bko

Saying capital is a moat is not convincing.

From the vast amount of VC money going around, nearly half a trillion expected in 2026, not including other forms of funding, it's safe to say that there is a lot of capital for people that can execute.

I don't see how you can translate money to product/startup success. You think there's some magic lever you can press to get people to use your product? Selling $10 for $5 and building a market like that is rare (moviepass) but even that is incredibly difficult. Advertising is very inefficient and sales is hard.

https://dealroom.co/guides/global

AI may save us time, but if we simply reinvest that time into working harder and competing more, what have we actually gained?

I think you may be in a bit of a bubble. Sure the Anthropic engineer is trying to token max. But "we" generally see AI as a step up from google search and go about our lives pretty much the same as we have.

The ones that are captured by AI, I think they're just truly excited about the technology. It's new and opening up possibilities. It's like when you first learned to program and you stayed up all night writing games or whatever your interests were.

I know without programming I would "work less" but that doesn't result in "more fulfilled lives". Quite the opposite. The most unfulfilled people I know in life work the least!

Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly?

You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?

Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.

This is actually how the world works.

Am I just out of the loop but is $200+ for a children's bike absolutely insane?

Very productive comment. Here is my reply:

R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.

Why do you ask questions you can easily ask to an LLM? You probably don't care, your world view is "Meta bad".

Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.

What are you talking about?

2) Isn't it great that we can burn a bunch of dinosaur blood to convince ourselves that we don't need other humans?

God I hate this cynical take. Yes human beings use energy. We should look to generate more energy as that's a sign of wealth. The "energy bad" take is so lazy and ultimately anti-human. And in this case its especially obnoxious because what does "we don't need other humans" even mean.

You don't need a citation for everything. It's common sense.

But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.

That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.

Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?

Birdsong and Golden Peanut together have controlled roughly 80% of U.S. peanut shelling, with Olam holding another 10% or more.

Warner Bros. releases roughly 20-30 wide theatrical films per year, or about 8-12% of all U.S. theatrical releases (counting independent films as well).

Paramount Pictures releases roughly 10-20 wide theatrical films per year, or about 3-7% of all U.S. theatrical releases.

Hope this helps

Netflix completely changed the game. They paid huge amounts to produce original content. Direct to TV used to be an insult now you have triple A content direct to steaming. You forget what the market looked like pre Netflix. Sure you don't like their content now, but that's not the point

Comedians for instance get 10 - 25m per special, they were getting a fraction of that before Netflix. They had to sign on shitty sitcoms to make any money

What are you talking about?

Do you think a company w less diversified source of income would be willing to take more risk, knowing that room for error is very small?

What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?

Here are a few positives:

Larger movie catalog all under one place, better value bundle due to fewer transaction costs in negotiation. Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.

More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.

More movies. Shared expenses and synergies can produce lower costs and increase supply.

More investment in technology. It makes sense for a larger company to invest more in technology since the business impact and throughput is larger (technology scales).

Less likely to go out of business. Larger and more diversified revenue stream means more long terms security.

Instead of a flippant one sentence snarky response, make the argument or don't comment at all.

Are you really comparing youtube with theatre movies?

Yes I'm comparing youtube to movies. They're direct competitors. My decision on Friday night is often do I go to the movies or do I watch something on YouTube.

Do you really think a monopoly is going to improve anything for anybody?

They don't have a monopoly on any meaningful product category.

Sometimes companies go out of business because the economics are so bad (e.g. Spirit). I'm not sure if economics are that bad in film industry, but there are benefits of being a certain size or having a larger catalog. Don't people always complain about having to go to many different streaming services to find a movie?

Can anyone rationally explain why a police agency that is interested in Flock would like to see one third-party camera integration that is in a children’s gymnastics room?

I could think of one reason

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre

How to make an apple pie from scratch with no copying:

Step 1: invent the universe

If you think Codex is some neutral harness designed to work equally as well for all LLMs, I got a bridge to sell you...

Thats great, but the market will always be driven by rich developed countries. I don't think Anthropic and OpenAI is banking on third world adoption in their growth estimates.

Claude and OAI are not valued at $1T because of their harnesses

They're valued at that because they add a lot of value and people pay for the product. The product is more than the LLM. If you want argue the value of the harness vs LLM but flippant remark adds nothing.

Enterprise excel is like $50 a month, the closed source labs charge orders of magnitude more than that per user per month for enterprise, and want to charge more if they can to maintain their valuation. I spent $20 in an afternoon yesterday using my work plan for one workflow for reference, I probably spend at least $50 a day and I don't even do that much coding anymore.

I want to know what percent of their revenue is this API spend compared to just a Claude/Codex max plan that's $200/m and very generous.

I think the risk is overstated.

For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the minority (correct me if I'm wrong, curious what their customer base looks like)

Also the actual LLM is a tiny portion of the value added. Anyone that tried to build agentic solutions from LLM apis quickly realizes that a huge value is the Claude Code / Codex harness. There are open source implementations like OpenCode but they're not nearly as good.

