“The vast majority of this year's net loss, $72 billion, resulted from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments the company issued to raise funding, the Journal report said.”
Interesting, would love to know the details of this.
Basically the $72B are updating the value of what their convertible notes would be worth if they IPOed today at their current valuation. It's a non cash expense but it does matter because it dilutes all current shareholders and thus lowers earnings per share.
What we need to see is the statement of cash flows.
Whats happening to that cash balance?
People are missing the point IMO - the reinvestment needs is what matters. A) how large are they? B) How will they change over-time? C) How does a slow down in capabilities and closing of the gap by China + price-competition affect their cash flows from operations net of the reinvestment (e.g. will it draw down their cash balance).
You can only hold the perception of increasing capabilities for so long - humans are very adaptive as we are seeing and scare-tactics do not work forever.
I love that you made this, and that you told your story about why. Clearly a lot of thought went into it, both leading up to and during its construction. Thank you!
Like others, I'm skeptical about the business model. That's not really a knock on you (and I wish you the best of luck), but rather with the whole ecosystem of these kinds of apps. There are three big problems:
- Everyone and their aunt is trying to sell me monthly subscriptions for a few bucks. These add up, both in terms of $ and cognitive overhead (yet another subscription I need to remember to cancel if I stop using it...)
- I don't own this system, I'm just renting it. This is a trade-off I'm less and less willing to make for a whole host of reasons including my ability to vibe code my own thing, open source, enshitification (or, perhaps more likely, you deciding to abandon this project in the future) etc
- All the usual concerns about data security and privacy are heightened right now in this era of super-capable hacking agents and super-creepy AI companies
As a user of things, vibecoding is the most exciting thing about AI. I can make anything I want to use, built exactly as I please. As a maker of things, vibecoding is the most damning thing about AI. Anyone can re-make anything I've made, built exactly as they please.
By the way, I've built my own system with AI to manage my todos. So even though I probably won't use yours in the sense of paying for your service, you have some ideas and themes in here that are really thoughtful and I could see working into my flow.
Not only are the models and compute unavailable to the public, they are unavailable to anyone besides the labs, including the government. We better hope the furthermost tip of the jagged frontier stays in purely theoretical mathematics, because if it strays into the physical world then we may find ourselves in a situation where the power of the labs rivals the governments supposedly overseeing them.
Lots of anti-AI takes seem to fall prey to the moralistic fallacy (ie because something shouldn’t be, thinking it isn’t). I’m very skeptical of the claims AI companies make, their motives, and whether their impact will be anything positive. But I am pretty tired of takes like this that are so reflexively skeptical of anything AI that they carelessly dismiss claims about the dangers and real impacts of AI that are happening.
(And to be clear: I’m not talking about being skeptical of fantastic claims about things that have not happened- ie an AI takeover, runaway super-intelligence, etc.)
What kind of real evidence about the dangers of AI that are happening do you have that didn't come from an AI company, wasn't about some internal test that conveniently can't be replicated or independently verified, where nobody disabled guardrails that would be in place for typical users, or where they didn't instruct the AI to roleplay as someone doing something evil? What danger are we seeing right now in the real world that people aren't taking seriously?
The article is very dismissive of recent mathematical proofs. It mixes together ethical problems (plagiarism, "strip mining" proofs) with capability problems (proofs not being novel, overstating capabilities). Again, it's fair to be skeptical of what the companies themselves are saying (and why). But from what I've read, many mathematicians are taking AI quite seriously. I've recently read several thoughtful essays from credible folks who are calling for dramatic changes to the field in response. For example:
https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/9/13/a-beginning-for-ma...
The article is also dismissive of the Hugging Face incident and other hacking incidents. This one is trickier, because we are more reliant on what the companies have released to piece together what happened. The METR report is probably the closest thing we have right now. Here again, I think the issue is that a lot of coverage blends the ethical issues (holding AI companies responsible for what their bots do) with capability issues (whether AI is or will be capable of developing novel and dangerous attacks).
That's not what happened, in any of the many incidents. But even if it were, if you can make AI do dangerous things by telling it to roleplay doing dangerous things, then that... Makes the AI dangerous.
> That's not what happened, in any of the many incidents.
That's exactly what happened when Google's AI "autonomously" hacked into companies coincidentally in the middle of tests of its cybersecurity abilities in a simulated highly controlled scenario on a totally isolated system that was just accidentally given unrestricted access to the open internet.
That's exactly what happened when AI was "threatening to blackmail" people. Internal tests, in roleplaying scenarios designed to push the model to do exactly wthat it did.
It's exactly what happened in the the Hugging Face incident. An internal test was conducted, AI was told to do tasks specifically to test AI's ability to take known vulnerabilities and turn them into working exploits, mostly using an internal research model which was not intended for production, but also another production model whose guardrails had been intentionally removed.
So yes, a company with billions and billions of dollars and years of research and investment into AI models likely will be able to use their AI in cyber attacks. I think pretty much everybody believed that was a risk.
What does that tell us about our risks in the real world right now? Well, it's extremely hard to say because we're still left trusting the AI company who is constantly lying about what their AI is to tell us what it was doing and how, and we're still unable to independently verify or replicate what happened, and there are no known examples of anyone who isn't an AI company doing anything like it. Certainty you or I or the vast majority of the population can't just browse to chatgpt.com and hack the planet.
Did AI do something that humans couldn't already do? No. Did they spontaneously "go rogue", or demonstrate "superintelligence" or "create AI civilizations"? No. Can we be sure they didn't just orchestrate the whole incident to push their "AI scary!" narrative? Nope. So we're pretty much left with what we already knew. All the largest risks are from AI companies themselves and governments building AI models. There isn't much any of us can do about that.
So, your claim is that OpenAI intentionally might have had its agents hack multiple companies, as well as multiple government agencies? And they're just pretending to not have known about it?
The vast majority of the AI-doomerism (if one wants to call it like that) actually doesn't come from AI companies, rather, from a few (high-profile) individuals.
(I intentionally ignore the tsunami of trash journalism and the likes)
"White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTrBz6Z5c0E
AI companies aren't leaving a lot of AI-doomerism ground uncovered.
Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.
This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).
There’s a nice Apple session from this year’s WWDC about this where they suggest using the new resizing feature of the simulator (born to support the foldable iPhone) to have a “drawer” for all the controls and tools to fine tune your UX. I’ll be stealing that for the web as well
https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e842...
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