RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I'm not talking about operating margin, I'm talking about inference margin, where the server rental is the cost of production.
The operating loss is due to research. Research is the basis of all modern technology and companies should be doing more of it. It's inappropriate to compare it to casino spending like in your above comment.
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1973120175470944615
Says it right here, source is paywalled article.
Revenue: $4.3B in H1 2025 Cost of Revenue: $2.5B in H1 2025. Do the maths, margins are 42%.
I never see a source for these claims that inference costs are higher than what is charged to customers but people keep saying it, in spite of the fact that it violates basic rules of economics.
If research and model development costs more than your inference margins
Companies are allowed to make losses investing in R&D for new products. This profit-brained beancounter mindset is why the West has been declining, in a nutshell. If you don't invest aggressively, how are you going to innovate? R&D and capital deepening is the source of prosperity.
It's very reasonable to expect there will be all kinds of lucrative offshoots from LLM research, just like how deep learning is staggeringly, ludicrously profitable, that's why these big companies are investing so much. The technology is fundamentally very promising and is worth investing in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Better yet, imagine a story where you are the main character, playing in a rich world with real agency, learning things, judging, fighting, ruling, plot threads springing up around you. We could have that too, a whole new fusion between games and literature. We have that right now, albeit in a limited, experimental form.
the pure consumer backlash to this silicon valley lobotomy of AI could be very much Dot-Com-2-point-O
What consumer backlash? For every reddit post about how AI is terrible, there are probably 100 people who are enjoying using ChatGPT, find it convenient, 10 people gooning to physically impossible pornography or degen ERP, 30 people enjoying the funny AI cat video that chops up and cooks other animals...
Many consumers say they hate Facebook ad-slop, Microsoft's persistent disregard for consent with Windows updates, Google spying on you and the crap Google algorithm, Tiktok brainrot short form video.
But these companies are making huge amounts of money. Trump and Larry Ellison aren't trying to secure Tiktok because short form video is unpopular, quite the opposite. Tiktok is making billions. It's high-status to say Tiktok is slop, I think portrait video was a mistake and repress youtube shorts furiously whenever I see it... but it's clearly very popular.
If we just read what consumers say and what the media highlights, we'd assume that Facebook was near bankruptcy. They're constantly getting fined, called into congress, delete facebook and hit the gym is an ancient meme at this point, billions shoveled into VR with no returns, their Llama AI models have been shit, everyone thinks of it as a website for boomers, people blame them for everything from loneliness to anorexia to genocide in Myanmar... But no, Facebook is making gigantic profits and their profits are rising fast. Money >>> talk. AI is paying off massively for Facebook in the unsexy ad algorithms that nobody talks about. They can easily pay for these huge capital investments, profits are up even as they spend more and more!
OpenAI is making 42% margins on inference, they want to grow the inference market and this is a natural route to take. 42% margins when they have such a big free-tier is insane. Research is the expensive part, not inference. AI research is clearly important, Facebook and Tiktok prove there's fortunes to be made. LLMs and generative AI are also lucrative, only they're resource-intensive for R&D compared to deep learning. But the promise of mechanizing intellectual labour is incredibly seductive, the big players are not going to slow down here. The market for LLMs is awkward because they're so immensely powerful and valuable that there's furious competition driving prices down, while the market is also still immature and yet to be developed so revenue is starting off small (but growing very quickly).
Unlimited weird porn and anime cat videos are going to accelerate techno-capital, not slow things down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Drones aren't quite like guns since they require conversion and some significant level of skill to weaponize. Petrol-bombs are a thing but we don't worry so much about petrol like guns. Fertilizer -> explosives is a thing but fertilizer doesn't require special licenses to buy, though there is monitoring.
You can do vast amounts of damage with a laptop and internet connection but they're not too regulated.
Whereas guns, rockets, knives, high explosives are easy to weaponize if you have them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I'm more interested in the exact meaning of its '30 hours +' of continuous coding. What does that mean? 30 hours in series, or 30 hours over parallel, many sub-agents...
Can you really leave it on overnight and come back to see a good result? I wouldn't know, I'm a peasant stuck on the Pro subscription...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
"The media is trying to make ISIS look like bad guys and from media reporting, they seem pretty bad..."
They could just be bad! It is very, very likely that an illegal immigrant from Guyana who gets a position of high office is a sketchy character. Even without the cash, guns and so on he'd still be a sketchy character.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I don't see how the reporting is deceptive. They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character. How did he come to get a highly paid job in the administration? How did he pass the background check? Why is there all this cash in his car? Why did he try to flee law enforcement? These questions are probably not unrelated.
It's not a crime to have lots of cash nor should it be. But it is useful in trying to analyse the situation.
