Isn’t this just selection bias - you don’t see the people who are out making AI deliver boring value for people unless you use their products right?
I.e. Ramp does a pretty good job of using AI to make expense management easier/ CloudFlare makes it a lot easier to configure stuff properly on CloudFlare but is just like boringly useful.
I’m excited to try this. I got Instinct after hearing all the hype and it is basically completely useless. Fails at the most basic browser navigation type tasks.
Right now the consumer agent players are trying to pretend they have decent functionality that will exist 3-6 months so they can get marketshare. So hopefully Anthropic is sticking to their underpromise and over deliver.
Lots of use cases are more speed than cost sensitive. I.e. yes if you are paying a bunch of engineers in Boston who graduated from MIT to work on robotics $165 is a rounding error if you aren’t producing at scale.
Basically anything aerospace and defense related will care more about speed and compliance than cost.
They have $80 billion in debt, they are basically going to be operating like a private equity run business. They'll be converting any cash flow they can to debt payments.
It's not the end of the world. Seattle is incredibly expensive, however the market is down this year and listings sitting on the market for months and months. The problem is influx of people who need to sell because they lost their job or accepted the buyout - it can ruin their life further down the line.
The Seattle "Eastside" is not really Seattle, it's Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah and Sammamish - overpriced suburbs. I live in one of them and work at MSFT.
it definitely feels like sooner than later there will be “Mythos level” cyber threats available on open source / uncensorable models. I think the only thing that can be done is continued work on hardening anything that is remotely close to “critical infrastructure” and software supply chain.
On one hand, self hosting will always be niche so you could pass a law like “if your serving inference at scale you need to have safeguards/ classifiers in place” since > 95% of inference will go through hosted services in the long run … but that could turn into thought policing dystopia real quick.
This feels like kinda of a useless comparison if we don't know about the tax rates they pay, cost of capital, adjusting for geographic location and local regulations etc. I.e. the largest increase was seen in NY where it is really expensive to do anything and high taxes.
Yup, tax exceptions, cheaper financing or even government financing. It's like letting the referees play the game and then pointing out that they make more free throws.
Removing the rent-seeking middle-man class generally brings in savings. Same with healthcare.
Also the "refs" should be in charge. That is to say the working class are the refs and they should be able to build infrastructure without the capital owning class inserting itself as a rent-seeker between them and these services.
Who do you think is paying to keep coming that way? Businesses that have an interest in keeping it that way, for example comercial realestate companies.
Based on my personal observations, most of the local zoning restrictions in the US come from conservative local residents, and not a cabal of developers. The latter want to build.
And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.
In large cities, housing is now being built specifically for rent, and there are many early sales opportunities available exclusively to companies.
In certain cities of Ireland, it is common for a new block of apartments to be sold out within the first hour. You get in a queue to visit on the first day and you don't even have a chance.
Do you think commercial real estate are backing maintaining single family zoning in places like Palo Alto, or do you think they'd actually benefit from tossing all the zoning, and being able build, sell, and rent as many office buildings and apartments and condominiumns as possible?
Real estate development is a pretty competitive business with few barriers to entry. Nobody controls enough of the market to make it worth trying to restrict other developers.
In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.
I don’t think so - those companies are atleast modestly pro growth. They want to do more projects. In NYC and Boston local residents talk about “evil developers” who want to replace vacant lots with homes and businesses
I don't know about Boston case, but in Ireland it is common for developers to build and investment funds to buy it all in closed door meetings. So your only option is to rent.
In other places of the world where I lived, it was common to rent a completely different region to only find out later the company letting the house/apartment belonged to the same group.
> Ireland’s planning and zoning framework is widely regarded by economists and housing experts as one of the most restrictive, bureaucratic, and hostile-to-development systems among developed common-law nations [1]
So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.
I've been thinking for awhile it is very strange that claude/ openai etc google "What was the inflation rate last quater" instead of just having a tool to query BLS datasets and that sort of thing.
So hopefully most of these statistics move towards first party sources.
I think you are giving them way too much leeway. For the service they provide there’s no technical reason it can’t be infinitely scalable. For example their “pull request” page constantly goes down. Serving that kind of workload at high burst load is a fully solved problem.
If they are genuinely compute constrained on CI they should obviously reduce the free offerings rather than take down all their paying customers constantly.
You are basically saying that you, from the outside, have solved the problem perfectly and the whole team of engineers at GitHub just don't know about this one simple solution you are proposing.
Have you considered that you don't have the full context of the problem and it's not "just" a few small tweaks?
My guess is that the problem is internal politics and incentives. Yes I think it is a fully solved problem for a company worth trillions to have an infinitely scalable "pull requests" page.
For example, Microsoft is known to pay significantly less than their competitors. I am guessing they just don't have the systems internally to say "This problem is worth literally billions to us in revenue per year, so we will pay millions to IC's to get it fixed and clear internal roadblocks".
It's not "just" small tweaks it is likely that people who are entrenched need to be moved and they need people with the right incentives in place to get it done.
I think we just fundamentally disagree here. I'm sure they know the current state and that it doesn't work. I think it's likely that they need entirely different people knowing about these problems and working on them in a totally different reporting structure to get the job done. It's a hard job and they're not up for the task.
I think the reason they can't make that change is that Microsoft is a slow moving rigid culture and doesn't have the kind of org that can adapt to a 10x or 100x increase in usage compared to companies like Google or the AI Labs that handled much more difficult scaling problems.
> Their c-levels wrote blog posts about the current state and why it happens, pretty sure they know what's going on.
Having read many of the formal statements from the C*Os in the BigCos I've worked for, I can say with confidence that that is not at all a safe bet to be making.
I.e. Ramp does a pretty good job of using AI to make expense management easier/ CloudFlare makes it a lot easier to configure stuff properly on CloudFlare but is just like boringly useful.
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