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This is not about wars or winning contracts. If you know about Sam's strategies - It's just business. This deal ensures Anthropic doesn't have the financial cushion that OpenAI desperately needs (they just raised billions, also trending on HN). Is it ethical? Probably not. But, all is fair in love and war (proverb).

The deal was only possible because anthropic stayed by their convictions. OpenAI didn't have agency in that. You're making it sound like Altman orchestrated the whole thing.

> You're making it sound like Altman orchestrated the whole thing.

Not at all, as a matter of fact I'm just stating what you're stating. It's just business.


I get the feeling they didn't like Anthropic from the start for whatever reason and just found excuses to dump them and find an alternative provider. There's also the possibility the DoW will still have its way and this is possibly only a statement for the public.

P.S I'm not political (no left/right drama), just speculative.


The question is why was it so urgent to bring this up right now. The answer is that the US Navy has carrier battle groups stationed off the coast of Iran right now.

US F22 fighter jets have been spotted on Israeli airfields by Chinese commercial satellites in the past 3 days.

A full scale strike on Iran is imminent and they want to leverage LLMs for data analysis and quite possibly automated target selection.

Literally the SkyNet scenario both researchers and frickin pop culture have warned about for years.


Don't know why im being down voted on this. The reality of the situation will become evident in the next 2 weeks

Wow, NYTimes posted news of a strike only 30 minutes after my comment.

I thought it sounded very conspiratorial (can you even integrate a new model that quickly?) until I learned that Israel launched strikes on Iran literally as I was typing out the comment. I bow in respect to your analytic skills.


Wow, you were spot-on with this.

So far this is correct, you were 40 minutes ahead of the news of the strike

> "money you have" is just an int32

Damn, that's terrifyingly eye opening. That's a really, really strong argument for physical cash (or gold maybe?)


> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.

Welcome to 90% of HN blog post submissions :))

I switched to Proton mail 2 years ago. Now I'm in this weird limbo where I want to go back but I can't because Proton's email search is so bad that I often default to Gmail where I still keep forwarding a copy of all my emails just for searching them later on. And this is even with the setting to search through the contents of the mail being turned on.

You might think "well, that's no biggie, I can manage that" but no. I didn't realise how important searching your email was until I was at a bank and they kept asking me some documents from years ago that were only inside my email.

The proton client on the phones are particularly bad and unusably slow in such emergency situations. Now I can't switch back to Google workspace because I started using a lot of the email aliases provided by Proton and it's going to be a clusterfuck once I unsubscribe.

Live and learn.


> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:

> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.

> i’m sorry to put you through this.

POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.

I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.

This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.


> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.

Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.

My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.

Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.


> Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory.

The people decreasing headcount are already behind the curve. They're thinking about how many people they need to run things instead of how many people they need to reinvent an industry.


Yes, unfortunately. Each headcount, properly trained and reskilled, is now worth a whole team by themselves! I blame capitalism and the inability to look past the next quarterly earnings statement for what's happening instead.

I think in the (very) long run it will end up being for the best. This will force us lowly serfs to grow beyond our wage-labor mindset and leverage this force multiplier for ourselves.

AI lets those with capital get rid of labor, but by the same token(s ;-)) labor can now achieve outsize results without capital!

It is going to be very uncomfortable, but evolution always is.


It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.

I agree with this take. The AI is producing tons of debt still, we will see if that pattern holds or if people automate that part into the agents as well.

Actually, AI's do need code to be pretty. It's becoming widely accepted that whatever is good for humans -- modular code, tests, docs, linters, fast feedback loops -- is good for agents.

I keep repeating this, but the latest data from large-scale dev reports like DORA 2025 and DX find that AI is simply an amplifier of your engineering culture: Teams with strong software engineering discipline enjoy increased velocity with fewer outages, whereas teams with weak discipline suffer more outages.

About the only thing they need (for now) is architectural guidance and spot-checking of results. But then how many architects does any given company need?


> why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges,

This is a very interesting perspective, I haven't thought of it like that.


Your theory is wrong.

Someone will inevitably have to prompt AIs, CEOs and other executives are NOT going to be doing it themselves. The people driving those AI will have greater leverage as less and less people choose a career in tech.

Also, when an AI fucks up in a way only a human can fix, the human must be available.

What I see more likely is a future where software engineers do even less work but frustratingly you still need them around to fix problems whenever they come up. Kind of like firefighters.


