There’s an astounding level of arrogance required to believe he is somehow uniquely capable of bringing about a technology especially considering Anthropic came after OpenAI where he worked.
Place yourself at the head of one of like 3 companies the entire rest of the world has been taking about nonstop for 4+ years now. You can move forward or you stop. If you move forward you get to have a hand in how stuff turns out and you make a gajillion dollars. If you stop, it's somebody else's hand in stuff, and you don't get to make a gajillion dollars. And if you shut it all down? Then you just cede to the competition. Everything happens anyway.
the obvious play is to get the government to shut down all the competition, and then make a gajillion dollars while making whatever at the worst level of effort that destroys the world anyways.
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the real play is using the accumulated power to get socialism and democratic control over the key aspects of the economy, such as where to build data centers, and how many. Nothing says you have to play the corporate game of competition
> I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability
If someone genuinely believes that an invention will bring about the end of the world as we know it while making him and his friends inconceivably rich, “hey guys let’s uh, stop?” is so profoundly naive that his think pieces aren’t worth the bits they’re written on.
He’s either an idiot or an idiot, does it matter whether or not he genuinely believes this nonsense?
You are cynical but not cynical enough. The idea of a rogue Ai gives plausible deniability when they can blame human hubris, rather than it being seen as a deliberate and calculated attack, the perfect cover story for a sinister scifi plot. Make it look like an accident ehh
I can't even tell whether the poster to whom you're replying is saying that "let's uh, stop" is profoundly naive, or that failing to say it is profoundly naive... I've certainly seen both takes elsewhere.
Vitalik Buterin: “...But currently, I see zero plans for how to deal with an ASI transition that are not naive. Perhaps humanity is stuck with a choice between naive and naive squared (or maybe even naive squared and naive cubed), so I feel inclined to cut some slack to people who are trying.”
Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want.
And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.
So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…
Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it.
I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.
> And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world.
There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing.
And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine.
But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that.
Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?
> * Donated the WordPress trademark to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation in 2010
Fallen at the first hurdle. The WordPress Foundation is Matt’s personal vehicle used to obscure his control over the WordPress ecosystem. He has misrepresented the foundations role for over a decade, it was only following the WP Engine debacle that the true status of the foundation and Matt’s personal ownership of WordPress.org came to light.
The spirit of Open Source is contributing to the world for the greater good, not building your personal fiefdom. Matt is rare because he’s one of the few people in Open Source who are so desperate to launder their reputation. Most either acknowledge their project as theirs over which they exert absolute control or they hand over control to the community. Matt pretended to be a benevolent steward for decades until his position was threatened. He has long since cashed in all the credit he earned for his Open Source contributions.
You’ll find dozens of examples of tech CEOs that spend some of their corporate budget on sponsorships of open source projects and events. Matt was relatively unique in 2006, but not in 2026.
After eating his 65th hot dog, Joey Chestnut reassures Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest organizers he will stop at 66 to ensure they don’t run out of hot dogs
We're in interesting times. Trust in AI CEOs, just as an example, is likely about zero and so, unsurprisingly, people are increasingly skeptical of anything they say, question their motives, the timing of their announcements… Huge amounts of capital (perhaps entire economies?) are hanging in the balance.
(Even when I see a number of comments I disagree with, I get at least a sense somewhat of the HN Zeitgeist, FWIW.)
I‘m using Sol all day every day. It’s on average doing better than Astra at what I need it to do. Astra is like an absent minded professor - gives good direct responses, but too inconsistent and forgetful for my codebase.
Let me ask you, have you noticed that all the major labs are releasing models very similar in gains and performance? How do you explain that other than juicing the max out of the current architecture and processes.
They have been releasing similar gains/performance for years now... Pretty much never has one company been dominant for a long time (except the initial GPT3/4 release I suppose. That period took a while for others to catch up)
Yeah - that's why I think they are basically squeezing the scaling laws and the current architecture with incremental innovations.
I expect they will continue optimizing and improving for the current use cases/benchmarks. But the core capabilities will stagnant, that's why they will be forced to slow down until another major breakthrough happens.
I personally don't think LLMs have any understanding of the world, nor any imagination or even agency. I think it got very good as recognizing patterns and shapes in human thinking, language and knowledge, but that's pretty much it.
The one where it’s infeasible that a company that needs to live up to a valuation of like 5% of US GDP but is still burning cash and has no moat would willingly decide to slow down the pace of development of their core technology
There is no need for a copy. If another can do most of what OpenAI/Anthropic can do at a fraction of the cost (like the Chinese models) then the moat evaporates.
the capability gap is underestimated. the raw unaligned base model from a pretrain is like the telemetry recorded from a particle accelerator - it's hugely valuable and not just because of the cost sunk building a collider.
the things are kept under air-gapped national weapons grade security measures not because it's literally going to escape and threaten the world but because if somebody walked out the door with a copy they would have everything. the capabilities we see at the surface are mostly the result of mining the great unknown space and attaching feeble control surfaces, ablating/lobotomizing dangerous areas, and fencing off illegal/secret/embarrassing ones.
