Are you joking? There's loads of trivial links. Most obviously: it's stopped (pregnancy, menopause) and therefore so too will stop purchases of certain 'female hygiene products'.
And will be targeted by an avalanche of childbirth-related ads... Isn't this an old story now? We've already seen this happening even before evidence of women's health data being sold to ad companies...
I think even Flo's behaviour is not news, but it is worth distinguishing I think between more organic and generic targeting behaviour based on say searches for health advice or other products, and selling 'first-class' health data as it were which is a much stronger signal and feels more personal.
I can't accept that premise. They'll take any revenue they can get, including reselling that same data to Palantir or to RFK Jr's health department. Did you skip several periods and then suddenly start having them again? Sounds like you've had an illegal abortion. SWAT raid on your home, incoming. And so on.
Nadella had OpenAI by the short and curlies early on. But all I've seen from him in the last couple of years is continuously acquiescing to OpenAI's demands. I wonder why he's so weak and doesn't exert more control over the situation? At one point Microsoft owned 49% of OpenAI but now it's down to 27%?
Everything is personal preference, and perhaps I am more fiscally conservative because I grew up in poverty.
But if I own 49% of a company and that company has more hype than product, hasn't found its market yet but is valued at trillions?
I'm going to sell percentages of that to build my war chest for things that actually hit my bottom line.
The "moonshot" has for all intents and purposes been achieved based on the valuation, and at that valuation: OpenAI has to completely crush all competition... basically just to meet its current valuations.
It would be a really fiscally irresponsible move not to hedge your bets.
Not that it matters but we did something similar with the donated bitcoin on my project. When bitcoin hit a "new record high" we sold half. Then held the remainder until it hit a "new record high" again.
Sure, we could have 'maxxed profit!'; but ultimately it did its job, it was an effective donation/investment that had reasonably maximal returns.
(that said, I do not believe in crypto as an investment opportunity, it's merely the hand I was dealt by it being donated).
Microsoft didn't sell anything. OpenAI created more shares and sold those to investors, so Microsoft's stake is getting diluted.
And Microsoft only paid $10B for that stake for the most recognizable name brand for AI around the world. They don't need to "hedge their bets" it's already a humongous win.
Why let Altman continue to call the shots and decrease Microsoft's ownership stake and ability to dictate how OpenAI helps Microsoft and not the other way around?
I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure. This deal is proof. If Microsoft didn’t believe in OpenAI they wouldn’t have restructured it this way. They’d have tightened their reins and brought in “adult supervision”
> I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure.
Maybe that will be true someday. But, right now, they are burning billions of dollars every quarter. Their expenses far far outweigh their income and they are nowhere near profitability.
silly valley stopped letting the subtraction of two numbers dictate their reality since the start-up era. while the money and vcs stopped trying to finding the next uber and went all in on llms, they didn't get wiser in how they gauge if something is worth investing in
Were you around here ten years ago when that exact argument was regularly regurgitated about Uber? Notice that argument is no longer popular?
The point is that losing money isn't a sure sign that a business is doomed. Who knows where OpenAI will end up, but people still line up to invest. Those investors have billions reasons to be due diligent. Unlike what's claimed around here, most of investors aren't stupid. You yourself wouldn't be stupid either if money is at stake.
I don’t understand the “record high” point. How did you decide when a “record high” had been reached in a volatile market? Because at $1 the record high might be $2 until it reaches $3 a week or month later. How did you determine where to slice on “record highs”?
Genuine question because I feel like I’m maybe missing something!
The longer answer is; you never know whats coming next, bitcoin could have doubled the day after, and doubled the day after that, and so on, for weeks. And by selling half you've effectively sacrificed huge sums of money.
The truth is that by retaining half you have minimised potential losses and sacrificed potential gains, you've chosen a middle position which is more stable.
So, if bitcoin 1000 bitcoing which was word $5 one day, and $7 the next, but suddenly it hits $30. Well, we'd sell half.
If the day after it hit $60, then our 500 remaining bitcoins is worth the same as what we sold, so in theory all we lost was potential gains, we didn't lose any actual value.
Of course, we wouldn't sell we'd hold, and it would probably fall down to $15 or something instead.. then the cycle begins again..
I was told stock to employees are left aside shares, or they sell the stock the company owns if they already went public.
