They're offering about $65Bn, of which about $1.8Bn is from existing stock holders. That's a tiny amount of shares from existing stock holders and probably not anyone who works at the company.
I think there's just some core arguments here that you can totally reasonably disagree with
>In theory, an AI company has to be worried about their users switching over to a competitor or using an open source model instead. In practice, this isn't a major concern. For starters, the average person...
There's two things to disagree with here. First, this isn't theory, I work at a company and use AI heavily, switching model is as simple as changing a line in a json file. And would I do it? I've done it like 5 times this year. Claude was good, then openai was for a while, then there were times gemini was great for quick trivial tasks, now I'm mainly back on opus-5-5 with astra for some more complex tasks. Secondly, I'm not the average person, no, I'm the person openai and anthropic actually make money from. Sure, a consumer might be stickier, but so far they're not really making money from consumers, they're mainly doing B2B.
The core thing that bugs me is not so much that AI is going to be massively unprofitable, I think there's definitely going to be profitable companies. I just think if you're Google, the best case scenario is you're transitioning from fantastic economies of scale in a monopoly business to a business with costs roughly proportional to revenue and no moat. That is really bad for Google and it's not unreasonable to think it's motivation enough for them to try and undercut Anthropic and OpenAI until they're bankrupt.
It means that the companies have to be highly cost-competitive, they can't win market share and then raise margins. If (as is the case today) astra is bad value for money compared to opus-5-5, then I'm switching, and if (as is the case today) for lots of stuff gemini can do the low hanging fruit, I'm switching. And all of this is happening before my company has really put any boundaries on our spend, in the future I'm going to be on a budget and that's really going to impact my decisions.
But according to Anthropic they are getting the healthy margin right now. If they raise margin it would be “even better”, not just “finally making any money”
But it's not clear that's sustainable. If you look at what happened in the first half of the year, they were very clearly ahead and that translated into both massive growth and great margins. But that looks like it's atleast slowed or maybe even reversed in Q3. And again, that's while there's a shortage of compute and so everyone who has compute can charge a premium for it. Shoot forward 1-2 years as this massive glut of compute hits the market, can Anthropic sustain their margins or do they have to compete with Meta and Alphabet dumping almost free inference to claw back costs on data centre investment.
It doesn't quite work like that. You don't go off and find some super smart person who can easily get a job at Nvidia and tell them "Hey you, go work for this company". You find someone who already works at Nvidia, and you bump into them at their kids' little league game, and you get chatting and build a rapport and over time you build trust and before you know, you've got a trusted source inside Nvidia. They don't even need to know they're a plant. And then, if you really do need something more than information you can go further. But you start with someone already at the company and you target them, rather than the other way around.
And that's not even talking about the less clandestine methods of just ringing their General Counsel and saying "Hey buddy we're the US government we need X Y Z".
There are just some things that as the head of one of the world's largest companies you can't do. If Jensen Huang doesn't realise the geo-political importance of his chips, then he shouldn't be in the job. But we know he does because he spends all his time hanging around the white house lobbying Trump to let him sell his chips to America's geopolitical rivals.
Well there's two parts to it, firstly yes, it's morally wrong for him to have an affair. I'm not sure if that particular part of it would warrant being fired. The part that I think is particularly bad is who he was having an affair with.
I'm kind of bemused by this "But Epstein" defence. No one thinks that's a good thing! Seriously, is that how we run society, if we can point to any grievous failure of justice we just suspend all further rules? No. Of course not.
But surely that only applies if there was some reasonable way for him to know she was a spy, if she’s even a spy. That part is still only an accusation, not even proven / confirmed.
This is why I think it was released to the public because he didn’t want to do something and this is Trump’s payback ie sell a percentage to the government like how he forced Intel to do the same
This is one of the things that makes me negative on AI. Before AI, no one would have done this. Because it's a huge amount of effort and a total waste of time. Now we have AI, we have this explosion in people going off and doing all these pointless activities.
What do we gain from a plethora of SPSS-alike tools? Nothing. There's literally no explanation on this page about why anyone who uses SPSS would want to use this. But it's "100% Safe Rust". Yes, that's a feature that someone who likes rust wants, not what someone who uses SPSS wants.
What do we lose by fracturing all academic statistical analysis into a dozen different tools instead of 1? Lots!
It's not even clear the person creating this even intends for anyone to use it. So (a) why are they doing it and (b) how do you even know if it actually works if absolutely no one is using it. In fact the danger now is someone who doesn't know the author is just an AI slop dilletante comes along looking for an SPSS-like tool and makes the mistake of trying to use it.
Is there really any difference between this and the people posting AI slop onto their reddit accounts. It's just raising the noise floor to the point where we're going to have to essentially shut down the public internet, everything of value will move to closed spaces.
