I quite like the idea of a future where the AI job holocaust largely never happened because license costs ate up most of the innovation benefit. It's just the kind of regressive greed that keeps the world ticking along and wouldn't be surprised if we ended up with something very close to this

Also, the pool of public domain data is always increasing, so the AI will eventually win in any case, even if we have to wait 100 years

But one thing this reminds me of is the idea of a "trap street", something mapmakers used to do was put in false locations on their maps to prove that other mapmakers were copying them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street . I figure you could do something similarly adversarial with AI to pollute the public training data on the internet. IDK like adversarial attacks on image classifiers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOZw1tgD8dA . With an LLM you could try to make them into a manchurian candidate.

Not quite realistic. You are talking about very huge benefits, in favor of which licenses will be abandoned. And who don't abandoned them... I mean you can look at the Amish settlements.

Not everyone has to know about, understand, or use open source solutions for it to open the field.

This is just a weird dichotomy you're introducing. Open source will introduce price pressure as any competition will - that doesn't mean you won't have a monopoly.

Idk what you mean by saying this doesn't preclude a monopoly - having your pricing power eroded by competition is kinda one of the key features of what a monopolistic market isn't

A monopoly means a company has enough leverage to corner and disproportionately own the market. This is entirely possible (and usually the case) even with significant pricing pressure.

Feels like I won't be paying for anything that isn't real-time. And that any time delay I can introduce in my process will come with massive savings. Picture hiding the loading of loot info behind a treasure chest opening animation in a game, except that time difference means you can pull all the work in-house.

Openrouter.ai seems like a step in the right direction but I'd want to do all their calculations myself as well as factor in local/existing gear in a way they don't.

You need to pay energy bill, do the update/upgrade and you need to build a LLM rig.

Nvidias Digits Project could be very interesting, but this box will cost 3k.

We are a lot closer to running it at home than i assumed we would but plenty of people prefer SaaS over doing stuff themselves.

Right now the average person has to go through a vendor with a web app, there's not a lot of room for the public to explore.

Things could change in a hurry.

I don't think we expect a company to exist solely making a proprietary web server anymore and be a behemoth of 300B. OpenAi might end up at the same model as Nginx or Docker if they don't pivot or find a different model.

It passed every goofy test I have for writing articles which involves trying to surface arcane obscure details. (it certainly means however they are scraping the Web they are doing a good job here)

It made the database code I wrote over the last week with o3/o1/GPT4o/Claude3.5 look like a joke.

It fills me with rage over who owns this thing.

Even if people tank Tesla's car business and run Twitter into the ground, I think our new Galactic Edgelord is going to win his first trillion on xAI and Teslabots anyway.

btw: it tried to charge me $40/mo for this thing: https://imgur.com/a/QXslgBo

Also, the "Deep Search" button was not available when it first went live, so I'm retesting everything again with this feature enabled, which I assume is a reasoning version of the same model.

Personally, I wouldn’t use it though. What’s going on with Elon Musk right now is completely insane. I hope to see OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 & GPT-5 releases to catch up soon, if nothing else. Announced for this year.

Someone that is not elected gets 8mill/day from the government now overseas the government with some 20-year old fanatics that can’t even put up a secure website for DOGE?

Tell me you don’t know how the US government works without telling me you don’t know how the US government works, why don’t you?

""[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: *but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.*"

Emphasis on the last sentence. There have been a plethora of such vestments in the Executive branch over the decades.

5 U.S.C. § 105 - This statute authorizes the creation of "necessary agencies" within the Executive Office, giving the President flexibility to establish entities like the USDS and staff them as needed, subject to funding.

5 U.S.C. § 3101 - This law states that "each Executive agency" (including the EOP) "may employ such number of employees ... as Congress may appropriate for." It implies broad authority to hire staff, with Congress controlling the budget but not necessarily the individual appointments.

