Tbh it’s probably more straightforward than that. Kill a $2B government program to so private interests can collect $4B on the same (or worse) previously subsidized services.

I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.

My understanding is that it’s the latter. AFAIK it takes something like 3-5 years to get a fab going if you already know what you’re doing, so it would not only be wildly expensive but you’re also gambling that RAM won’t come back down to a reasonable supply/demand in the next 5-10 years to break even on the whole process.

There’s also the fact that it wouldn’t really make sense for Valve unless they wanted to make a huge pivot in their whole business. Entry costs aside, manufacturing RAM is not really something a company can just do as a “side gig”. Valve is only like 400 people, so it wouldn’t be Valve just “starting to produce RAM” but rather Valve turning itself into a RAM manufacturer that also distributes video games.

I played with it at work for the afternoon when I noticed I had access. It was fine. Sure, it was an improvement, but it wasn’t so good that it could end the world. It was basically just more of the same for anyone familiar with coding agents.

That’s wishful thinking at best. Banks have your money invested in the AI bubble right now. If anything, they’re already working to disqualify purchases made by AI from being considered fraud.

Most business laws are just pay-to-play regulation anyways

I think that may be true for Peter Thiel or Larry Ellison, but for the rest of them it’s just the same old game: riding the wave of whatever investors want to see. The actual business only matters as far as they can use it to convince investors to keep throwing money at them.

If you gave them a button that would give them a million dollars but a child would die, they’d press it without a thought. They’d press the button until there were no more children on the planet. They’d use the money to convince people to have children just so they could keep pressing the button.

IMO most of these CEOs are so excited about AI because it’s just been the best money printer in a while. Investors are irrationally interested in AI, so these CEOs will continue to find any excuse to say the letters “AI” at least until people stop sending them money for it.

It does, actually. From the article:

Anthropic’s confidential filing will give regulators a period to look over the company’s financial disclosures before the AI firm’s investor prospectus becomes public. Filing confidentially has become common for major firms, with SpaceX approaching its IPO in the same manner.

[…]

“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” Anthropic said.

Modern browsers are basically an OS of their own at this point. And, in fairness, for many users their actual OS is effectively just a means by which they access a browser. This is not even mentioning something like Chrome OS.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea or that it should be this way, but it is where we are.

I know this is fun to point and say about MS, but not really the case here IMO. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish describes the MS strategy for creating/maintaining a monopoly - but GitHub nearly is a monopoly. Extinguishing it only takes themselves out of the competition.

This is just plain old mismanagement if you ask me, and ostensibly a victim of the current AI craze.

Translated for the rest of us:

“You working-class chum will be unquestioning servants, and you’ll be grateful for it!”

If anything, it’s the other way around: we have an AI-company PR problem. Media outlets can’t stop themselves from presenting interviews with CEOs of AI companies as some sort of reliable source for how incredible AI really is if we would only spend more money locking ourselves into AI-driven workflows.

TL;DR the umbrella-selling weatherman keeps predicting that rain is on the way

Don’t worry, you’ll still get shit on by your manager. Probably even harder than now:

The restaurant-level analytics, which Yum refers to as Accelerated Restaurant Intelligence, will be used to create action plans for restaurant managers at struggling locations, using best practices from stronger-performing units.

They’ll be sending your human boss AI generated plans that may or may not have been successful at a totally different location, that they’ll have to try to make work. And make no mistake, this will end up in every location, not just “struggling” ones.

I think the overlap between people who think using Linux is hard and the people who would open regedit in the first place is basically zero.

The whole “AI Credit” thing did strike me as odd to even introduce. They mention a few times that 1 AI Credit = $0.01, but then do the whole pricing table in $/1M tokens.

The only place I saw them even use “AI Credits” as a unit was to say the $10/month plan includes 1000 AI Credits. Why even introduce a whole new unit if you only use it to say your $10 monthly plan includes $10 of usage?

I suspect the answer is so that they can later muddy the waters by changing the number of included credits to be less than you’re paying monthly without directly saying “you’re now paying $20/month for $10 of usage”

I guess it is coming from the same people who came up with the world’s most inscrutable billing scheme for compute…