I only went to Pangram because I read through the essay and could not help but notice the Claude-like sentence structure and AI-isms in it, which distracted me and completely made me distrust the thesis of the piece.
My understanding is that Pangram is the best out of all of the AI detectors and if there is a better one I'm happy to switch to it. And it's easier to point to them than to give explicit sentences and examples about why it reads so AI-generated (and since you want it, it's these sentences in particular: "The message was unambiguous: energy is finite, security is earned, and comfort has a cost.", "That template is being applied again today — and markets have accepted it.", "One country never made the West’s mistake.", etc.)
Reading through it again, there are so many emdashes. And don't get me wrong, I was a liberal user of emdashes before AI! But just like, if your job is to communicate your thoughts to a wide audience at least respect their intelligence enough and not rely on crutches just to get an article out against a deadline.
c'mon, you're Carlyle, a trusted institution for financial advice! How can I trust what you're saying if the AI-generated text is so blatantly obvious?
You can absolutely level this claim against Tesla too. When deliveries dropped a year ago, the stock price didn't go down. Tesla's stock is disconnected from the fundamentals and every stock investor today knows this.
Why would SpaceX be any different? If anything it would be even more disconnected from the fundamentals than Tesla is, given how much more control it gives Elon.
SpaceX stock is a bet on Elon, full stop. It has nothing to do with space, data centers, AI, or whatever technology they're currently working on; it's a bet that Elon will figure something out.
(and if you need any example of this, just look at Twitter--he engineered an exit for his X shareholders at a higher valuation [at the expense of SpaceX, but a positive exit nonetheless])
Lots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!
I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works, sticks, and starts to grow.
In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk about the things they launch that successfully grow!
OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it was.
All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses innovation by making future launches less likely.
Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago.
Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!
I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.
So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
very fair! wild to think about though. It's both more human but also less.
I would say this behavior now no longer passes the Turing test for me--if I asked a human a question about code I wouldn't expect them to return the code changes; i would expect the yes/no answer.
if you want that kind of control i think you should just try buff or opencode instead of the native Claude Code. You're getting an Anthropic engineer's opinionated interface right now, instead of a more customizable one
"Can we make the change to change the button color from red to blue?"
Literally, this is a yes or no question. But the AI will interpret this as me _wanting_ to complete that task and will go ahead and do it for me. And they'll be correct--I _do_ want the task completed! But that's not what I communicated when I literally wrote down my thoughts into a written sentence.
I wonder what the second order effects are of AIs not taking us literally is. Maybe this link??
I love this writeup--it's one of the refreshing looks into how startup innovation happens on-the-ground. We're inundated with new products and startups so often that it's easy to forget that the people working on the product are taking a bet with no promise of future payoff. In this case, it didn't work out, despite the team putting in their hard work, sweat, and clearly lots of stress.
Startups are not for the weak but the process detailed here is how we've gotten some of the most transformative and innovative products in technology. Props on attempting this unique idea; very sad that it didn't work out, but sometimes the market just can't support certain ideas!
If you know anything about tech, you will know that tech as an industry is highly deflationary--billionares use the same iPhones as you do! (in contrast, they don't drive the same cars you do)
This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech. So the more chips they can produce for a given fab, the more profit they can make, meaning that companies are incentivized to sell as many products as possible for as low a price as possible.
We're supply constrained in the short-term because demand for these AI tools is so high that TSMC and other chip manufacturers can't keep up. But long term, supply/demand will equalize and tech will continue its deflationary trend. Sure, the frontier will always require the best possible chips, but AI coding is highly competitive, and competition drives price decreases. So prices may stay high right now, but it seems unlikely to me that this will stay true long-term.
All four of the author's steelmanned arguments at the end for a price decrease seem likely to come true already: competition is intense (OAI brags about how much cheaper they are compared to Claude), OAI subsidizes open-source influencers already, companies' earnings calls all call for more investment in fabs, and we're already close to saturating all of the benchmarks used for RL!