Agreed, and the AI wranglers will be the equivalent of architects and staff+ engineers today, and they will be paid handsomely. BUT! They are a pretty small fraction of the current developer workforce. The remaining junior-to-mid level engineers will have to uplevel themselves while having no opportunity for hands-on experience to do so as they get laid off in bulk.

And note, this pattern is going to repeat across the entire white collar workforce, because the same pyramid scheme holds everywhere in knowledge work.

A new equilibrium will be found, but that will be years, maybe a decade+ away? That's the period of turmoil I am concerned about.


> Also, when an AI fucks up in a way only a human can fix, the human must be available

Actually its more “when an AI fucks up in a way AI that you need a human to take the blame, the human must be available”


>>I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter.

Jesus.. why do CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts....! Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama.

Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.


> such useless language in their posts

"Your call is very important to us."

"We take security very seriously."

PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.


It's for the people who still work there.

It surely still does look stupid for the same people though..

Do they make sure new employees all remove the shift key from their company laptop or is that limited by band?

At that level, pressing shift probably affects efficiency. /s

A lot of employees are really stupid, and will believe (or close their eyes to) all sorts of bullshit.

> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs

Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.


Share

To be honest I prefer this type of communication over the I-can't-believe-it's-not-layoffs that my previous employer was doing. At least it's honest that it is a decision they've made.

I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep

It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.

Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/


… then keep cutting.

Yep, he hasn't changed. F*ck that guy.

I mean, sky is blue, water is wet, etc.

> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.

i love that he casts it as:

a) a drawn-out downsizing that might stretch for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty.

b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an "honest" decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty?

...because of course employees who get laid off, prefer to lose their jobs as soon as possible and know they served an honest ceo.


The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.

> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision

I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.

I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?


> he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.

That's what he wants you to believe. That is just an easy way out for CEOs to blame it all on AI and not take accountability for their over-hiring in the first place.

Literally on their homepage:

"Block builds technology for economic empowerment"

How can you claim to build technology for "economic empowerment" if you couldn't see through the AI coming? The trend started like 4-5 years ago.


First, I posted the numbers below, it's not ZIRP overhiring in this case.

But even if it was...I'm struggling to understand how "overhiring" is a bad thing for the actual workers who were overhired.

So too many people got paid massive big tech salaries for the last 5 years. How horrible for them? They were robbed of...the opportunity to be paid half as much money working in a non-tech job?

It's bad for inflation in the economy broadly since it's money not being efficiently allocated, but for these 'overhired' people it was literally a life changing amount of money they're better off having had even if it ends now (with an extremely cushy 6 month severance I should add).


I'm generally anti-corpo and capitalism but I agree with you. The guy could've done better but so far he's on a good trajectory and much much better than most. Doesn't mean that he isn't going to make mistakes nor that this might turn out badly but that's the point of leading - making bets.

It sucks to be fired but if I'm a year time everyone lost a job it'd suck even more.


> and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming

You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place


If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP.

Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic.

They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels.

If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.


The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this.

I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes.

Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon.

The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet.

> While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend.

IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...


I just posted the hard evidence (the actual numbers). The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.

But I guess we'll just have to defer to the AI experts at...the Financial Times...and their emotional vibes of the situation instead.


The future is not evidence? I don’t understand what you’re saying.

> The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.

That’s not evidence. That’s a belief. I’m not disagreeing they overhired, but this statement contains no evidence that reducing the size of the company like this is going to yield the same or greater profits.


> What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?

A lot of smart and talented people could do this if given the opportunity. Jack was at the right place at the right time and had enough talent. Same with Elon and others. That’s kind of what happens when you have a population of hundreds of millions, a few get lucky and have enough talent to not screw it up.

It’s best to avoid being delusional and acting like billionaires are 5000 IQ geniuses. They’re regular people too, albeit, yes they are smarter than the average person you pull out of Walmart.

There are also plenty of smart people who simply do not care to run or start businesses.


How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!

That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say.

While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people

I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions


If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board.

CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs.

There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you prefer it to going out and trying to grow your own company from scratch.


It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap.

Now, you can absolutely hold a different position here, that’s okay, I’m fine with that, but at least address it head on.

Consider the fact that those getting laid off have disproportionate negative affects compared to what executives face for making terrible decisions in the first place. Jack still keeps his aspen home and whatever wealth he’s extracted out of the company. So he faces no real downside here. He could run block into the ground and still have more money than he would know what to do with.

You’re arguing about shares of paper entitling people to do things to other people’s lives without facing much actual consequence in their personal lives.