I'm extremely on the other side - it's not about what we gain, but what we don't lose. If there's even one person with a dataset they can't process easily without a proprietary tool, why shouldn't this exist?
I'm extremely happy every time a closed format falls. Whether it's this one, Sibelius music scores, records from medical devices, data series from scientific measurements, or something else. Every one of them stopped me from doing something in the past (not on a technical level but "it's not worth spending a month on this") and I'll support efforts like this.
If you want to advocate for open source alternative statistics software, sure, there are plenty of those - you can find half a dozen with a quick Google. None of them are prioritizing Rust Safeness, and they have a hell of a lot more support than "Here's something I vibe coded, I can't actually program so if you have a problem don't ask me"
But regardless, I know about projects like that. And I've been using Octave instead of MATLAB during my uni years. But I suspect the situation is similar here - not all the time, but sometimes you just need something to work precisely like MATLAB.
Sorry, but this really comes across as demonstrating a substantial degree of entitlement. What is the purpose? Easy. A student is trained to use SPSS for their thesis work. They may be given a sitewise license from their university, but only for one device. Then after their training, they lose access to SPSS, but want to do that analysis in their workplace.
Proprietary software, especially at these prices, cause all kinds of issues. SPSS is one of the software packages that has a sizeable audience of people crying out for a true open source alternative. Just because you have the money to afford these things, does not mean that others do.
Also, if you are referring to the similarly named ArtCraft suite as a "pointless activity" then you are really out of touch.
If it's anything like the code it generates for me, it's thousands of lines of throwaway slop for a dashboard I needed to vizualize something. Or if it's on code that is actually important it's a single line fix with 10 lines of comments explaining the diff (not explaining the new behaviour that someone might want to see, explaining the diff vs the old behaviour that no one coming to that code in the future will ever care about)
In fact it would be far more interesting if it happened over the course of hours/days/months, because that would be an indication that they managed to remain undetected for a long period of time.
It's kind of interesting that they're releasing this, because anyone with access to the OpenAI RestAPI has probably already vibe coded an equivalent to this. It's a trivial thing to bootstrap.
Is it actually hard to maintain a REST wrapper though? I think it is actually quite easy to maintain and improve something as simple as this as a pure vibe code project. I do it all the time
To be fair, I don't think they do want you to be excited. They have a REST API. It does the obvious things a REST API would do with OpenAI - lets you interact with openai models via a REST API. This is a CLI for it. There's really nothing to describe that isn't in the name, it's the CLI for the OpenAI Rest API. If you don't already care about the REST API then this isn't really for you.
There is no conscientious reasoning here on their part - it's not 3D chess it's 0D chess.
It's lazy at a guttural level.
This is 'totally absent product management, even the utterly basic things a regular developer would think to do without professionals to support them'.
This would not even pass muster as Open Source for friends, or internal use.
No, this is not 'missing helpful information' - it's missing 'essential information'.
It takes about 10 minutes of focus and attention from someone who understands the product to make a quick coherent introduction and overview, which is essential and very valuable.
There is no time/value trade-off equation where it doesn't make sense to provide that.
* This is from a company trying to convince us that their AI can automate many jobs *
It's almost disturbing is that people could see this otherwise.
"Our AI will dramatically improve your productivity but we can't even leverage it to do the most rudimentary and basic things" is a message that implies a lack of credibility.
You're still treating this like a product announcement. It isn't one. It's a repo someone found.
It could easily have come out of an implementation call with a large customer who needed exactly this. They built it, it serves that use case, and they made it public. Neither of us knows. It's not the official codex CLI. It really doesn't matter.
As a man in tech, it's quite easy to just completely miss this behaviour. It's very easy to overlook. Especially since there are often very few women, and the women that are around aren't likely to trust you enough to tell you what's actually going on. One of the senior engineers I worked with literally came to me after an interview she was conducting and was like "Yeah we can't hire that guy", why? because he got aggressive when a female engineer (who was literally interviewing him for a job!) corrected him on his approach to a coding problem.
And it's a mine field, because it's also not helped by some of the companies I've worked at - big companies - who literally had quotas for hiring from "diverse" backgrounds. It doesn't matter what you do, if you put in those top level targets, atleast some of the idiots in your management chain are going to take it as "just hire a woman" and 1 bad woman is the justification for 1000 mediocre men to go on a rant.
I find it funny she complains about being called "guys". When I was at uni we were in the meeting with the head of the department, a group of 6 of us. He goes "So guys <pauses> <creepily turns to the one woman in room> and lady". And then goes on to explain to us he does that because a woman once complained because he kept on saying "guys" when he was talking to a mixed group of people. It was genuinely unbelievable that he thought that was acceptable. But then he also explained that sub-10% of the department was women because they "wouldn't lower their standards".
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