Excepted Service Authority (5 U.S.C. § 3301 and Schedule A) - Under 5 CFR § 213.3102, agencies like the OMB can use Schedule A hiring authority for positions requiring specialized skills (e.g., tech expertise) that aren’t practical to fill through standard civil service exams.

This authority, delegated by Congress via the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (Public Law 95-454) and regulations from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), allows the President (or OMB leadership) to appoint USDS personnel directly.

Term Appointments - Many roles are temporary or term-limited (e.g., 2-4 years), often filled by detailees from other agencies or private-sector experts. These don’t require Senate confirmation because they aren’t permanent "officers." This flexibility is supported by 5 U.S.C. § 3161, which allows temporary organizations within the executive branch to hire staff for specific projects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037624

And he's not even "auditing" the government. When you're auditing, you emit a report that the audited party later analyzes and acts upon. He's been given freeway to fire government workers as he pleases as if he's an elected officer, which he's not.

They are auditing as part of their process of cutting costs. They're literally tracing trillions of dollars in financial records.

He's doing everything he's doing by executive order of the President of the United States, who was elected.

He, a single person, has far too much control of our system.

Thats not how it works.

Btw. i think having the richest man in the world in his current position is very very unique.

And already has a number of lawsuits started because he's trying to do things neither he nor the president are allowed to do. Getting an EO to do something doesn't mean it's automatically legal. Multiple big decisions have already been reverted or are held until judges can review them. Even things like the promised payout for quitting are not practical, because only congress can approve the money for that.

Wrong tools.

They can use data processing, detect anomalies better, leverage AI models, automate data extraction from analog records, ingest unstructured data like emails and memos, build complex financial dependency graphs, detect leaks, build custom scrapers, etc etc.

I'm sure there's at least one accountant in the loop, but you really want the team to consist mostly of data nerds.

You also seem confused; COBOL might be used, but it isn't the only tool available to accountants working for the government. COBOL is a straw-man. What you're describing here—software engineers who presumably have training in accounting—already exists, and they work inside and out of the government. This is an existing career path.

You're speaking about this as though you know a better way to do something, but it's already happening, and has been for years. Accountants aren't writing 62 year old programming languages waiting to die in their chairs while the world continues to progress without them.

Accounting just about anywhere you find it is already accomplished by accountants, some of them technically trained, as well as data scientists and software engineers. It's an interdisciplinary collaboration in any serious organization.

Or they will have absolutely no idea about the context and for example reveal secret information while they think they're just looking at money https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-doge-posts-classifi...

You can easily get drowned by a see of numbers and get confused and gaslighted, unless you don’t make sure all data is available and computable.

Not sure how this release, which impressive by all means transformed into an attack on DOGE which is the exact approach startups are taking to disrupt an industry.

How much disruption started with massive failures?

You don't start with a live system or did SpaceX put astronauts in therir first rockets?

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/01/17/richard-feynman-of...

There is no evidence of this happening, nor of a serviceable plan to do so.

All recovered expenses, to date, add up to a laughably small amount, and are one-time cutbacks. The strategy shows signs of costing the government in unexpected ways as well.

Most governments of developed nations operate in more sensible ways with clearer plans than this. I won't claim they are looting, but it's absurd to suggest they are fixing the deficit at the moment. The economy appears to be getting worse, not better.

What evidence is there that the current moves will lead to "fixing the deficit?"

Illegally redistributing of appropriated spending could be easily understood as looting in most context. Not sure how this would be excluded.

I think this has two errors.

First, I don't agree that he's fixing the deficit. I think that's an assumption not in evidence. We'll see in a few years time, though. I'd be willing to bet in 4 years the deficit is > 0, and likely larger than it is today.

But let's assume arguendo that he is fixing the deficit. It's still possible to loot the treasury while fixing the deficit, which shows that they aren't actually the opposite.