Think about it another way. Consider how much money Microsoft spends on maintaining Excel. There are open source alternatives that have >90% of the functionality, they'll even work w/ Excel files and generate them. Google sheets is probably 99% and available to everyone and better in a lot of regards. But the immense value spreadsheet software produces workers above the $100 or whatever a year makes it so that there is a real moat and no one bothers exploring alternatives.

The Fairphone 6 is about double the price of a comparable phone like Motorola Edge 60 Fusion. All these branded "fair" or "open" products are just not competitive and 99% of people aren't willing to pay such a big premium for what's essentially a concept

https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13955&idPhone...

Right, and people don't want to pay a high enough premium to justify the cost and design tradeoffs. That's how markets work. Mandating a more expensive product w features consumers aren't willing to pay for normally makes everyone worse off

Why wouldn't one of the hundreds and probably thousands of companies that can make phones at scale not jump in? These are all pretty much off the shelf parts.

Why did Google even attempt Project Ara? Why did Fairphone or Teracube never produce a compelling product?

If anyone could make replaceable batteries work, even at a premium, it would be a big hit. I remember replaceable batteries and they were incredible. The batteries were slim, can barely feel them in your pocket. I popped 2 or 3 for my camping trip and never had to worry about charging.

The idea that there's collusion in one of the most competitive marketplaces in the world (consumer electronics) is an extraordinary claim. Companies don't just nuke their products and survive long term.

Why would a company choose to produce an inferior product?

My guess is there is a trade of that's worth it on the product side. That's why you can't buy a compelling phone w a replaceable battery anywhere. Its an incredibly competitive market. If there was a design that worked and tradeoffs made sense it works certainly exist and do well since who wouldn't like it.

I just believe that the fact it doesn't exist tells you that the trade offs aren't worth it. I didn't buy conspiracy theories how dozens of independent manufacturer and hundreds of hardware manufacturers that are on the side line so collude to keep this design choice at bay.

this post has been flagged.

Ironic

Additional context:

NetzDG (2017/2018): Germany passed the NetzDG legislation in June 2017, which officially took effect in January 2018. Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.

Strict Liability Precedent: Even before NetzDG, German courts have traditionally set a low threshold for companies to challenge reviews. If a business simply claims a reviewer has no record of a transaction, platforms will often temporarily remove the review and force the user to provide proof of their visit.

Fully 99.97% of Google Maps reviews taken down for “defamation” across the entire 27-country European Union are for businesses based in Germany, official European data shows.

I'll take unintended consequences for $500

https://www.fastcompany.com/91420303/google-review-germany-t...

Not sure what "average corporate person" means, but if you're just a random dude and you trade on your golf buddies tips, no one is going to throw you in jail. Very few people get charged a year, like dozens. I'm sure >99.9% of get away with it. I think it's often political or targeted.

The weirdness here comes from the president owning a social media company. I think they're playing up how markets move on their posts for obvious reasons. But social media companies likely sell priority access. They're called enterprise licensing deals. Same with news media, like Bloomberg, Dow, Reuters.

This isn't "insider trading" its publicly available information. The idea that the "little guy" is somehow screwed over by this is just silly.

https://www.barrons.com/advisor/articles/insider-trading-fbi...

What college kid would do that for $100? Seems like a lot of work.

They might do it for free if they enjoy it or for a class, but purely for the money, not even close to being worth their time.

Thats kind of missing the point. There's nothing magical about "level 5". This is stupid academic nonsense, not an objective test or anything that can be measured:

The vehicle can drive anywhere in road traffic and under all conditions without human beings.

I can't drive anywhere in road traffic under all conditions so I guess i'm not level 5? What piece of technology doesn't ever fail or require some kind of human intervention. I don't even think I trust my toaster when I'm out of the room.

Self driving is very much here. Sometimes it fails, because it's technology. The reason steering wheels exist is due to regulations. There are some Chinese cars like Apollo RT6 with a detachable steering wheel

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202207/1271140.shtml

My favorite LeCun was when he was talking about LLMs understanding the real world. In the clip he essentially said "If I have a water bottle on this book and I push the book, the water bottle will move as well. A 3 year old can tell you this. But an LLM has no concept of this effect since it's not written explicitly in any books". The clip is then immediately followed by asking this exact question to a number of LLMs and giving exactly the correct answer.

From the interview, I see he still harps on about the limitations of LLMs and harps on about real world AI. I just can't take him seriously because pretty much everything he says is wrong and hypothetical. He still can't point to a single thing that an LLM fails at that require his so called "world models"

He'll just throw some random stuff out there like "we're not at level 5 driving yet" despite having hundreds of millions of miles driven autonomously every day. He just seems to keep holding on to his beliefs (much of them economic) and refuses to adjust his priors.

I think the rules are there are hard limits unless a multi-trillion dollar company IPOs with a significant absolute float, in which case tracking the "market" obviously includes said company.