jonas21

Convertible notes are worth more as the valuation of the company increases and under accounting rules that’s considered an expense for the company?

I think the author is missing the point. A company cannot unilaterally pace the frontier -- they'll just be left behind. It requires coordination across all actors who are at or near the frontier.

Even if the leading US labs could agree amongst themselves to a coordinated slowdown (and this would likely run afoul of antitrust law), you still have Chinese labs who will catch up to the frontier eventually. To solve this, you'd need some sort of international agreement.

That's why Dario and others are saying loudly that we should pace the frontier in hopes that our political leaders will take up the issue and do something about it. We'll see if that happens...

An open question is what happened to the 15,625 shares that he received when he exercised his options in 1996?

If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.

My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too.

LLMs might not reason exactly like humans, but they do produce much better results if you turn reasoning on.

The "crack-addled idiot savant" phase was really circa 2024, before the big labs figured this out.

I think the issue here is that Google decided that doing reasoning in the AI overviews in Google search would be too slow (and probably also too expensive), so it's still stuck making 2024-era mistakes.

I agree with you about Elon Musk's claims, but that's not what we're discussing here.

If it takes until 2035 or even 2045 for space data centers to have an economic advantage, it still seems like a good investment for someone in Google's position.

And FWIW, there are quite a few people claiming that they'd "go against the laws of physics", etc. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49838152

I've heard arguments that cooling will be a hard technical challenge and, given current equipment weights and launch costs, they would be uneconomical. But is there an obvious reason space data centers would be impossible?

Most technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you might be able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's viable.

If they do get things to work, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.

Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.

I feel like many of Anthropic's issues are due to Dario being too earnest and open. It seems both refreshing (that a CEO has thought deeply about and is willing to talk publicly about the dangers of their product) and depressing (that so many people cynically think this is some sort of marketing ploy).

That's also true in the summer when you don't want that heat dissipated in your house.

I'm not sure this is the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle still has a larger market cap than at any point in history except the last ~2 years.

It's the classic case of a cartel conspiring to limit competition. Here's Matt Levine's explanation [1]:

> 1. Anthropic, OpenAI, and perhaps a couple of other frontier labs are the dominant providers of frontier AI models.

> 2. They can charge customers a lot of money for using their frontier models, and rather less money for older, no-longer-cutting-edge models.

> 3. Training a new frontier model requires ever-increasing billions of dollars of computing power.

> 4. The labs need to more or less continuously race to build new frontier models, because their competitors are all doing it, and if they don’t they will fall behind and no longer be able to charge a lot of money for their best models. (Also because they intrinsically want to build artificial superintelligence, for cancer-curing and/or killing-everyone reasons.)

> 5. If they collectively slowed down, then (1) they’d spend less on compute and (2) they’d be able to charge frontier-model prices for a longer time.

> 6. But if one of them slowed down, the others would eat its lunch.

> 7. If they got together in a room and agreed to slow down, that would look like an antitrust conspiracy: It is generally illegal for competitors to get together and agree to limit the output of their industry.

> 8. But if they publish papers about how important it is to slow down, that might have a similar coordinating function, at least among the US frontier labs if not necessarily among their Chinese competitors.

> 9. And if the government believes those papers, it might help them coordinate. Maybe the government will impose pacing by regulation that the labs could not impose by agreement. Or at least the government will let them get together and agree to slow down. Amodei’s post calls for “frontier AI companies within democratic countries [to] coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress”; a footnote adds: “With government mediation or waivers of antitrust restrictions.” Just meeting in a room to establish common safety standards is legally risky; the labs can’t do it on their own unless governments affirmatively allow it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-14/ai-...

It would require government permission. The top labs would be agreeing not to compete on model advancements for a period of time, which seems like a pretty clear violation of antitrust law.

Career path:

   software engineer -> prompt engineer -> positive affirmation engineer

The entire essay is about stopping development until it can be made more safe, with specific ideas on how to do that.

The fact that he would suggest this despite preparing for an IPO is an even stronger signal that it's in good faith -- it will almost certainly delay or reduce the valuation of the IPO.

More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1,2] and similar legislation. These create extra steps that a service has to go through before releasing a new model that minors can interact with and exposes them to prosecution if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot. It's safer for Anthropic to just exclude minors -- and they're unlikely to be paying customers anyway.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

[2] https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/governor-newsom-signs-adams-...

> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)

I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.

In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].

In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.

If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.

[1] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-9724

[2] https://archive.ph/5M05h

[3] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-11713

> No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.

If that's your bar for reasoning, then most people can't reason either.

> could trace whether that data was used

The point of de-identifying data is to ensure you can't trace who it came from. It would be a serious privacy violation if they could.

Or it could simply mean that they're operating at the limit of the capacity they were able to purchase and do not have headroom to handle load spikes. From what I understand, that's the situation Anthropic is in. And since Anthropic is now leasing a large portion of xAI's datacenter capacity, it's plausible that an Anthropic load spike could cause issues for xAI as well.

Your comment makes it sound like they can just push a button and spin up more capacity -- but at this scale and in this GPU-constrained environment, that's not really how it works.

Sign a contract? The only thing preventing a model from doing that is a lack of legal personhood -- which seems completely orthogonal to intelligence.

The database entry was updated to "Lake America" on August 27:

https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/searc...

GNIS renders their own static map tiles, so it may take a while for the update to be reflected on the map itself.

The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store.

uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).

Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.

The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012.

All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.

It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.

> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.

I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.

In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.

How so?

Well, I guess it's good that corporations have free speech protections under the First Amendment. I often see it argued here that they shouldn't.

Luckily for us, OpenAI's prompt wasn't "make as many paper clips as possible."

You can also just turn off your watch history completely and use the subscriptions page as your starting point. I did that for a while, but turned it back on when I realized that the algorithm was actually quite good at surfacing content that I learned a lot from -- most of it was stuff that I would never search for on my own (or even know to search for).

You must never read the contracts you enter into. Nearly every contract limits the liability of the service provider to the amount you paid them. Short of proving fraud or negligence, you're not going to get more than that.

You could just as easily ask yourself how can a middle man for people finding web pages be worth so much, but here we are, and Google is worth something like $4 trillion, mostly on the back of search.

As it turns out, it's very valuable to be the intermediary between a large number of people who want something and a commoditized market of providers. It's the middleman who captures most of the margin.

Now, AI models are not a commodity yet. But things seem like they might be heading that direction. And in a world where they are, Stripe probably wants to be that guy sitting in the middle.