Consider this example with completely made up numbers:

Before

- Revenue: $1T

- Defense Spending: $500B

- Benefits Spending: $1T

- Public Services Spending: $499.9B

- Government Contracts with Musk's Companies: $100M

The before scenario has $1T in revenue, and $2T in spending, for a deficit of $1T. Now, let's allow hypothetical Musk to have free-reign to "fix the deficit"

After

- Revenue: $800B

- Defense Spending: $300B

- Benefits Spending: $300B

- Public Services Spending: $100B

- Government Contracts with Musk's Companies: $100B

In this scenario the deficit has been reduced to $0, while Musk has enriched himself and his companies with $99.9B in government funds. This would be an extreme example of Musk looting the treasury, while still completely resolving the deficit.

This creates numerous conflicts of interests and opportunities for self-dealing.

Consider a NASA employee that is awarding government contracts. They know all of the above. They have three bids in front of them. One from Boeing (lol), one from SpaceX, and one from Axiom Space. They NASA employee thinks the bid from Axiom Space is the best value and fits the requirements the best. But will they select them, or will they select SpaceX, knowing that they could be fired tomorrow by Musk's whim?

Repeat this scenario across every interaction any of Musk's companies have with the federal government.

This isn't a novel scenario. Putin's Russia is a great example of what happens when oligarchs are granted significant autonomy over organs of the government. It is a system designed to facilitate corruption.

You could assuage my concerns, though, by describing the ways that there is effective oversight over Musk, or by describing the anti-corruption anti-self-dealing measures that have been imposed on Musk. The Press Secretary gave a statement on this saying: "As for concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts." That...does not resolve my concerns.

Then why the hell are they still waving flags?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191304

Your bias is showing.

When everyone goes around calling everyone they hate a Nazi, it only desensitizes people to the real Nazi behavior, kind of like the boy who cried wolf, since there's people out there committing actual atrocities against humans going under the public radar because they never do the Nazi salutes on camera to not draw attention. So then the Nazi term starts to loose any meaning, kind of like the overuse of calling everything "woke" today.

The problem is people as a whole are retarded due to mob behavior and too focused on optics and only judge based on feelings rather than facts, that's how we have actual criminal Nazis going free under the radar while innocent people being swatted and doxxed because they said something right wing on social media. Not all Nazis today wear jackboots and do heils, plenty go about appearing like normal people in public, they could even be your neighbor, police officer or local congressman.

So save your anger for those people instead, as Elon is just a 3 year old throwing tantrums seeking attention, annoying but relatively harmless. If people stopped giving him so much attention, he'd stop doing it.

He said the far-right extremist AfD is "the only hope" for Germany. You can maybe tell other people on how they're not taking the Nazis seriously enough by not "saving their anger" until literally Holocaust; but not us. Americans may still be ho-humm about it, but as far as Germany is concerned, he wants to cross the Rubicon, and every single movement he makes or syllable he utters will be viewed with that in mind.

> If people stopped giving him so much attention, he'd stop doing it.

This is basically blaming the thing criticized on the people criticizing it.

How cunningly you replace "circle of corrupt ruling German elites" with "Germany".

What makes you so sure/special in this regard? What are you gaining from this? If your were that enlightened as you claim, Germany wouldn't be in such a mess right now. If you only spent as much effort in securing your borders, energy independence and defence, as you spent lecturing others on imaginary Nazis and banning hate speech on social media, you'd be a respectable world power right now at the table with Trump and Putin ending this war before it even happened. The "we know better than you" arrogance is Germany's biggest problem.

>This is basically blaming the thing criticized on the people criticizing it.

It's not blaming, I'm just telling you what the simplest solution is. Ignoring attention seekers is better than giving them more attention. Which is why I'm also gonna ignore your future comments form now on.

Germany? the scope of the discussion is already limited to the AfD. What makes Germans special in their opinions about Nazis in Germany to is deep experience and knowledge with the subject you are belittling. And I'm also not spending any time banning hate speech on social media, heh. Whatever chip on your shoulder you have about Germany I can barely even decipher and you're right, it's best to agree to disagree.

