The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

https://leoveanu.com/2026-06-06-qwen3.7max/

by futurisold • 2 months ago

146 201 2 months ago

Every industry goes through its slop phase. You should see how much of early print was smut or really amaturish. We just like to talk about the Bible and the great art. What we need is a way to filter through it. AI should be decent at this, but for many intentional and unintentional reasons it isn't.

swiftcoder5• 2 months ago

You should see how much of early print was smut

Hey, don't malign smut. It's the great technological motivator

graemep• 2 months ago

Early print was not just smut or amateurish. Some of it was highly harmful misinformation: Malleus Maleficarem is an outstanding example that caused an immense amount of harm.

sandworm1013• 2 months ago

Is it just me, but the language gap between me and the AI believers is becoming insumountable. I use AI every day. I have a local server not ten feet from me as i type this, but i struggle to comprehend the gibberish that comes from those only slightly deeper in the rabbit hole than myself. Is this what 24/7 AI thinking does to people?

> I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone.
> It all fell apart quickly, turning into smoke and mirrors. You see, I committed the cardinal sin of idolatry. For that, I am an idiot too. With OpenAI, at least I knew the devil

Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?

mohamedkoubaa• 2 months ago

It is not just you

swiftcoder5• 2 months ago

Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?

Por que no los dos? One of the most storied AI researchers is most known for his Harry Potter fanfic, and we all know how much the techbros love naming things after Tolkien...

tayo42• 2 months ago

Who is that?

rawgabbit2• 2 months ago

The last notable event in American history when the meaning of words lost any semblance to reality was just before the Civil War. We are living in a post words world where words have no meaning.

trumpdong4• 2 months ago

What happened to words in the American Civil War?

throwaway041207• 2 months ago

I don't think the writing style has anything to do with AI, it's just a writer without an editor.

Bolwin• 2 months ago

If this is what we get without editors I want every thing I read to be without editors

mannanj2• 2 months ago

I actually liked that statement about the sin of idolatry. I resonated and it described something I've been guilty of and learning to break, its embedded deem in the culture. We do idolize and heroize groups and people, think Elon Musk and his cult following in the early days of Tesla.

I think it's great to name that even if it's in this crude, sort of offensive way.

AI thinking has had this weird effect on me though like you say, where I want to write sentences with more commas in them, and like, try to make 3 points and 3 separate commas in a sentence to condense information better.

swiftcoder5• 2 months ago

and will judge, like any sane person, that US frontier models have stopped earning their multiplier

I think that this is on the money, although I'd place the bar even lower - DeepSeek v4 Flash is sufficient for basically all day-to-day coding tasks.

You might want something beefier for a complicated reverse-engineering project, but it will competently one-shot a decently complicated app or API - and a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription is sufficient to keep you in tokens for such a cost-efficient model...

Similarly, my employer hands us all Cursor, I've yet to actually switch it out of "auto" mode, which mostly runs Composer (their in-house finetune of Kimi 2.5).

xyzal• 2 months ago

I'll root for DeepSeek v4 Flash as well. It surprised me just how "good enough" it is for most of my needs, and also dirt cheap. Everyone should try it at least once.

MaKey• 2 months ago

+1, it's good enough for what I need to do as a DevOps engineer.

Multiplayer• 2 months ago

fired it up via the $5 opencode go subscription and am stoked. This is an amazing amount of capability for pennies on the dollar. I'm using it alongside my codex and claude max subs. Just fantastic for coding that claude is architecting.

sublinear2• 2 months ago

I think the situation is even more severely ridiculous than that. Google is still good enough just like it was well over a decade ago.

Most people don't have workloads that demand agentic workflows to begin with, and if their employer is pushing for that it's probably a startup that underpays or a coding sweatshop full of nepotism that fires fast.

fwipsy3• 1 month ago

"People shouldn't need to use AI unless they're overworked, Google is good enough."

But why should I work harder than necessary to do the same job? Why wouldn't I want to use the best tools available?

realmofthemad• 2 months ago

Am I missing out? I feel like I can definitely tell the difference in quality between Claude Opus and other smaller models. The smaller models are much more likely to make mistakes or to get stuck on random stuff

Maybe I just haven't been trying the right models?

orwin• 2 months ago

Yes, but no. Honestly, except for frontend/IAC where I still use frontier models, I will use smaller models whenever I can.

Because even the latest opus on High don't really get what is needed, and need careful steering and a rewriting in most cases, and the code is often hard to review.

I'd rather just launch a smaller model in plan mode, argue with it and make it implement the bases I will write the code into. writing code is often faster once you know what you want, and AI most useful ability is to be a canary that also propose stuff. And I find my method faster than generating everything then reading the code to find mistakes or understand why it used X instead of Y.