Not all people with certain kinds of obnoxious tattoos are criminals. But they do send a message and wisdom involves receiving that message and calibrating appropriately.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
You don't have that crypto in the car with you any more than I have the cash in my bank account in my phone, that crypto is actually in some coinbase server somewhere and unless it's Monero, it's very much traceable. It's not the same. If you had a Ledger with you, that would be analogous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere.
What do you mean? Why does music need a purpose? It just needs to sound good. A purpose and meaning are optional.
Now the lyrics, when they're AI, can have a samey, obvious vibe. But that's just the lyrics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Interesting story. I feel as though it's too well-written to be realistic. All these people are making smart moves, only to be checkmated by a smarter being.
Apparently Microsoft only just stopped outsourcing Pentagon IT to China: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-escorts-pentagon.html
The US military is not going to be making smart moves regarding human-in-the-loop AGI/ASI control loss situations. They don't make too many smart moves elsewhere in their area of expertise, developing weapons and winning wars. The Iraq-Afghanistan bunglers are still in power, there was no military purge or anything. They don't know how to win wars and they're not great at procuring weapons either - Constellation, LCS, Zumwalt... Why would they do a good job with AI, a seductive and dangerous, unknown and unprecedented technology?
It's like how back in the old days, people were concerned with how a powerful boxed AI might escape the box to interfere with the outside world. There's no boxing, there are huge companies working around the clock to give powerful AIs more access to the outside world! And in China they don't care about AI safety at all, they just laugh and move on.
Law of undignified failure: https://www.yahoo.com/news/watch-ed-sec-calls-artificial-184225319.html
President Donald Trump’s education secretary repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence as “A1”—like the popular steak sauce—instead of “AI” during a panel on artificial intelligence in education.
“I wish I could remember the source, but there’s a school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders or even pre-Ks have A1 teaching every year starting that far down in the grades,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon, 76, said at a summit put on by Silicon Valley investors in California on Tuesday.
Making the situation even more bizarre, McMahon pronounced “AI” correctly earlier during the same panel discussion. The Education Department didn’t respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment on the secretary’s apparent mistake.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Mystery drones have been lurking around airports and nuclear plants for years, prior to the war. May be Russia, may be some other source.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
v5 is much better but it still sounds Suno... It's indescribable, something about the clashing sound (if I was a musician I could be more clear).
Is what I was going to say, till I found one that didn't sound Suno at all. Wow.
Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?
Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard. Turn all my neverfinished story ideas into full stories, better than I ever could.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Yeah but within the ultra-processed junk food is chemicals and hormones that they didn't have in the 1950s and 1960s. Nutrition 'experts' have clearly let us down on the obesity front, they don't know what all these chemicals do in the long-term or in combination. And not just in food but the plastic wrappings on everything, the particles in the air, in sunscreen, in clothes...
I agree that eating healthy food is good. I do this myself and remain fairly healthy, no weight problems at least. I can eat as much as I like. But there's more to it than just surface-level health/obesity/malnutrition. The body is very complicated and poorly understood.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
True, the MKUltra brainwashing experiments did change Kaczynski's beliefs but not in a controllable or desirable way, from the point of view of the manipulators.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Their remote viewing was pretty promising too, per various documents. Nobody can fault the Cold War CIA with closedmindedness.
But if remote viewing is so great, why did they spend so much on the U2, satellites, SIGINT? If the US has unconventional propulsion, flying saucers, why would they need the F-35?
If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!
Western citizens aren't volunteering to die in Ukraine because the CIA did some trickery, they're doing this because their attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by the media and those around them, they think it's the right thing to do. Some people are easily suggestible and follower-type personalities. I think this website is full of contrarians and individualists who are highly resistant to consensus and passive manipulation, we naturally struggle to model the mindsets of the other end of the spectrum.
(One exception might be the chemicals and hormones we encounter all around in the modern world, which might act as epigenetic triggers making people more cowardly and less rebellious, though it's not clear that this is anyone's plan, per se. You can see the physiognomy of our fathers and grandfathers was totally different to today, some young men are growing breasts because of some chemical, presumably.)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
I think we overestimate the power of 'mysterious technique' brainwashing. The gold-standard, world-class, top-tier brainwashing methods are all known: State education, media propaganda, social media to catalyze it all together. Some schmucks in the CIA are no match for that. Mass media >>>>> MKUltra.
And remember that many people are weak-willed. Think of the people who spend thousands on gacha or online gambling. There are going to be people who are extra-vulnerable to this stuff, fall into communities where this is normalized and valorized... bang bang bang!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Start suppressing the far-left? Arrest, debank, infiltrate, undermine, unearth embarassing information (huge contingent of pedophiles here, recall the weird pedo who tried to cover for Kirk's assassin). Definitely get rid of these twitch goons like Destiny, make it known that it just isn't practical for Twitch to be hosting this kind of content. Twitch will then find that the nebulous terms of service mean that, alas, Destiny's channel has to be shut down. Find legal issues and then continuously haul them into court until they STFU, though this works best if you actually control the judiciary.