If he does to the USA Gov what he did to Twitter, he will destroy the brand, reduce the workforce by 80% and reduce the value by 80% too.

The issue with him is, tha tin Twitter, the affected people had money. A missed payment of USA can literaly kill people.

He would have regretted it if it wouldn't have played out (and this game he is currently playing, is not finished yet) like it currently does. He said in an interview that he puts everything on one card now.

Edit: Also he gets a lot of valuation due to him being a cult or whatever. From companies surviving the AI phase we are in right now, if he can't get the nazi people on his side to buy his stuff, he is a very high risk.

He destroyed twitters brand and bluesky emerged. He destroys Tesla and other car makers making ground. SpaceX needs a lot of subsidies and his goal for mars is only a cult topic not a financial success topic.

Here is an unelected NAZI and ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT (worked illegally on a student visa) who did a seig heil at the presidential inauguration taking up an informal unconfirmed-by-congress department head role (DOGE is just US Digital Services renamed) and getting wide access to government systems, and seemingly firing thousands of government employees.

Billionaires, who should not exist, are so rich that they don’t need government services and would rather the government go away so they can make more money. But regular people do need a government, and that’s just one reason of many why Elon shouldn’t be anywhere near policy decisions.

Now, you might say I’m being dramatic. But I’ll say there is no criticism of this man is unfair. He is one of the world’s biggest hypocrites, along with the other MAGA Nazis in his camp.

And lets see if Musk is pushing too many people too far. Everything he currently does can blow up in his face very fast

Is it? Because it seems like a bunch of megacorps pirating every single copyrighted work available in digital format, spending an enormous amount of electricity (that is probably not 100% clean) to churn through them, and the end result we have a bunch of parrots that may or may not produce accurate results so that spammers can more effectively fill the Internet with crap.

That statement is clearly in reference to the fact there are more than 2-3 companies constantly improving their models. You are referencing the fact that there is greater than zero models available.

These things still cost me time because of hallucinations.

It matters if it is better than what you have.

If it breaks a cup but is 10x cheaper than a human, go figer

How many times do you think I've heard that over the past three decades? And you know what? They've been right every time, except for this one little fact:

The machine cannot make you give a shit about the problem space.

This hype will burst sooner than later and will trigger yet another global recession. This is untenable.

Sounds incredibly valuable, but in reality collapses into Butlerian Jihad fairly quickly when you have 90% unemployment.

Edit: if the claims are true, then this will be far more destabilizing than social media. What do elections mean when the AI-guided political parties are putting out AI press releases for the AI press summaries, which voters have read out to them through their AI? What happens when >50% of the voters ask the AI who they should vote for? You end up with an AI dictatorship where the levers of discontent are fake.

What AI and robotics does is actually create a machine that has no use for humans at all. Ñ

But nobody really knows if that happens or not as a consequence, let alone quickly, because the transition itself only happened at all so far in fiction.

Whatever does happen, I think it's going to be a surprise to at a minimum 80% of the population.

>This hype will burst sooner than later and will trigger yet another global recession.

It seems to small of bubble for global recession. I mean if it is a bubble at all, there is all the reasons to believe that the strategy will work with a significant probability.

OpenAI's business model was literally "we don't have one: we'll make AGI and we'll let AGI tell us how to make money". This is so idiotic it's not even a scam. xAI will compete on the same plane field. Not sure about Anthropic: they seem a bit more sane.

There’s a whole class of educational apps that could open up for people learning in the physical world. Whether it’s building physical things, sports or reading books or notes written in non-latin scripts... the impact will be enormous!

What does the scenario look like where everyone else gets eaten alive?

This lame HN trope of LLMs having no business model needs to die.

https://sacra.com/research/cursor-at-100m-arr/

Sounds legit.

It’s losing more billions than what it’s generating. Revenue does not equate profit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...

That is only true is your primary concern in life is personal wealth and you’re burning other people’s money.

The bandwidth costs made it deeply loss making for a long time despite having loads of engagement and ad revenue. However over time they became more cost efficient at sending video over the internet and became profitable.

This strategy obviously doesn't always work, with WeWork being the canonical example. But it's not guaranteed to fail either.

There were LOTS of funded competitors to YouTube between 2006 and 2009, including Viddler (who paid Gary Vaynerchuk a small fortune to host his WineLibraryTV show there exclusively), DailyMotion (which is still alive today, although no longer a threatening contender), etc.

In 2009 I had a coaching business and was buying marketing courses and software which would deploy your videos across 40+ different video websites (including Google Video which was a separate thing until they acquired YouTube and merged those), and YouTube wasn't yet amounting to 50% of our video traffic.

I think you might be mistaken with the bold statement above.

The capabilities of LLMs are impressive, but none of them have published an idea I consider to have the same potential for a trillion $ monopoly that the current hype looks like.

There are far more similarities with the dot-com hype.

No critical first mover advantage in sight. All parts are replaceable for the cheapest variant with little to no down side to users.

Most of them would have responded by explaining what a monopoly is, and why this reply makes little sense.

All the LLM providers are - extremely useful - tools. Currently I can only see the 'non-monopoly' proportional improvement when their userbase grows from 100 to 1000.

But I might be wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if in hindsight it will be obvious what the real disproportionate advantages there were to be found.

If started selling 5 dollar bills for 1 dollar, I could generate a lot of revenue with $150B. You wouldn't believe the demand we would see for $5 bills.

Are we really still doing this nonsense? If Open AI wanted to become profitable they could do it inside of 12 months - growing companies don't care about profitability (nor should they)

All currently known profitable use-cases are competing on price. All the unicorn examples you're biased for had in their pitch deck the network effect of being the largest.

OpenAI, Grok, etc, have shown no unique value prop or an idea with monopoly potential.

Remember when everyone on HN was sure Uber would never be profitable? Or Tesla? Or Amazon?

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/altman_gpt_profits/

Of course, they are clearly cooking something or they wouldn't have just published a benchmark in which they do badly.

OpenAI is currently in an explicit non-profit seeking mode using a technology that we have demonstrated 10-100x or greater decreases in compute to achieve the same outcomes.

This is not a declaration that OpenAI will become wildly profitable. This is just me saying that these aren't comparable companies.

Google gives everyone free access to a good spreadsheet tool, even though Microsoft Office exists.

Web browsers are free, despite the value of the entire internet.

Compilers are free, despite the value of all software collectively.

LLMs being really valuable doesn't automatically mean anyone can get rich from them.

I think everyone last year parroting "moat!" was cringe (like Altman of all people wouldn't know about this already, c'mon), but you do actually need something that other people don't have. I expect Altman's already got stuff in mind, but he's hardly the only one, and that means it's a game of "which multibillionaire with lots of experience building companies will win?", and that's hard for non-skilled normies (in this case incluing me) to guess.

Re: Dropbox, from a well known user. It didn't age well and we've been asked not to repeat it because it makes the author with connections to this site's operator look bad.

> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

the controversy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

I assume you're referring to this:

https://sacra.com/research/cursor-at-100m-arr/

It went from 10M MRR to 100M

The dot com bubble also gave us the most valuable companies in history, like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

Whatever helps you sleep at night I suppose.

That's what I mean. One example are PV panels, they are making energy production cheaper, so their producers should be good investment right? No they go bust all the time because prices are falling and margins are thin even if the volume grows. Of course the economies of scale here are different but still.

That being said it's my understanding that these companies don't have many huge contracts at all -- you can audit this in like 10 minutes on FPDS. Companies need a LOT of capital, time, and expertise to break into the industry and just compliance audit timelines are 1-4 years right now, so this could definitely change in the next couple years.

I wouldn't bet on that, given the undemocratic influence Grok's owner has in government.