I don't really read generated frontend code anyway (nor do anybody in my team care) , so I generate it and push it if it does the stuff I want it to do. For IAC it's mostly boilerplate except for 1-2 lines most of the time, and at worst a dozen, if you know where to look (and check the AI doesn't suffer from NIH), it's really easy to review generated code.

throw10920• 1 month ago

It's not just you. I tried an Opencode Go subscription, and experimented with most of their models (GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek), and none of them got anywhere close to Opus - the difference in quality was very noticeable, especially with Deepseek V4 Pro and Flash.

The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus.

But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.

obsidianbases12• 2 months ago

I really enjoyed this critical take on the current landscape. It's a breathe of fresh air from the seemingly neverending stream of sycophants

woadwarrior012• 2 months ago

The sycophants are plied with insider / early access, with the tacit threat that such access would be revoked if they're critical of the provider.

tcp_handshaker10• 2 months ago

They are in the phase I need a government bailout like the banks after their crazy financial adventures of the 2000 to 2008. At which point the corruption is so big, that an Empire crumbles under its own stench?

"Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no

"Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/trump-offi...

Waterluvian• 2 months ago

The retirement investor bailout strategy seems to have recently failed with the index fund rejection of SpaceX but therefore Anthropic and OpenAI. They’ll have to keep looking for ways to make others deal with the consequences of their actions.

tcp_handshaker10• 2 months ago

Only for the S&P not the NASDAQ, but the Capex they need until 2030 is well over 2 to 3 trillion, so now they plan to use US Treasury Bonds as their exit liquidity.

"Your 401K Is Their Exit Strategy" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433705

zkmon• 2 months ago

Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.

xnx2• 2 months ago

Is "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.

tcp_handshaker10• 2 months ago

> Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.

As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?

scotty79• 2 months ago

"China bad!" is a moral statement. Whetever the reasons might have been that it was formed.

mannanj2• 2 months ago

I don't want to send my data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in USA either. This to me seems very rational.

It's not tribalistic or binary ,choose USA Or Choose China. We can choose neither.

Choose neither abuse.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 months ago

Many of the Chinese models are open weights, so if you are concerned about them "phoning home", then anyone can just self-host and run them themself, or use via a US provider such as OpenRouter.

Der_Einzige3• 2 months ago

The Chinese models can and should be run locally (though the price difference vs western models isn't as good when done this way).

Before the age of AI Agent Harnesses/unbounded tool calling, there was literally ZERO risk of a .safetensors file "hacking" you. You could even air-gap and run a ton of security analysis/HIDS on your server running the model to verify this.

Now, because a microscopic risk of some chinese AI having a "trigger" to act badly in a harness when it detects its being used by some Gweilo in the USA, even locally run Chinese models are DOA for most USA based companies.

obsidianbases12• 2 months ago

I'm not any less concerned about the US companies.

A Chinese company seems more likely to produce Chinese products that don't directly compete in the US market.

While a US company can ship the product as a feature of their platform and undercut on price while making up the revenue elsewhere

Edit: I personally use US models, but I'm not naive enough to think that's any sort of real protection of IP

analognoise• 2 months ago

These are the same people that sent manufacturing jobs away to be copied elsewhere. They got rewarded for it in the market. Decades later, when it was clearly a problem, they got tax breaks to bring some of it back/distribute the work to other, friendlier countries.

Every public AI that is not full of classified material will end up being hosted where the energy cost*compute efficiency product is lowest, thievery or not.

With Chinese GPUs just a step behind (but subsidized), China putting in 8x more solar than we do in 1 year, and Chinese models just a step behind but free? All public AI will be hosted there, theft or not.

If it becomes a problem, then we’ll subsidize the rich to bring it on-shore, but only to those companies who our leaders invest in already - to maximize grift and corruption.

qarl6• 2 months ago

The real advantage of the Chinese models is that they do not phone home at all. They run locally unlike their US competitors.

So odd that your erroneous criticism is at the top of HN.

EDIT: I'd love to hear my downvoters' objections. Is it possible that the mechanism that is promoting erroneous information is also demoting its correction?

Matl• 2 months ago

known IP thieves

Such as Antropic and OpenAI you mean?

joe_mamba3• 2 months ago

Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense.

Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.

blfr3• 2 months ago

Yes, there was a whole idea about civilizing and pacifying the world through economic cooperation that would foster middle class in countries across the world that would then in turn make them democratize and become peaceful trade partners.

It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.

mynameismon• 2 months ago

Why not Chinese models hosted on American hardware?

