ywvcbk
ywvcbk on Hacker News
> heavily subsidizes cheap personal plans.
They are of course are the ones paying for R&D of new models but its not exactly clear if gross margins on subscriptions are negative. It might be just normal market segmentation just like SaaS companies charging enterprise users many times more than private individuals.
> An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power.
Yes, not from a fixed physical location. If the empire fell when rome ceased to be "the seat of power" it was no longer the Roman empire by ~300 AD was it? Diocletian was larping...
The Roman empire continiously changed and evolved. The empire in ~300 AD wouldn't have made any sense to Romans from 100 BC (and probably a lot more sense to the Romans from 1000 AD)
I don't see how buggy software directly leads to generating more money? A company being successful doesn't somehow magically make them infallible, 100% rational or immune to making mistakes (as you are implying).
OpenaAI and Anthropic models are priced quite competitively with open ones, they even cut prices by quite a bit since spring. So it's not too surprising that their revenue is pretty high, the question is whether the competition and downward price pressure from open model providers combined with their extremely high R&D spending is sustainable.
Well it's completely voluntary since no sane person would ever need a "smart" coffee machine connected to the internet. So IMHO it's more Idiocracy than Black Mirror
> Both Luna and Haiku are more expensive than DS4.1 Flash at API cost
Are they. Luna uses way less tokens for identical tasks so its a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
But it also frequently uses massively more tokens for the same task compared to other models which kind of negates the speed.
It's probably not illegal per se. But if you violate their ToS they can just stop providing you services.
> The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point
I'm not sure that's true amongst most large enterprise companies.
> They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job
They could but unfortunately there have only ever been a small handful of European tech companies which got anywhere close to that
Which indicates they are no longer serious about being an AI lab and downgraded themselves to merely being a hosting provider
> the contract workers are the ones taking the
True, OTH it's not obvious that these jobs would even exist in the first place without Uber/etc. since demand has certainly increased
Airbnb maybe, in Europe booking.com seems to have better deals even if they offer similar service to Airbnb these days.
Uber and other ride sharing apps improved UX immensely and still are cheaper for consumers than regular taxes.
> their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.
Neither AirBnB or Uber are anywhere close to being monopolies aside from maybe a few markers that I'm not aware of.
> you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits
For employees yeah, pay and conditions are not great compared to normal taxi drivers OTH the demand is higher and there are more "jobs" on aggregate.
> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.
Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.
> once they're good enough for coding aid
The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.
Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.
Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).
Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.
20 perhaps, but just about. Probably not 10 years and certainly not 5 years ago (obviously they are way faster now, but from the perspective of normal users running software designed based on the constraints of the hardware available at the time)
Or people could just stop buying Mars bars and other ultra-processed foods if they feel they are overpriced which would force corporations to adjust their policies. Mars, Nestle, McDonalds etc. will continue increasing prices as long as people keep buying regardless of how much they complain.
The pricing of normal raw food products, produce etc. is generally quite transparent.
The population collapse in New England happened only a couple of years before the Plymouth colony was established though (they didn't have any meaningful contact with the Spanish colonies where it happened in the mid and early 1500s).
Of course probably it took quite a bit more for it to reach the Amazon but it's not like Europeans were that familiar or explore the region that much until the 1800s or so.
Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
Well Chinnese companies are way more efficient, Deepseek did manage to get quite far with a relatively tiny number of staff and limited funding. Then you have companies like Meta which suck pretty much at everything they (excluding their core business) regardless of how much money they throw at it.
Do you have any evidence to back this claim?
> This is one of the most successful investment companies
It was for a long time. There is not a lot of evidence that's still the case (so far at least but even if the crash comes but its not big enough its not guaranteed they will outperform S&P 500 over a several year period).
It seems like of the most outdated and inflexible indicators that's widely used though? Does not account that a much higher proportion of the US economy might be represented in the stock market and that US service companies are generating massive revenue outside of US (in some cases the majority). That wasn't the case 50 years ago.
Why single out Australia though? I mean one conclusion that can be made from arguments like this is that if you do commit genocide and ethnic cleansing you better go all the way and wipe out the other group 100% so your grand children can avoid any type of ancestor blame or demands for compensation (like in plenty of other countries like Turkey etc.)
In plenty of cases it's absolutely self evident (especially when there are plenty of historical precedents for similar or analogous situations).
Yes you can get involved in extended arguments with people arguing in bad faith or whose world view is fundamentally incompatible with your but that's usually just a waste of time (I mean you wouldn't argue with Nazis either just the same as with people trying to institute a Stasi style surveillance apparatus through slow boiling)