site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If a lab goes pop and has to sell off its assets, training costs are not a problem. Inference costs can be covered with a reasonably priced subscription. If we're stuck with current SOTA models for the next 50 years, software dev will still be changed forever.

Inference costs can be covered with a reasonably priced subscription.

[Citation needed]

This is currently not true. Maybe if you freeze the models and wait for silicon to improve for a few years it will be. But the LLM companies are constantly increasing their inference costs as FLOPs go down in price.

At least according to Ed Zitron's analysis. Maybe you just don't believe his numbers.

At least according to Ed Zitron's analysis. Maybe you just don't believe his numbers.

Link?

I've been trying to figure out AI-as-a-business since last fall, and the numbers make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ is his blog. He also has a podcast https://www.betteroffline.com/ but the AI industry analysis there is essentially him reading/summarizing his blog posts.

I'm reading through his latest piece where he basically says AI companies are all in complete shambles and he just seems flatly wrong? https://www.wheresyoured.at/data-center-crisis/

While most people know about pretraining — the shoving of large amounts of data into a model (this is a simplification I realize) — in reality a lot of the current spate of models use post-training, which covers everything from small tweaks to model behavior to full-blown reinforcement learning where experts reward or punish particular responses to prompts.

There's a warning sign here, it's like he's implying that post-training is done after the training process, post-training is part of the training process. I don't think he has a proper grasp on what he's talking about.

To be clear, all of this is well-known and documented, but the nomenclature of “training” suggests that it might stop one day, versus the truth: training costs are increasing dramatically, and “training” covers anything from training new models to bug fixes on existing ones. And, more fundamentally, it’s an ongoing cost — something that’s an essential and unavoidable cost of doing business.

Training is not an up front cost, and considering it one only serves to help Anthropic cover for its wretched business model. Anthropic (like OpenAI) can never stop training, ever, and to pretend otherwise is misleading. This is not the cost just to “train new models” but to maintain current ones, build new products around them, and many other things that are direct, impossible-to-avoid components of COGS. They’re manufacturing costs, plain and simple.

What does he think an AI model is? Deepseek R1 0528 is sitting on people's (big!) PCs somewhere, cloud providers are just providing it. It's a complete product. It still gets about 2 billion tokens per month on openrouter which is pretty good for an obsolete model. It doesn't need more 'post-training' to maintain it...

Seems like a deceptive line of argument to say that training costs are not R&D.

It would be reasonable to say 'because of competition, these AI companies cannot stop making new models like how car companies must always release new cars - this is especially true given rapid performance improvements and low costs of switching provider which reduce retention making the business model precarious and expensive' but he isn't saying that, he's making an altogether more ambitious argument that 'training costs are impossible to avoid' which is just wrong?

He has this overly emotional tone too:

Even after a year straight of manufacturing consent for Claude Code as the be-all-end-all of software development resulted in putrid results for Anthropic — $4.5 billion of revenue and $5.2 billion of losses

What is this, Chomsky? I don't find this guy trustworthy when he conjures up figures based on 'just trust me':

Based on hours of discussions with data center professionals, analysts and economists, I have calculated that in most cases, the average AI data center has gross margins of somewhere between 30% and 40% — margins that decay rapidly for every day, week, or month that you take putting a data center into operation.

The idea that the biggest companies in the world have mysteriously decided to invest hundreds of billions in an obviously, openly unprofitable business sector is interesting but it needs to be justified in detail. Who could know more about data centre economics than Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google? Who would be more diligent in checking the financials than the companies spending hundreds of billions of their own money on this, this year alone?

Not saying you’re wrong but a few explanations:

  1. Some firms may believe its existential and therefore even if costs are high and odds of success are low the cost of losing is too high.

  2. Right now, the market is rewarding them for the spending. So even if they internally question the wisdom, stock price goes up and the decision makers get bonuses.

  3. One tech company has somewhat called bullshit. They sit in Cupertino. Maybe they’ve since changed but my understanding is they still call bullshit.

One tech company has somewhat called bullshit. They sit in Cupertino. Maybe they’ve since changed but my understanding is they still call bullshit.

It's less that they've called bullshit and more that they don't have the chops to build a good model themselves so they will simply license one.

Apple clearly could if they wanted to spend the money to have the chops.

It's not clear to me that they could.

Friends I know at apple, even on important projects, find it difficult to get promoted or get a raise. The corporate culture is extremely focused on siloing people so that they don't find out too much about what's going on.

Simply throwing cash at people in the hopes of getting a good model out of it leads to the Facebook path. Not a single incumbent tech company has produced a frontier model except Google, but really it came from DeepMind which was an acquisition and retains a somewhat separate culture from the rest of the company.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats