HN user
Nobody from nowhere. Entrepreneur in training since 1997.
Curious if this kimi moment is net growth (jervons paradox - abundance = more consumption) or just people shifting to cheaper model
Is there a good source for total token consumption between the various labs / openrouter / etc?
This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI
Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...
(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.
(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.
(5) Meanwhile Sam and others are reframing including launching a new foundation to "increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world" and pivoting messaging to AI "accelerating everyone in achieving their goals" https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431 & https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888
Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?
That is an absolutely beautiful infographic and should become the standard for time series change!
The context this comment misses is Gamestop's secret weapon is their CEO Ryan Cohen who has been sitting around the hoop trying to figure out how to leverage Gamestop's fundraising capabilities to do something big
Couple of highlights on Ryan
- Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time - Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on - Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming largest personal shareholder - Took over as CEO after being a proactive board member, works for no salary
The AI data center narrative is the perfect storm:
First most of the data center build out is happening in areas that have had little other opportunity so local resistance is muted. Abilene, Texas is referenced and is the kind of place my grandfather would lovingly say is where you go to learn to be a “dirt farmer”
Second, every environmentalist in the US is fighting 100 different battles with the most anti-regulation, pro-energy administration in decades (ever?) and has limited bandwidth.
And third, the AI narrative around national security, longevity, and super-intelligence-enabled abundance provides massive national coverage - the implications being that AI will solve any environmental and or human economic disasters that they enable.
If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.
That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.
The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.
Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!
Clicked this and was hopeful it was a TSA-line-tracker
Anybody have a good solution that's utilizing actual traveler data vs the (non existent atm) TSA data?
Fascinating first principle to thinking about Kalshi 90% of it is sports betting - I assume a lot of their revenue is gambling law regulatory arbitrage atm
https://closingline.substack.com/p/the-takeaway-kalshi-non-s...
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
Really good comment and fair point
But mortality credits (pooling) don't solve the math of the discount rate - they add 100 - 150 basis points of reduction so retarget to 5.5% vs 4% if generous
So they are still structurally designed where they HAVE to allocate towards risk to meet their targets which is at core of issue
From first principles public pension funds are broken.
The "Safe Withdrawal Rate" assumed by many private individuals planning for their own retirement assumes a withdrawal rate in the 3 - 4% range based on the "trinity study" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study
Meanwhile, American public pensions are structurally engineered around a 7%+ SWR - this was recently confirmed again by the median goal by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.
The perpetual "under funded" nature, and all the return hunting etc in pension fund management can be explained by that disconnect.
But this then belies a very uncomfortable acknowledgement which is that we cannot afford the government workforce currently in place requiring us to either:
(a) Raise taxes to increase contributions.
Or
(b) Somehow make due with less government :)
Top comment of one of the standout Bitcoin-culture memes ->
"The best technical analysis anyone has done on bitcoin."
Great find and also worth a watch is the Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout video from Fallout creator Tim Cain
"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
"When I was a kid, science fiction was off in the future somewhere. . . now it’s kind of science fact. . . AI and social media and all these influences are driving progress so quickly, at a pace that I think many of us, as human beings, are having a hard time keeping up with."
This is a quote from Alex Proyas (director of Dark City, irobot, the crow etc), he has long observed that humans are biologically under-adapted for a modernity of silicon-fueld complexity
https://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/alex-proyas-dark-...
The real "genie is not going back in the bottle" moment is that both sides have decided that power - at any cost - is a valid strategy.
And that's very apparent even in this article which leads with the logical fallacy of moral equivalence
". . . and America’s preeminent real estate fraudster who bankrupted six rigged businesses is all of a sudden concerned with supposed mortgage fraud"
BOTH are guilty, BOTH are crooked!
This directly leads to a lot of "the whole system is broken, may as well get mine"
Feels like a mixed bag vs regression?
eg - GPT-5 beats GPT-4 on factual recall + reasoning (HeadQA, Medbullets, MedCalc).
But then slips on structured queries (EHRSQL), fairness (RaceBias), evidence QA (PubMedQA).
Hallucination resistance better but only modestly.
Latency seems uneven (maybe more testing?) faster on long tasks, slower on short ones.
It's a great / memorable / and tongue-in-cheek name that anybody seriously in the space will instantly get and appreciate.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
UX 101 taught by George Carlin
Can’t believe this doesn’t include our friend Pinot who is still churning out unreal MacPaint pixel art
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/pinot-w-ichwandardi-flatiron-...
Not sure that's the right way to look at it
Premium Telegram users get to try for free, will move to a subscription model
Telegram has 12m premium users up from 4m in 2023, and 1b+ users
Not unreasonable to think a 5% take rate from just premium users at say $10/month extra
Which - at 50% revenue share to GROK - would be a ~$36m a year run rate for Grok
At $36m in this category of AI SaaS that's something like $400 - 500m in enterprise value out of the box
This is a techcrunch link arbitrage to the actual article if we can update
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-12/softbank-...
"Flurry of activity for everything other than acquiring customers"
In 16 years on HN this is one of the best pieces of startup advice I've seen.
Default should be 10% of time on MVP and landing page, 90% on distribution until you smell PMF.
Fight violently against any suggestion you invest more heavily in product until somebody is in tears about keeping up with demand for your MVP.
Drooling over PC part reviews in magazines that I could never afford, checking the weekly printed Fry's ad in the local paper to find deals, convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"
Iconic building, nostalgic time.
It is literally insane that when I search for Photos on iOS I can't zoom in to make the thumbnails bigger. As an approaching mid-40s person this is untenable, even worse that it DOES let you zoom in prior to search.
I wound up deleting Bluesky (too) when a political fight about border security started between two accounts I follow for 1990s video game nostalgic content.
unsurprisingly most of these top stories are left-leaning and political of nature given blueskys reputation as being a refuge for exactly that kind of content post-Elon twitter.
I was personally hopeful that blueskys tools for user content filtering and personal curation would let me rebuild an interesting list that was mostly politics free - I say that agnostically.
But my reality seems to be anybody regularly posting into these networks winds up catching the “mind virtus” from one side or the other and inevitably most accounts, wind up reposting or engaging in that kind of content.
I don’t have a strong point given this is a lazy Sunday afternoon comment other than I truly appreciate HNs mostly successful efforts to keep discourse focused
And I think the despite its flaws HN winds up being a good blueprint for how to admin, community interest, focused discussions, and I’m hopeful, others will pop up!
Thematically investing billions into startup AI frontier models makes sense if you believe in first-to-AGI likely worth a trillion dollars +
Investing in second/third place likely valuable at similar scales too
But outside of that MSFTs move indicates that frontier models most valuable current use case - enterprise-level API users - are likely to be significantly commoditized
And likely majority of proceeds will be captured by (a) those with integrated product distribution - MSFT in this case and (b) data center partners for inference and query support
This is awesome!
Is there a consumer version available?
Or is there a company focused on that side of the business?
- This is a proper MSFT resource allocation commentary, not an industry wide canary in coalmine
- MSFT CapEx is up 45% YoY, positioning for inference dominance
- MSFT is prioritizing AI inference for millions of customers over massive AI training for OpenAI
- Losing inference demand risks clients moving to AWS/GCP
- MSFT taking bet that industry overbuild will lead to more attractive leasing terms in future vs owning
- OpenAI chases AGI; MSFT chases scalable, affordable AI that drives Azure adoption
- Leadership is risk adjusted - they win if OpenAI succeeds, and win if open-source wins
“Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.”
… until we train our model on your usage data and totally replace you