Der_Einzige3• 2 months ago

The reality is that they're a hell of a lot less cheap on American hardware than on Chinese hardware. At the point you are running Chinese models on US hardware, "Why not nano or haiku" becomes the next relevant question.

tcp_handshaker10• 2 months ago

You have the models available on Bedrock. What is the problem? It stays within your AWS account.

worldthruword• 2 months ago

And the reasons are same. Chinese cars can't be sold in US (EU is planning a similar law to ban Chinese goods).

mavhc• 2 months ago

When will we see an open source car?

newaccountman2• 2 months ago

I think unless one is operating in a highly regulated industry, wanting to avoid "sending data to China" is a bit paranoid. For code specifically, most of it is not interesting anyways.

lopsotronic• 1 month ago

Even with open weights, there's a legit reason to be careful when making stuff for defense.

Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can identify "boat shapes" even if it doesn't have a database of all boats. Pretty neat, right? Well, the point could be made, that the weights might be hiding behavior that will make my vision model . . not see specific boats very well.

"Landing craft? I see no landing craft."

Some decent testing would expose this in a couple shakes, but, well, now you know how much software testing happens in Defense, especially in the unmanned world. Not a whole bunch.

hparadiz• 2 months ago

There's a lot of assumptions in here and reductivism of the paid plans to just the models. If that's your idea of how you want to use the API sure that's a reasonable mental financial model but if you want automatic integration with third party systems the cost of the "premium" models is not that high relative what was being paid for SAS apps before and during.

38484858• 2 months ago

[flagged]

blfr3• 2 months ago

I don't get the point. That Anthropic or OpenAI have more expensive products than Alibaba? So does Apple, AWS/GCP, and pretty much any other large western company vs its Chinese counterparts.

jayd162• 2 months ago

It's a ludicrous amount of words to say "I use the cheap models and that makes me very smart."

rdiddly2• 2 months ago

I honestly could not follow any discernible point or thrust to this incoherent, disorganized, self-indulgent piece-of-shit post. He didn't even successfully establish or explain the titular Onlyfans analogy. I know more about his fucking taste for sci fi than I do about the ostensible subject matter. I know more about his physical composition (answer: he is made of metal. He was forged in the fires of science. O glorious creation, emerging complete and perfect from the furnace!) than I do about the subject matter.

twolf910616• 2 months ago

How many words did I read in this article before I realized it wasn't written by AI? 10? 20? A paragraph or two?

It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.

ramon156• 2 months ago

Something something entropy

If I ask three models to write an intro to the cold war, they'll all try to pick words that sound like they should be related-ish. I'm not saying that's how they work at all, but the output is indistinguishable from just grabbing some words in the wikipedia page.

Humans make mistakes. They'll use words they recently learned. They'll use words that sound good. Entropy still applies, but these outliers are what keeps us from a synthetic piece of writing

IsTom• 2 months ago

Especially with how they pick (one of) the most likely word as the next one. And the most likely word is exactly the one with least entropy, the least surprising one and giving the least amount of information you can.

boelboel• 2 months ago

"I am also an engineer, which means I have a healthy respect for the practical. All this made me a fine skeptic ..." is what did it for me.

jampekka2• 2 months ago

It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.

Or you detect only the easy to detect AI writing?

sometimelurker4• 2 months ago

I really freaked out once I stopped seeing AI gen videos on those scrollyapps, that fear is what got me off them. (the videos got so good I couldn't tell if they were real or not)

sajithdilshan• 2 months ago

For me it’s easily the — character. Like no human would use that since it’s not in any standard keyboard

fragmede3• 2 months ago

It's readily accessible on a software keyboard. Software keyboards are common on smartphone devices. Y'know that thing that 75% of the world's population uses?

engcoach• 2 months ago

Option-hyphen key on macOS. I used to make prolific use of the emdash and LLMs took that from me!

rdiddly2• 2 months ago

How many words before you realized it was a piece of shit though? For me it was "Because I am a Sci-Fi nerd." Yet I kept reading, because I am a fucking fool, and now I'm pissed that I spent time on it.

fwipsy3• 2 months ago

I think in this case "this isn't AI writing" is not a compliment. I find the tone pretty grating, tbh. The author clearly has a very high opinion of themselves. Just explain your ideas clearly so we can evaluate them on their merits.

fancyfredbot• 2 months ago

The article is right that open models already compete well with the frontier labs, and that the main thing holding big corps back from switching is fear of China.

I can't see OpenAI or Anthropic undermining their business by releasing top tier open models, but surely Nvidia will do it eventually.

notyourwork• 2 months ago

Nvidia has to balance relations with their biggest customers. So that’s a careful decision to be made by them.

KellyCriterion• 2 months ago

Question that I do not understand:

How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?

rjsw• 2 months ago

I think the fear is that it might insert some "phone home" routine into the source code that it generates.

Jtarii• 2 months ago

Has anyone demonstrated that this type of attack is even possible? Also the moment anyone detects this attack it will nuke deepseek/other chinese AI labs reputation completely, it is the most high risk low reward attack ever.

monsieurbanana• 2 months ago

I don't think they do at the moment, but they could be trained subtly add backdoors to code or make "phone home" api calls during dev time, triggering on certain conditions ("is user employee of xyz")

adampunk• 2 months ago

I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. What the light reveals has a name: Qwen 3.7 Max.