Not to mention professional, I’ve watched executives jump from company to company doing terrible things and they still keep getting hired.

Where as the average person is often advised to reduce or obfuscate the fact they were laid off less there be discrimination.

Now you can argue that executives shouldn’t face higher consequences in exchange for wielding such immense power over the lives of those which they employ, I ask that you say it plain, don’t hide behind feigned guise of people who live in a world where they don’t have a choice but to work for corporations or not have a roof over their head and basic needs met.

It’s fine if you want to defend that, but don’t act like people are just making a deliberate choice. This is a choice society has made for them and the wealthiest perpetuate


To me what you're upset about basically sounds like, "People who have more money/power/etc have it easier than those who don't."

Yes, yes, they do. So what?

All else being equal, greater wealth generally brings greater ease and comfort. A billionaire’s life is easier than a millionaire’s, a millionaire’s life is easier than being a middle-class Westerner, middle class living is easier than living below the poverty line, living below the poverty line in a wealthy country is easier than being poor in a developing country, and being poor in a developing country is easier than surviving as a subsistence farmer or living without shelter at all.

All else being equal, if you're a majority owner in a company, you're going to get away with a lot more than if you are a smaller owner, or a non-owner, or an employee, or a customer. All else being equal, if you're a general in the military, you're going to have more power and more leeway than if you're a lieutenant or a private.

Etc etc.

I fail to see what is wrong with this.


Potentially, universal human rights is what's wrong with it. Much depends on what "get away with" and "leeway" actually mean. There's a difference between owning a jacuzzi and owning a high court judge. Between these there's a gray area of things people vaguely disapprove of, and sometimes it turns out that they're decided to be illegal.

Sure, we're all in agreement that one should not be able to buy a judge, or violate human rights. But that's not what we're talking about.

What no_wizard and others in this thread are upset about is the owner/leadership of a company firing employees from that company. no_wizard goes so far as to suggest that that's "entitled" behavior.

IMO he has it exactly backwards.

We have at-will employment in 49 out of 50 states for a reason. You're adults entering into a mutually agreed upon contract where you trade money for services rendered. Your company is not your parent/nanny/caretaker who owes you continued employment and predictability in life. And vice versa, if you are a company owner, your employees are not your slaves who owe you work or continued employment.

Employees have the freedom to quit at any time, and owners have the freedom to fire them at any time. Both of these actions can adversely affect the other party, but that's life. People are free to do what they want with their own companies and their own availability as employees, and just because we would prefer them to continue giving us money or employment doesn't mean we are owed that. Neither quitting nor firing is entitled.

What is entitled is the belief that you are somehow owed your job (or vice versa, that you are owed continued tenure by your employees), and that for them to cancel the at-will contract when they no longer want it is worthy of punishment.


>What no_wizard and others in this thread are upset about is the owner/leadership of a company firing employees from that company. no_wizard goes so far as to suggest that that's "entitled" behavior.

It is entitled behavior. In the very literal sense of the word entitled. They wouldn't have such power to affect so many people unless they had a form of entitlement.

>We have at-will employment in 49 out of 50 states for a reason. You're adults entering into a mutually agreed upon contract where you trade money for services rendered. Your company is not your parent/nanny/caretaker who owes you continued employment and predictability in life. And vice versa, if you are a company owner, your employees are not your slaves who owe you work or continued employment.

We don't have at will employment because workers decided its what's best for the arrangement. There's been systematic efforts by business lobbying politicians. Its a well documented history. At will employment overwhelming benefits employers, not employees. Its not an equal relationship. The reason we have at will employment so prevalent is because it undermines unions. Its not because its the best and most equitable arrangement between employers and employees

>What is entitled is the belief that you are somehow owed your job (or vice versa, that you are owed continued tenure by your employees), and that for them to cancel the at-will contract when they no longer want it is worthy of punishment.

Who said anything about owed a job? What I'm saying is there is a lack of consequences for executives and by extension companies.

Triggering a wealth tax would be one. Companies that are profitable laying off thousands of people being required to pay fairer severances would be another form of consequence.

The specifics of all that can be debated, what I'm saying head on though is there should be higher consequences for their stupidity and inability to deploy resources effectively.


> The reason we have at will employment so prevalent is because it undermines unions. Its not because its the best and most equitable arrangement between employers and employees

At-will employment came about in the 1870s and predates the predates major union battles and influence. It's part of American culture, which treats adults like adults who are able to make decisions on their own. I support it as both an employer and and employee. It's a big reason there's so much mobility in the tech industry and in other areas with high-skilled employees.

