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Comment by geori | Hacker News Reader

Lol at "On secondary markets, investors have propelled the company to a $1.5 billion valuation."

typo? or did an editor see the original and say "trillion must be a typo"

I imagine the logprob of b is much greater than t in this context for most models. So 'trillion' gets corrected to the more likely 'billion'.

Freudian slip.

It's for the second grade htf algos

Maybe the editor is from Germany DACH, or similar?). A trillion is a billion in that language.

Cue the Dr. Evil.

For my amusement, I recently asked ChatGPT whether OpenAI and Anthropic were worth their proposed valuations or whether they'd be "kneecapped" by the Chinese models etc.

It gave me a long, detailed explanation which boiled down to, "Maybe Anthropic will be worth the 1T market cap if xyz happen, but unless something fundamentally changes w/ OpenAI, they are NOT worth anywhere near 1T"

Here's a quote from ChatGPT:

"And if I had $1 million that had to be invested today in either OpenAI at $852B or Anthropic at $965B, with a 5–7 year lockup: I'd put the entire $1 million into Anthropic. Not 60/40. 100/0 Anthropic."

Most likely a typo (fixed by now), but in some (most?) non-English languages billion is the correct word for 10^12 instead of 10^9, usually the error happens when translating from English though, not into English.

> billion is the correct word for 10^12 instead of 10^9

Is it? In Portuguese it's thousand, million, billion, trillion... (Milhar, milhão, bilhão, trilhão, ...)

Apparently it's different between Portugal and Brazil? (e.g. Portugal => long-scale, Brazil => short-scale - but that's just what ChatGPT is telling me). E.g. maybe it's more of a 'Europe-except-UK vs Americas' thing?

TIL, I wasn't aware Portugal differed. I wonder about the other Portuguese-speaking countries. They generally align closer to Portugal and Brazil is the outlier (though it accounts for ~78% of Portuguese speakers!) so I suspect it's the case here as well.

Here is a list of languages that use "milliard": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milliard#Descendants

Yeah, in German for example.

Same in Greek. It's "ekatommyrio" with a prefix of the order of magnitude "dis" from two for billions, "tris" from three for trillions, "tetrakis" from four for quadrillions and so on.

Never heard of this... Any examples?

German: 10^6 is "Million," 10^9 is "Millarde," and 10^12 is "Billion"

Hence why in financial markets, a 10^9 billion is called a "yard" (from milliarde)!

In German, 10^9 is a 'Milliarde', and a 'Billion' is 10^12.

The Wikipedia article has a nice map what countries use which convention (search for "Current Usage"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Brazil and Portugal being different doesnt seem stable. I guess Brazils usage will win out?

"milliard" gave us this delightful little poem https://allpoetry.com/Atomyriades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Specifically:

> [...] giga- is always 10^9, which is 'billion' in short scale but 'milliard' in long scale.

In Spanish it is that way

The Social Network quote also needs an update. "a billion dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool.... A Trillion Dollars."

Fixed it seems.

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