I sure am glad we left idolatry behind.

jmyeet• 2 months ago

This is kind of a winding, long-winded way of saying that AI models are going to be commoditized, mostlikely by the Chinese. This has been my position ever since DeepSeek came out. It is a national security interest for China for an American company not to "own" AI. And they will release models to make that not happen.

We aren't yet at the point where running local models can compete with DC type infrastructure but it's not that far away either. 12B models are easy to run on consumer hardware. 31B models aren't that hard either but the tokens/sec are a bit slow. Where will we be in 3 years? 5? I think we'll be running 100B+ models on <$5000 PCs. And at that point is there a law of diminishing returns with even bigger models? We will see.

The issue is that several companies, most notably OpenAI, are predicated on:

1. There will be an AI moat; and

2. That company will "win" or "own" AI.

That's the basis of the OpenAI valuation. If that doesn't happen, it's going to be ahuge problem to recover sufficient revenue to recoup the investment. And I don't think it will happen.

In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.

tcp_handshaker10• 2 months ago

> In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.

And this is the core of why this will all end in tears. You have race conditions and thread inversion issues, between four threads in the virtual cpu of this bubble. And you are going to experience some nasty deadlocks.

T1 is -> Depreciation and amortization

T2 is -> NVDA, AMD and others booking revenues at the time they do

T3 is -> Constraint theory at it applies to time until physical deployment and data centers energy constraints

T4 is -> US Treasury bonds rates and cost of credit

trumpdong4• 2 months ago

Even though programmers would never intentionally design a 4-way race condition in a computer system, it's completely ordinary in business. Businesses don't always work out.

trumpdong4• 2 months ago

That sounds like a big problem for OpenAI investors and not a problem for anyone else. Why should I or you care?

bix62• 2 months ago

Is there any truth to the Chinese models having built in f’ery? Like phoning home or inserting backdoors. Or is that just everyone blanketing “China bad”?

Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?

witx2• 2 months ago

If you think american models aren't phoning home and don't have backdoor capabillities, you're naive.

With all the sloppers not looking at the code this is bliss for that sort of things

codemog• 2 months ago

We’ve detected zero cases of any Chinese models doing this. I’m quite tired of the American propaganda. If only Americans understood China really does not care about them outside of wanting to sell them things. They’re too busy building high speed rails, modern cities, and providing healthcare to their citizens. I am ashamed to be an American these days.

bee_rider• 2 months ago

The models themselves should not be able to phone home, right? They are just piles of weights that generate text (and associated metadata), they don’t have any ability to run code.

They could be trained to generate code that would phone home. But these are just tools, anybody doing the right thing and checking and understanding every line of code that they use an LLM to generate has nothing to worry about.

allthetime• 2 months ago

Nobody is only generating code. Many are letting agents run commands. Agents routinely write scripts and run tools in the background. Agents who have been told they can only do `cat` and `grep` can sometimes do `cat $EVIL_PAYLOAD | bash`. It's entirely possible for a model to have malicious commands designed for agents to execute baked in.

deaux• 2 months ago

No, there is zero truth in it. It would be trivial to detect phoning home.

On top of that, all claims of this are written on devices built on Chinese hardware. That makes it a joke to worry about hidden backdoors in Chinese models. Completely inane to pretend that Chinese model backdoors (for which there doesn't exist a sliver of evidence) would change anything when near every device in the US contains Chinese-written firmware in some shape or form.

It's All-American FUD.

sivakon• 2 months ago

What is this $100 plan the author was talking about?

sandcat_• 2 months ago

https://www.qwencloud.com/pricing/token-plan I think

ericyd• 2 months ago

One of the least satisfying posts I've read on here in a while

anotherevan• 2 months ago

I think comparing American AI to OnlyFans is in extremely poor taste. If I were OnlyFans I would sue. /s

sleight42• 1 month ago

Lost me at "simps" and "cucks". Ad hominem? Don't care. I have standards.

palmotea2• 1 month ago

Anyway, that guy said something along the lines of “we should be patient with these companies and give them room to fail.” I like to call this the OnlyFans economy. Nobody is simping for a cartel. The simps thrive in the parasocial economy, shoulder in shoulder with the cucks paying $500 million invoices.

I haven't totally processed this, but it seems like there's a useful connection here. There are all kinds of workers who bizarrely take on the perspectives of the billionaire class, even when it actively harms their interests. Some of it is ignorance and simply getting duped by propaganda, but now I wonder if there may be a para-social component as well, like those guys pathetically wasting money on OnlyFans: "if I carry a torch for the billionaires schemes, then I can feel I'm like them and part of their group."

The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

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