In many places that don't have at-will employment, employees get stronger firing protections, sure, but it's also common that they have to give longer notice before quitting, can be subject to more stringing non-competes, etc.

I don't want any of that. People should be able to quit, and companies should be able to fire, and the consequences for the other party are not either party's responsibility. As a business owner, it's your company, and you need to be prepared for employees to quit. As an employee, it's your life, and you need to be financially prepared to lose your job at all times.

I absolutely do not want a nanny market that forces private citizens to be responsible for each other. That's what the government is for. We already made this mistake tying healthcare to businesses and employment. It's a huge mistake.

If you want to benefit more from at-will employment, you can learn more and get a higher skilled job with more bargaining power. Or you can take the massive risk to start and own your own company. If you don't want to do that, then that's your choice.

---

> What I'm saying is there is a lack of consequences for executives and by extension companies.

There are consequences. If you mismanage your company, it will fail. This happens tens of thousands of times per day in America.

Similarly, if you're an adult, and you go out and get a job, and you don't prepare for the fact that you might lose that job at any time for any reason, then there are consequences for you. The second you go out an sign an employment contract, you should prepare for the very obvious and predictable circumstance that your job might someday end. This is not someone else's responsibility. It's your sole responsibility.

It's not fellow citizens' or your boss' job or your company's job to nanny you and manage your financial situation in life. That's what the government is for. If you fail to prepare in life, then you can fall back to government entitlement programs, which are aptly named, because they are benefits you are entitled to.

You're absolutely not entitled to someone else who owns a company taking care of you, or worrying about what happens after you lose your job, or any other part of your private life. Just like they are not entitled to you worrying about what happens to the company if you quit.

Nor is either party entitled to some sort of weird vindictive emotion they may have to punish or hurt the other side if the employment contract is unilaterally ended. Thank god.

---

> Triggering a wealth tax would be one. Companies that are profitable laying off thousands of people being required to pay fairer severances would be another form of consequence. The specifics of all that can be debated, what I'm saying head on though is there should be higher consequences for their stupidity and inability to deploy resources effectively.

I don't see why. This just seems vindictive/punitive to me.

The market already punishes companies for mismanagement. As much as everybody likes to focus on the tiny percentage of really rich companies that do well enough to survive a big mistake, the vast majority of founders and CEOs never get to that level. They lose their companies and possibly their shirts before that ever happens.

If you start a company and you get through the gauntlet and you make it successful enough and rich enough that you can employ thousands of people, that's great. It was your competence that created those jobs, and your incompetence (or straightforward market forces) can destroy them, and that's that. If other people don't like it, they can go work somewhere else.

It's just very hard for me to understand this alternative perspective you're promoting, which imo fails to treat adults as adults, and is more akin to a nanny situation. I'm very grateful to live in the US where the game is played differently, and the last thing I want is for it to turn into something resembling Europe.

I like individual responsibility. I like treating adults like adults. I like the fact that the sky is the limit and the ceiling is high for the most skilled and ambitious people. And hell, I also like having a high floor. I just think that floor needs to come from the government and taxes.

What I don't like is this entitled idea that one's fellow citizens need to be their nannies, need to be punished, or need to be held down, just because they're successful.


> If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board.

Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.


The number of famous CEOs who've hopped around from company to company despite being terrible at their job is probably in the dozens. The number of founders/CEOs whose companies have died is demonstrably in the millions.

Also, there are plenty of regular employees who suck at their jobs and yet manage to hold onto them, get promoted, get new and lucrative job offers, etc.


>I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions

I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.


I know investors largely don’t care but that’s the point, they do t care because they don’t have to face any real consequences of bad decisions in aggregate

When you accept my application, there is an implicit understanding that I will have a job for a foreseeable future. I am making life decisions based on YOU, the CEO - I have to think about commute, renting, school for kids and a lot more. All you need to think about is my pay-check.

And once you fuck up, you still get your nice fat cheque and bonus, but I'm very realistically looking at relocating and/or unemployment for a very long time and possibly homelessness. You will be hailed as a hero by the board for saving them money, I will be painted a villain by everyone in my family...just for believing in you and your empty words. I'm not even mentioning the side effects of health I get as a result (possible anxiety, depression, blood pressure, etc.)

Services rendered is an acceptable excuse for a contractor relationship, not employees. If that's how you view employees, then good luck with your business.


