on to do their daily job ? You better believe Anthropic will pay for that (instead of letting another AI pay for it, and steal all their customers).
Sure, they'll probably pay PyPi, the Swift Foundation, etc for that documentation - but it's a pretty small universe of relevant content. An interns tech blog with a 'hello world in javascript' post won't be paid for, the Mercor contractors are doing more (and better) than that!
I don’t think this is aimed at the labs and pre-training, it’s aimed at end users and their agents. Like if you’re a news site the paying customer isn’t a lab scraping your articles for training, it’s an end user that asked their agent to lookup the news of the day
Of course nobody wants to pay for anything, and you like me would like to be given everything for free without having to give anything in exchange. But why would somebody want to give it for free?
You can read some ad-supported news for free right now. But there's probably a large enough group of customers who would prefer paying a subscription instead, just like with music.
I do not find the Anthropic allegations believable.
All the results presented in these distillation papers are for very small models.
In order to gain anything, Alibaba or others would need today to use the Anthropic models to improve LLMs at least one hundred times bigger than those tested in these papers.
I assume that the number of queries to the teacher LLM grows superlinearly with the size of the student model, which would mean that billions of queries would be needed. Even for a linear growth, at least hundreds of millions of queries would be needed.
I do not see how any Claude account could do so many queries without being detected. Even if the queries would be distributed over thousands of accounts, it would still be easy for Anthropic to stop any such attempts.
one could also see the fable-5 getting pulled off, US govt-ant talks, etc as part of all this globally i think
which is may way to say maybe Anthropic knows this isnt true, but they still will say otherwise publicly to make this admin understand whatever they need regardless on potential security issues etc, idk im extrapolating toomuch probably
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