Ninjak8051

The techies are insolvent but not yet bankrupt. They have been running their business off accounts receivable (which rightfully belong to you) for months. There is no way to work things out, the money isn't there. You have been hosting their guests and you will get back pennies on the dollars you are owed, years later. Time to pull the plug.

I don't understand why they would even disclose this, maybe it's useful for PR purposes so they can tell regulators "oh we are so safe", but people (including HN posters) can and will draw the wrong conclusion that Anthropic was backdoored and that their data is unsafe.

Ok great, people tried to use your AI to do bad things, and your safety rails mostly stopped them. There are 10 other providers with different safety rails, there are open models out there with no rails at all. If AI can be used to do bad things, it will be used to do bad things.

Let's say you own and operate a small independent hotel, some techies from San Francisco offer to perma-book every room for the next three years solid for some fraction of your normal room rate. You keep operating your hotel, the techies send you regular guests (and handle all payments), and at the end of the month you get the same guaranteed income whether business was bad or good.

All goes well for a while but the techies start slipping on payments. First it's a few days, but sometimes they miss by a few weeks, so you schedule a call with the VP to straighten things out. Eventually they get a few months behind, you're fed up and demand immediate payment or you will stop lodging their guests (who have paid the techies, but somehow the money has not made it to you). CEO calls to straighten things out, promises to wire the money by Friday, just please please please don't evict any guests. You agree, but Friday comes and goes with crickets, and on Saturday morning you kick everyone out.

Props to the author for the well-researched original article.

I disagree with the conclusion. In the current environment, OpenAI can raise money as if were water pouring from a faucet. If SoftBank can't meet its agreements then there are 50 others waiting to take their place. In the current environment, OpenAI's revenue and capital requirements are not meaningful given their ability to raise.

The environment can change quickly, look at early year 2000 vs late year 2000 funding for .com for example - money went from on-faucet to you're-not-getting-a-dime in a few months. So if the funding environment for AI suddenly shifts, yes, OpenAI is cooked, but so is the entire AI industrial complex, from the smallest barely-billion-dollar startup all the way up to Nvidia.

My conclusion is that OpenAI is not a systemic risk, it's not going to fall or take down a large portion of the tech industry on its own, it will fall if investors sour on the entire AI industry for some reason.

First of all, that is factually incorrect -- Trump received 28.1% of the vote in Santa Clara county, which is significantly lower than 1/3rd. Source: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/1225....

Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".

Maybe Altman has no idea about the realities of semiconductor manufacturing, or maybe he does. Sometimes it takes an outsider to shake things up and produce the impossible. Probably some Verizon execs called Steve Jobs a "computer bro" when he walked in with a pre-production iPhone and asked for "half".

This BOD went out and shot their own company. Sam & friends can now cherry-pick whoever they want from OpenAI and recreate most of the value in a few months under their own governance.

Firing Sam is absolutely one of the dumbest things a BOD has ever done in history. He's the founding CEO of the company that is insanely successful, he is the company. If you wanted him gone for some trivial reason you needed to get him onboard first, "here's a billion dollars, now spend more time with friends and family for the next 18 months".

Not the OP, but Fishscapes, Bierhaus, Milk Pail, Sprouts, LazerQuest all gone, couldn't afford the rent. And that's just Mountain View. Retail that residents loved has been replaced by establishments exclusively for tech bros.

Edit: Forgot about Game Kastle and Lee's Comics. Really I could go on all day. These community establishments are gone and never coming back ever, as long as Google lives.

Here is what I am basing my arguments on:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/russian-federatio...

More generally, if Russia (or any party) has incentive, means, motivation to create climate change, do not be surprised if they actively work to make it happen. Russia can literally light things on fire and come out way ahead.

Such pathways require global cooperation and will fail unless all major nations are on board. In particular, Russia is making no effort, and has no incentive or motivation to make any effort due to their vast tundra landscape. Step 1 is to get Russia on board by some means, without Russia any of these goals are senseless.

$1.7M is approximately the construction cost for a ~2000 sq ft rebuild in the suburbs. So that does seem a bit high to construct a single 150 sq ft bathroom.

Probably the mistake is undertaking such a small project to begin with. It sounds like there are many fixed overhead costs (such as environmental review) that must be paid regardless of project size. Maybe you could have a 1,000 sq. ft. bathroom for $2 million, or an entire 10,000 sq. ft. park for $4 million.

> Atherton is a billionaire enclave in Palo Alto

100% factually incorrect. In addition to NOT being part of the City of Palo Alto, The Town of Atherton shares no land border with Palo Alto and is not even in the same COUNTY as Palo Alto. Maybe it's a good idea to learn about other cities, towns and people before you try to dictate land use policies from afar.

Additionally, notice that the orange data points (actual hospitalizations) are significantly under the "With Intervention" plot. So why even include the slide? Clearly the assumptions behind the "With Intervention" plot do not match reality TODAY, let alone in a few weeks.

Not a good sign if people are making actual decisions based on this.

Checking the actual report (broadbandnow.com, not the linked article, which is blogspam) they looked at the weekly median download speeds for the previous ~10 weeks. Last week, 88/200 cities had a median download speed lower than any of the previous 10 weeks.

Imagine you wake up in the morning, first thing you do is take a swab test. Ten minutes later you have your result, and if it's positive, you self-isolate. If it's negative, you go about your day.

No at-home test exists yet, and we surely aren't producing 300 million tests daily yet, but this should be the target.

The handwaving arguments in this letter are not convincing (especially the "You do also understand that, as long as the rate of increase is exponential, no linear solution to contrast it will work (I.e. increasing x times the number of ICU machines, etc.)" nonsense). The stats in this very letter indicate that 10% of patients require ventilators, which cost about $4000. So even if the entire population were sick at the same time, would need population * 0.1 ventilators, at a cost of $400 per resident.

The fact that we haven't spent $400 per resident to stockpile ventilators is a failure of society and a failure of government. The economic damage over these next few weeks will be far, far greater than $400 per resident.

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you're a virus researcher, every outbreak looks like a pandemic. The facts on the ground don't match the pandemic conclusion. There were two cases in all of Santa Clara County a few weeks ago, now there is one case.