I was a Pro subscriber until last week. When I was chatting with Claude, it kept asking a lot of personal questions - that seemed only very very vaguely relevant to the topic. And then it struck me - all these AI companies are doing are just building detailed user models for being either targeted for advertising or to be sold off to the highest bidder. It hasn't happened yet with Anthropic, but when the bubble money runs out, there's not gonna be a lot of options and all we'll see is a blog post "oops! sorry we did what we promised you we wouldn't". Oldest trick in the tech playbook.

A less cynical explanation: It's heavily trained to ask follow-up questions at the end of a response, to drive more conversation and more engagement. That's useful both for making sure you want to renew your subscription, and also probably for generating more training data for future models. That's sufficient explanation for the behavior we're seeing.

I could be wrong, but I remember that Claude models didn't really ask follow-up questions. But since GPT models are doing that, and somehow people like that (why?), Anthropic started doing it as well.

Because, Anthropic can do no wrong, correct?

With this new announcement, Anthropic is saying they can _specifically_ "do wrong" since it's in their best interests...

Yep I agree, I forgot to add /s to my comment

Technical excellence is often overlooked by the MBA groups. They will simply walk into a project, pick something perfectly functional and ask you to tear it down for no fucking reason other than to demonstrate "they add value" to the company. They will be really good with the slides and graphs and that's what is visible to management anyway.

Not the framework you developed. Not the fact that your work powers millions of users. To them, you're just a replaceable worker bee. You are only needed when something breaks. Architectural decisions are made by anecdotal experiences by them and it's just stone, paper, scissors all over again.

And when shit blows up right in their faces, it will not be about their judgement or lack thereof - it will be about how you didn't communicate about the issue properly. It will always be you who will be under the bus. And then the bunch of these clowns go and vibe code some stupid-ass product and sell it to gullible investors "wHo NeEds EnGiNeErs?"

And then you read about how 1000s of users' information went public all over the internet post their launch...the very next day.

/endrant


I don't blame you, the FOMO is real to the point even basic ChatGPT wrappers are getting funded these days, I guess.

I'm always interested to understand - what constitutes a basic ChatGPT wrapper? Is Legora, which is doing very well, a basic ChatGPT wrapper? Because if you don't view it as one, it certainly started as one.

This is atleast fine as it's just spam, I got pulled into an actual scam and it never made it to the frontpage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357205


But that is someone pretending to be YC which is sort of less interesting than a YC company doing something bad. Because phishers imitate legit companies all the time. Easy to get roped in and I sympathise, anyone is suseptable (today I almost clicked the phishing training email as it looked urgent and pushed the right buttons)

Looks like GH nuked it, though.

Hope they didn’t get too many folks.


That's a little creepier than the time I got an email from someone trying to push a new crypto coin to me because I contributed to OSS.

OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that scares me, because, a lot of people use ChatGPT as a therapist. We know this because of their advertising intent which they've explicitly expressed. Advertising requires good user models to work (so advertisers can efficiently target their audience) and it is the only way to prove ROI to the advertisers. "But, OpenAI said they won't do targeted ads..". Remember, Google said "Don't be evil" once upon a time too..

That's ok, we use ChatGPT only for coding. We should be good, right? Umm, no. They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.

"As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path."

"Intelligence will follow the same path."

https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val...

So yes, OpenAI has the best chance to win on the consumer side than anyone else. But, that's not necessarily a good thing (and the OpenAI fanboys will hate me for pointing this out).


> They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.

Wasn't there already a ruling that LLM output is not protected by copyright?


I hope that's the case. That would be really confidence inspiring.

> Advertising requires good user models to work…

…and yet, everywhere I go I see massive advertisements on billboards, the sides of buildings, public transit, movie screens…


Yes, but still, targeting is done even in billboards based on the location's demographics based on census data. It's not random. Some countries in Asia (like Singapore, Malaysia) have digital bill boards to target certain demographics based on the time of the day or the estimated crowd demographic at a given bus stop. And a few of them even track eyeballs to count "views" of the ad.

I admit this is a factor I hadn't much considered. I'm sure at some point, if not already, the data collected by your phone will enable the equivalent of a tracking pixel on your physical location, so you can get personalized ads when you step into the subway car: the system will quickly evaluate which rider is most likely to spend money based on ads, and on what, and then an auction will be run in two nanoseconds and the winner will show their 10-second transit clip. Oof.

The saddest part is, the old kind of advertising worked just fine, before all the companies got addicted to AdCrack.


Amen to that!

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