atwrk

IMO they hope to make AI a strongly regulated industry, with OpenAI (and Anthropic) becoming military suppliers with their stronger models, and everything Chinese or open-weight gets banned.

The competition from the open models is so strong now that this seems to be the only way to keep both companies afloat, given their dire financials. OpenAI probably hoped that they can achieve market lead and then lower the training costs (and make inference cheap enough to eventually escape the red numbers), but the opposite is happening: The competition comes closer and closer, thus training has to be kept up with full force, thus the bleeding continues.

But if they can position themselves as too important/dangerous to be available for everyone (thus this incident report and the clever mentioning of GLM 5.2), they could get the military supplier treatment and would be protected from the market.

To anyone having read about Mussolini, Italy's economy and political landscape in the 20s onward, his model of corporatism etc, the answer is obviously clear: the US. China also is authoritarian, of course, but the societal structure sharply differs from Italian fascism.

To add to that, to me it seems that the idea is that open weights vastly accelerate dissemination into and practical application in the wider economy, which seems to be the goal. They don't seem to subscribe to the AGI/singularity silliness so prevalent in the West.

A bit late now, but thanks for this detailed breakdown!

What makes you think Germany didn't do well with renewables? This almost looks like a hockey stick graph: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene...

The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.

You're right of course, but in this case the statement doesn't look that false. The source article [0] states that half of the assets is cash, so "assets" is defined a bit more freely here.

If we assume a 2026 revenue of 23B (Q1 2026 revenue x4) and costs of 70B (2025 costs * (2026 revenue / 2025 revenue)), even those 25B in cash reserves won't mean much. And this napkin math even ignores their debt obligations. So either they raise money in the range of 50-75B this year (actual money, not datacenter vouchers), or ...

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.

He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.

Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...

"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."

The owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?

Coal is already shrinking in the China (in absolute terms, not just as share of production) [1], and share of wind + solar is already larger than in the US [2], so I doubt China will ever reach US proportions in CO2 emissions per capita.

An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3].

[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

Well I guess reading the article could ease your confusion. Unsurprisingly it is a bit less generalized than your take.

Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.

People around me, outside the programmer bubble, hate OpenAI with a passion. It's the symbol of antidemocratic US corporations cuddling with Trump etc, right there with Tesla. And no one outside my tech bubble has ever heard of Anthropic.

This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.

No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.

Well that conveniently makes your assertion unfalsifiable, doesn't it?

Those taxes are the necessary condition in silly essays like this one from pg. Or why do you think those billionaires miraculously mostly end up in the US and not in countries like Sudan or Peru? I mean if those billionaires would actually be the wealth creators, not depending on society at large, they could become billionaires everywhere, right?

George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.

If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?

Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.

There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.

If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.

Pretty sure they'll offer them at least so long as it takes to bring OpenAI and Anthropic into insolvency. Why wouldn't they? The Chinese models are way more nimble to train and run, bring in a ton of goodwill globally, and put immense pressure on the VC furnace that is the US AI sector.

And apparently OpenAI and Anthropic think so, too - why else would they try so hard to ban them instead of outcompeting them?

That is not a contradiction. Just look at social media use where you can observe the same.

People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.

They don't if you mean STEM and emancipation, quite the opposite, actually (compared to West Germany).

In addition to the points of sibling comments, their respective starting posititions were drastically different: West Germany got the marshal plan, which benefitted their economy, the East had to pay reparations to the USSR, which meant whole factories, trains, even railroad tracks, all in all amounting to about a third of industrial capacity, were transferred to the USSR.

You think standing in for people's rights against the profit interests of transnational corporations means "making life difficult"? Whose life exactly? That of the CEO of Microsoft?

I'd be delighted if you can link to actual numbers supporting this assumption, as all reputable reporting says OpenAI's revenue is smaller than their inference cost, e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...

To my knowledge none of the players is even profitable on inference, though Google probably is, considering the continuous release of papers around kv cache optimizations, mtp etc.

But all the open-weight players make money right now. Google (Gemma), Alibaba (Qwen), z.ai (GLM), minimax.io (Minimax) - they all have hosted offers and sometimes closed-weight max versions.

And the fact that the open-weight as well as cheaper tier 2 offers exist both place a ceiling on the prices the SOTA companies can demand - and as far as we know current prices don't even fully pay for inference alone already, at least not for OpenAI.

No, a moat would be a feature preventing the competition from competing successfully. Classically things like patents, for example, or process knowledge like ASML currently has for EUV lithography, or the network effects of a social media platform, or access to data no one else has access to.

ARR is not a moat at all, because the revenue of OpenAI is not preventing Alibaba, z.ai and so on from generating revenue as well. The opposite is true, actually, because the first mover prepared the market (e.g. user education about application possibilities, creating the willingness to pay for the service in the first place) for the second movers.

People here write about switching from Claude to Codex mid-workday - that is the absolute opposite of a moat.

The only companies that have a chance of not losing everything in this market are those with established non-AI revenue streams, like Google or Alibaba, or those focusing on profitability in niche markets instead of participating in the SOTA death race.

How can this become a monopoly/duopoly? There is no moat, the Chinese providers will continue to hunt the market leader at 10% of the price, there is no network effect (OpenAI's Sora was a play in that direction and failed).

I'm constantly amazed how this AGI/monopoly narrative can be kept up so long in the West, it just doesn't make sense (unless the state creates said monopoly by forbidding competition).

There's nothing to refute in your post; you only told the audience that you don't get OP, and people tried to explain the appeal to you. What you do with that information is your thing.

I bet you actually have. Its those gaps in the threads for screwing on the lid. The pressure get escape through these gaps while the lid still stays on the bottle.

(That hamster-microwave thing is a disinfo campaign from manufacuturers to limit liability of corporations, BTW, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...)

Lots of important points already posted, from reliability over accessibility to SEO. To add a personal reason: speed. I hate slow computer things. If I open a page I e.g. don't have to use for work or similar (like Google Ads or Linkedin or similar horror shows), and loading the page takes longer than a second, I just bounce.

I built and maintain a static site for a company, and it's just wonderful. It opens instantly (which the search engines like), rebuilding and deploying is trivial, I am not forced to update every week because the JS framework has a new vuln.(There are a few dynamic, JS-based parts that load dynamically and fail gracefully.)