This is standard govt stuff, a basic security-forces operation. If you're ideologically opposed to pressing the 'suppress' button then there isn't really much you can do. I guess you can try to channel leftist support over to a moderate instead. But that only works if you can do subtle manipulation of the media, which is very difficult today.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
The last 7 days are more important than everything else put together.
Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?
Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.
Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.
But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
You're too harsh on Sanderson I think. Sanderson is not on the level of HP slashfic. Go on AO3. You will See Things there and thoroughly reassess your opinions about writing quality.
Not much happens in Way of Kings. That's standard in fantasy. There is maybe 100 pages in the first book of the Wheel of Time where nothing happens. There is an entire book of filler in the Wheel of Time.
Books 1-3 of Stormlight were fine with moments of excellence, only by Book 4 does it degenerate into therapy-slop and an ass-pull twist. Also too much MCU inter-cosmere crossover stuff.
Yet any man or group of men who learned to read would have a huge military advantage.
They have female scribes to do the reading for them? Literacy was low back in medieval times. It's no more dumb than real stuff we did like footbinding.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
He is legitimately funny but in part because he comes up with whole new levels of reddit: argumentum ad Marvel Movie for instance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Why isn't it clear whether it's 100K per year or 100K lump sum? Lutnick was apparently saying annual fee. But the Press Sec says one-time payment.
https://x.com/PressSec/status/1969495900478488745
Serious failure of planning and state capacity here. Like with the tariffs where they go up and down on a whim. If you're going to implement a policy, be consistent and stable. Implement, test, review, iterate. Don't flip-flop from day to day.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them.
You're just describing how imperialism works, that's how countries get their borders. My point is that defensive violence is basically reasonable. It can't be less reasonable than offensive violence.
Most accept this and would take it a step further, viewing defensive violence as legitimate and offensive violence as wrong. Israel routinely says it's fighting a defensive struggle for survival to justify its tactics and campaigns, to justify foreign military aid and diplomatic assistance. But they're fighting offensively.
the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders
The Israelis didn't accept those borders and rejected them, that's why they took various territories beyond '67 borders in the Six Day War. They changed those borders and have continued to cement their territorial holdings by splitting up the Palestinian held land in the West Bank, creating new settlements.
Reasonable borders are based on power and Israeli power is unstable.
Israel is not a great power due to its small size and doesn't have the luxury of prosecuting this kind of campaign, they only get away with it due to US diplomatic and military support. Without America, they would've run out of bombs to blow up Gaza with and much else besides. Without America, their missile defence would be much less effective. Without American diplomacy and aid deals their neighbours would be much more hostile. The Israeli situation is unstable, they have a high-tech economy dependent on not being sanctioned, a high-tech military dependent on US weapons, a fractious democracy unsuited for juche-style isolation.
Constantly angering the Arab and Islamic world is not a smart idea. Israelis may be better at fighting but they're vastly outnumbered. This is not America vs native Americans. It is provocative and obnoxious behaviour to derive national legitimacy from harsh treatment in the ghettoes and expulsions in Eastern Europe and then ghettoize the locals of a graciously granted strip of land, while continuously striving to expand it for lebensraum. This kind of behaviour has and will reduce favourability in the West.
The Palestinians have made bad decisions, so has Israel. There may not be much sympathy for yet another Israeli crisis where they 'need' a surge of aid and support to get out of a fix. What is their plan for China inciting trouble, getting Hamas some first-rate MANPADs, ATGMs and killer drones to drag the US into more MENA drama? What is their plan for EU sanctions or the US walking away? Or even just a prolonged insurgency and skirmishing with Iran that wrecks their economy? Vae victis works both ways.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
So the army doesn't want to distribute food. They don't want to let anyone else distribute food. But they do want to shoot people coming up to get food... Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here! And it's not a sincere concern for crowd crush and equitable distribution of aid.
o3 sure is spooky, as is the stuff about rationality forums. Janus the LLMwhisperer also goes on about how tiny amounts of training data can radically change a model's self-conception, training on the information from these alignment tests has a special effect he says.
It's incredibly ironic how badly the classical AI safety movement has failed. Sam Altman credited Yudkowsky for getting all these people interested in AGI and ASI back in the day.
https://x.com/xriskology/status/1622197122979209218
It goes to show how unpredictable the long-term effects of our actions are. What we have today is exactly the outcome Yud didn't want!
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