I'm not convinced what you believe is true. Dilution is possible undoubtedly, but perhaps if majority shareholders approve it. And even then, likely regulated by a suite or other constraints.
A business burning more than a dollar for every dollar of revenue is a lot of things. "Quite profitable" is not one of them.
If you're reaching for the SaaStr piece on API compute margins hitting ~70% by late 2025: yes, that exists, and it describes one tier. The volume is on the consumer side. The consumer side is the bit on fire. Pointing at the API margin and calling the whole business profitable is the financial equivalent of weighing yourself with one foot off the scale.
The original argument, in case it got lost: Microsoft holds (held) a 49% stake in a company projecting another $44B of cumulative losses through 2028, against unit economics that depend on competitors not catching up. That's textbook hedge-the-bet territory. "They have paying customers" doesn't refute that, MoviePass had paying customers too.
Pointing at the API margin and calling the whole business profitable is the financial equivalent of weighing yourself with one foot off the scale.
I didn’t call the business profitable, I said that inference is profitable. I was responding to your assertion that they’re speculating by selling below cost. Which isn’t true; they’re selling inference, profitably. They’re losing money because they’re investing in the next model. The company isn’t profitable, it might never be profitable, but the product they’re selling is profitable. So calling it speculation based on selling something below cost is just factually incorrect.
Granted on the narrow point: inference itself runs at a positive margin. Where it falls apart is the implicit claim that the training spend is separable.
It isn't. Frontier model training is the cost of having a product to sell inference on next year. Stop training and the inference margin decays on the timescale of the next competitor release, which in 2026 is measured in weeks. So "the product is profitable, the company is just investing" describes a business where the investment is structurally non-optional and structurally larger than the product margin. That's the definition of selling below cost at the level that matters, which is the level you're hedging at when you hold 49%.
McDonald's is profitable because a Big Mac in 2027 costs roughly what a Big Mac in 2026 cost to make. OpenAI's product depreciates to zero on a 12-month cycle unless they spend ~$40B keeping it ahead. That's the disagreement, and "but inference itself has positive margin" doesn't resolve it, it just relocates it.
They had to negotiate away the non-profit structure of OpenAI. Sam used that as a marketing and recruiting tool, but it had outlived that and was only a problem from then on.
For OAI to be a purely capitalist venture, they had to rip that out. But since the non-profit owned control of the company, it had to get something for giving up those rights. This led to a huge negotiation and MSFT ended up with 27% of a company that doesn’t get kneecapped by an ethical board.
In reality, though, the board of both the non-profit and the for profit are nearly identical and beholden to Sam, post–failed coup.
If Sam continues doing Sam things, MS might get 0% of OpenAI if Satya insists on the previous contract. Either by closing up OpenAI and opening up OpaenAI and/or by MS suing it out of existence. It’s all about what MS can get out of it. If they can get 27% of something rather than nothing, they’re better off.
When I drink a single can of Diet Coke or anything with aspartame, I get crippling stomach aches and then sudden diarrhea, all within about 2 hrs and very predictable. It's definitely not harmless. This doesn't happen to me with stevia or sucralose, and I know sucralose isn't good for your either.
Coke Zero is sweetened with aspartame and phosphoric acid. It's just formulated differently to avoid the taste associated with Diet Coke, which some find unpleasant.
> Coca-Cola updated the recipe for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in the US, quietly adding stevia to the existing blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium (Ace-K) in late 2023/early 2024
Speaking as a greybeard, it's not really that valuable. Younger people are just as smart, if not smarter, and they can figure it out if I get hit by a bus. There's literally nothing I know that someone younger couldn't learn or figure out.
The more sensible take is “don’t use new technology where it doesn’t make sense.” The start menu should need a web browser engine and a heavy JS framework because…?
Well I don't use Windows so I can't comment on the quality. And I actually don't even really care about it. I was just commenting on the curmudgeonly perspective that young people can't do things right.
Another way to look at it: Microsoft APIs have fallen from grace. Even their own devs don't dogfood anymore. They download something that Facebook made instead and reimplement the Holy Start Menu using that.
I think it was perhaps useful, at least in knowing which things are Chesterton's Fence. I doubt that AI can figure that out, since it's not always possible for humans to figure that out either.
But with AI, simple codebase understanding or even just paving over everything, including the fence, is potentially easy, and getting easier each month.