Based off what? There’s pretty precise measurements of the capability gap where open weight models like Kimi K3 score higher than the latest flagship models just 6 months ago.
The capability gap is in the minds of the users but the frontiers' closed business models run opposite to it.
> the things are kept under air-gapped national weapons grade security measures
That's an enhancement of closed but not of moat
> because if somebody walked out the door with a copy they would have everything.
Including you and me? I'm not sure this is comforting news, despite the "trust me bro" asurances from behind the door where we can't see or verify anything.
I don't know about you but I would love to get my hands on a raw frontier base model - and a 16 node galaxy blackhole supercluster to talk to it. the capabilities currently being loboptimized for are just a narrow market-shaped slice that cheaper models can distill a competitive subset of but the untapped power of the base is a true technical moat.
about the benchmarks: the difference between a distilled competitive subset and the untapped base might be the difference that matters in any given task
FWIW, I meant "they would have everything... including you and me". It seems I wasn't clear enough and it sounded like "you and me... walk out the door with a copy" - obviously the latter isn't realistic, but the former is.
> the capabilities currently being loboptimized for are just a narrow market-shaped slice
Offensive capabilities aren't interesting to me except as a risk I have to consider. It might sound surprising but the intersection of offensive and practical-for-life capabilities is an almost empty set.
I expect they are slowing down in an attempt to keep from having those models improve to the point where they can effectively escape unassisted into the wild.
Unless you’re making 3D models of apartments and oneshotting trivial games, I‘m not convinced Astra writes better code than Sol. I‘m way more often disappointed about Astra forgetting some aspect that Sol just nails.
You give Matt far too much credit. Matt wouldn’t listen to Davies. Look at what happened to Automattic’s legal counsel, one HN comment that didn’t align with Matt’s world view and he was canned post haste.
Davies perhaps explained to Matt how financially precarious Automattic’s position is but it seems very unlikely for a CFO to advocate for a batshit extortion plot that had no hope of success. Where did you hear that Davies was responsible for the extortion scheme? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere.
Don’t underestimate Matt’s disregard for corporate theatre. A board voting to remove a CEO isn’t like firing an employee, there’s an assumption that obviously the founder would not use their elevated access to retaliate. As noted, Matt controls the majority of the voting stock, but he also controls WordPress as a whole. Removing the founder who controls everything against their wishes is basically impossible. Even if removing his access to Automattic’s corporate systems was possible, it takes one “I’ll revoke Automattic’s license to use the WordPress.com domain” to convince the board to blink and Matt is back. Mutually assured destruction. The board probably underestimated just how petty Matt is.
Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.
If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.
Hopefully the board will call his bluff, except he'll overreact in the most him way, wordpress will die, and we can all get on with our lives because there is no more wordpress.
I think it is easy to underestimate how big of a deal this is. Matt has a stranglehold on Automattic and Wordpress, it is not possible to remove his control over the ecosystem and he is volatile. Ousting him as CEO is almost certain to cause a major reaction from Matt, so, for Automattic to make this decision is a very big deal. The right decision for the long term but the hard decision. I expect we will see Matt try to punish Automattic’s board, it will get worse for Automattic before it gets better.
Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.
Automattic has exclusive commercial rights to the WordPress trademark. That was the self-dealing deal he made when he "gave" the trademark to the WordPress Foundation. He can start a new commercial WP company, but it won't have that trademark so would be limited in the same ways he was trying to force on WP Engine etc.
> He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project
The only thing he has that can't be moved or recreated are the trademarks. In an extremely short span of time everyone went from Xfree for their X server to Xorg, and Xfree limped along for a bit before falling over. This is the beauty of open source.
I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.
> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground.
I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty.
IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve.
Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.
> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board?
Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.
If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.
While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.
> While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board
This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)
“there’s a once in a lifetime discount happening at the OpenAI Intelligence Depot, and I brought 15 shopping carts.”
We have to understand current usage with this behavior in mind, there are tens of thousands of people just like this author who are intentionally generating as much usage as possible on their subsidized plans because they feel compelled by some need to get free intelligence.
The only reason these expensive models are generating so much usage is because they are so heavily subsidized. Pragmatic users will shift to cheaper models which will hurt per token revenue, yes, but huge volumes of usage is going to just disappear because there isn’t the demand when it isn’t being subsidized. Less revenue per token and less tokens.
https://tokscale.ai/leaderboard a small sample of just 2k users have generated over $100m of API-equivalent usage while paying closer to just $1m.
It goes a layer up, too. Harvey (legal AI) recently tweeted that a single user query cost that firm 26k USD. This, while they have thousands of users and reportedly whole law firms paying zero. That difference is being subsidized by billions of VC dollars.
A bit of a collective action problem, but if everyone leverages this services as hard as they can without cost concern, better capital decisions will eventually be made. Like the Federal Reserve draining the M2 money supply, AI users must drain the capital supply of subsidized tokens. This pulls forward the future of "Does this tech have value at actual unsubsidized costs?" If it does, tremendous, if it doesn't, also a reasonable outcome to the grand experiment. The current pain comes from the valley of uncertainty we find ourselves in at the moment.
> That difference is being subsidized by billions of VC dollars.
"History never repeats itself, but it rhymes." -- Twain
> I cut this deal with my neighborhood Italian restaurant!
I texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash. He replied. They aren’t. We compared pricing, and found the prices advertised are way off from what the restaurant charges. So I placed a $5,000 order to the neighbourhood homeless shelter. DoorDash paid him over $20,000, and I get free pasta for the rest of the year. (My neighbours have also partaken.) Glad to know it’s scaling. SoftBank has assembled a unique concentration of stupidity for itself.
Yes, there are good examples of this working, anti-competitive as it may be.
What if, in the DoorDash example, the pizza shop was itself venture backed and selling pizza at a loss to win customers and using this 20k revenue as a basis to raise money?
Why do everyone assume they are subsidized? When we seemingly have no idea what it costs? Maybe average subscription is breaking even and token spend is pretty much pure profit?
Case in point, claude code seems hell bent on increasing usage at all cost. Which makes sense in the growing phase (get people hooked) but it does not make sense given the hardware shortage. So, which is it?
Anthropic admitted last year to losing money on inference, it had negative margins. The margins have improved and are now positive but there’s still a significant cost. If plans aren’t being subsidized it would mean that the margin on inference is ~99%+ which would mean OpenAI and Anthropic should be wildly profitable but both are still losing money. So, it’s mathematically impossible that they’re not subsidizing plans.
The most widely accepted estimates (though I disagree with them) are that Anthropic’s margin on API inference is ~70% from which people extrapolate what their token usage would cost via the API and compare that to what their plan costs.
re: increasing usage with resets, it’s because they’ve overblown usage and need to show that usage is growing ahead of the IPO. They’re increasing usage on fixed price plans without increasing the cost, the only plausible explanation is they have unused capacity. If they were capacity constrained then the last thing they would do is give away more usage for free.
The last I saw with Claude was that the plans are subsidized somewhere around 10x. The usage of Claude and similar products (for people not paying the actual API token costs) would be lot less if they were paying 10x more per account/seat.
A lot of people are using Claude and ChatGPT for all kinds of minor things at work, and they probably wouldn't be if they were paying the true cost of the product. And this is all the while their work product is suffering because AI is not a great fit for a lot of use cases.
Depends on whether the costs they have are inflated ten-fold due to hardware shortages.
Ignoring current state of shortages, the interesting part (for me at least) is how much a SOTA token costs on current hardware if you exclude the costs for paying for current TSMC shortage and without factoring in the cost of new datacenters being rushed and renting hardware from your competitors (who are also supply limited).
The "actual" cost is of course also relevant and interesting but it is another thing entirely.
Have they actually announced that they're charging less than the marginal cost of inference, or that the revenue they're taking in doesn't make up for the cost of training each newer and better model?
The former does not pass the smell test when there are random providers selling tokens for competitive open weight models.
The problem with judging Alphabet and Meta on aggregate performance is that their advertising businesses print so much money that they can invest everything in a boondoggle and coast when it blows up. Zuckerberg burned $100,000,000,000 on the metaverse and it didn’t make a dent.
That said, Alphabet and Meta are borrowing against their future advertising profits to fund their AI boondoggles. If the advertising businesses keep growing then they’re somewhat insulated from their own missteps but the reliability of the advertising business depends on companies having money to spend on advertising.
The metaverse was mostly self-contained and the failure had zero consequence for the broader economy. AI on the other hand, every major fund is investing everything into AI companies. Every advertiser is using subsidized AI tools to generate hyper specific adverts. If this all goes south, who knows how advertising spend will be impacted.
Google specifically are backstopping billions in data centre build out costs. They’ve committed to spending, like, all of their cash to data centres. If the market gets nervous and funding disappears, Google are deep in the hole.
Anthropic “invested” $50bn in data centers to be built by Fluidstack who raised a billion dollars from Situational Awareness who used their Anthropic ownership to raise money to fund these investments. Google are backstopping much of the Fluidstack build out, i.e: if Fluidstack goes out of business then Google is on the hook for $10bn+ in costs. And Google’s Anthropic investment makes up like $100bn on the balance sheet. So, Anthropic fails to live up to expectations and fails to pay Fluidstack who can’t pay their suppliers which puts Google on the hook to hand over tens of billions in cash while at the same time their biggest investment is going down the pan.
The top line numbers don’t really do justice to the scale of the risk. You need to look at the long term commitments they’re making.
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