Certainly, a certain amount of senior experience is needed. The AI lacks taste and discretion. But the greybeard sensibilities the come with increasing seniority will probably hold back the new pace of things.
If the pace of gains with AI levels out, which has been predicted, then the next target would be to lower the cost of power usage. All of the gains will have been paid for by the investors today, but all the benefits will be for the AI companies of the future.
So my prediction is that AI won't be profitable for a long time for the current batch of companies today, but will be extremely profitable for the new companies without the same debt and burdens and will come to birth in an era where AI computing is cheap to buy and run.
Except you have no idea what the capability of sharks are to adapt to different ocean temperatures. As sharks swim across various parts of the ocean or at various depths in a single day, the temperatures change far quicker than ocean temperatures over the last 100 years. The idea that you could guess that sharks can't adapt to a wide range of temperatures is nothing but a wild guess on your part because it agrees with your biased belief that sharks are in danger due to climate change.
But sharks have been around for 400 million years, longer than trees have existed. The amount of change they have endured is far greater than that, and sharks are likely the most adept at climate change.
They will move to different locations like they always have been for the past 400 million years. Sharks are older than trees, they can adapt to climate change better than anything alive right now.
What an inane comment that shows how unqualified you are to talk about this.
Shark is a group, great white shark is a species. The fact that the group has been alive for 400M years has no bearing on whether the currently alive species can actually adapt and survive. Some very likely will, the great white might not, that’s what the article is about.
Another alarmist who believes "this time it's different!" with no knowledge about how climate has changed over the past 400 million years. You probably thought when Big Basin burned that it would never recover, meanwhile it started to recover in months. People who doubt nature's resilience are ALWAYS wrong.
I think ultimately the real weapon of mass destruction will be long-range drones the size of a DJI drone, each holding a small but extremely powerful explosive.
And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.
Explosives don't scale in the way you seem to think they do. Below a certain threshold of warhead mass, you won't do much more than scratch the paint. The effects aren't linearly additive. The warheads required to penetrate military targets are incredibly heavy; you won't be loading them on a DJI drone nor traveling far even if you could.
I think the opposite. Drones are subject to the tyrany of the rocket equation: they need fuel (or batteries) to fly, then fuel (or batteries) to carry the fuel, etc, in a compounded way. Which makes long range drone inherently more expensive than short range ones.
Right now, the novelty of the technology means the offensive has an advantage. But long term it will be the defensive who will benefit the most from drones.
I described below how you could launch thousands of them from a single massive container that gets dropped by B2 bombers. You have to use your imagination, you're not limited by today's technology anymore.
I was answering to your comment in the current thread, where you explicitly said "long-range" drones. Long-range drones will always be more expensive than short range drones, and not in a linear way, in an exponential way.
Thousands of short range drones dropped from B2 bombers sound like an interesting idea, until you hear about JDAM bombs, of which the US has a virtually unlimited supply, which are cheap, and are incredibly powerful compared to anything one could attach to a DJI-sized drone.
You could also just write "magic" and say we should invest in wizards.
No DJI sized drone using any available or near future technology is going to have a range of more then whatever 20 to 30 minutes of well-below subsonic flight time can get you.
You could drop them from B2 bombers and they could fall to the ground en masse at hundreds of miles an hour and then the propellers could open up as they get closer to the ground.
Or you could launch them in massive containers like in Infinity War and these containers filled with thousands of them would land on the ground and open up and release the drones.
You're just not imaginative enough to solve the problem you described.
So you know. Glide bombs. Which already exist and are already used and have a range of about 130km for a high altitude launch and a lot payload.
Or some absurdly heavy ballistic missile...which would be worse then existing ballistic missiles and is the type of target for which Patriot is specifically designed for (along with a number of other systems now).
This is an amazingly unserious post to the point I hope you're trolling. Or just twelve.
Referencing Marvel movies in one's description of proposed military hardware is not only immediately discrediting but also a good sign that self-reflection is in order.
Ukraine, in operation spiderweb, has already launched drones from containers deep within Russia to damage "... one third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers, estimated to be worth $US7 billion ..."
I think it's better if they keep all the URLs as they are right now, but then add misinformation into each page and put a big banner saying that this site is parody. Then search and AI will index this and then it will another lawsuit from Alex Jones to get the information removed from those alternate sources.
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