I was a bit confused as to how everything works until I read it in detail. Really cool tools, but I think one thing that would help in the introduction is: saying explicitly that the generated .md document is for you (the user) to read through, observe the output of the CLI call, and ensure that the output matches what you would expect.
It's basically an automated test, but at a higher abstraction level and with manual verification--using CLI tools rather than a test harness. Really great work!
Oh this is smart! Reading where Slack stores the local data in your filesystem instead of using their API/MCP (which they charge for).
Very clever; similar to OpenAI launching Atlas when websites start blocking bot requests--just build your own browser so your bot becomes an actual user.
Water allocation in the American West has been a mess ever since the beginning, when Prior Appropriation was decided as the way to claim water rights. Essentially, the first person to put a claim of water into "beneficial use" gets those rights.
This is why you see California with such a large share of the Colorado River's water rights, even though it "touches" the river the least: they were the earliest fast-growing state to "use" that water. And that's why you see so many water-hungry crops being grown in the West--the owners have the rights already, and to them, if they don't use it, they'll lose it.
So any agreement here needs to make a compromise between states, the federal government, prior settled law, and owners with effectively "free" water that don't want it taken away from them.
It's a complicated issue, but one step would be to force private owners of water rights to list their rights on an open market (right now some owners of water rights, like the Imperial Irrigation District can choose to never sell them). At least that way you can start the conversation somewhere.
(In fact, John Wesley Powell, namesake of Lake Powell, argued strongly against "prior appropriation" before the area was even settled, and instead argued against a collective approach to the limited and volatile amount of freshwater. He did not succeed.)
OpenAI needs to IPO because they want to access the public capital markets to fund their AI investments, more deep-pocketed investors are wary of investing in a LLC, and for liquidity, etc.
OpenAI needs to convert to a C-corp in order to IPO.
OpenAI needs the CA Attorney General's approval to convert a LLC into a C-Corp because the LLCs is headquartered in CA and incorporated with many CA laws.
So the article is making the point that OpenAI likely got the CA Attorney General's approval for the conversion because they promised to stay in CA (whether or not that's actually true).
(or support journalism and pay to read the article)
Not entirely by coincidence. Yes Shockley was from CA, but as late as the 1980, two places were competing to be the center: Boston's Route 128 ("America's Technology Highway") or Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley won out because the CA constitution explicitly prohibits non-competes (which MA allows), leading to more rapid innovation. Very likely the infamous Traitorous Eight who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild could not have done that if noncompetes could be enforced.
In any negotiation, you need to understand what leverage either side has. In this case, CA could block the conversion, and OpenAI could leave California. Both are possible but extremely unlikely outcomes! So the whole point is to take these unlikely outcomes to the table, negotiate in good faith, and come out with an agreement.
So California needs to believe that OpenAI will stay in California just as much as OpenAI needs to believe that CA won't block the conversion (or impose other onerous regulations around AI). So yes, it's possible to speculate about whether or not people are sincere in their motivations, but when you need to make a deal, there needs to be a measure of good faith and trust on both sides in order to make something happen.
And in this case, both sides are incentivized to make the deal. OpenAI wants to be a PBC in order to access more capital, and California wants OpenAI to be a PBC so that it can IPO so that all employees (all of whom are likely CA residents), will sell stock, which can then be taxed as CA income.
Everyone here seems to hate on the idea of seeing ads on an appliance you purchased. I hate ads too!
But, let's consider the counterfactual. What if Samsung offered you a new fridge for free, as long as you were ok with passive ads?
I hate ads, but I'm not sure I would pass up a free fridge...those things are expensive!
(this is not even that unrealistic. Let's say you have a household of 3 and a fridge lasts 10 years. Meta makes about $200 per year per user solely from showing ads; that's $6000 over 10 years. If Samsung got as good as Meta is (which they likely won't), 6k is more than enough to cover the cost of giving a fridge away for free)
So the OpenAI nonprofit will control ~20% of the OpenAI PBC once the conversion is done. This says nothing about different share classes that determine control (the nonprofit will likely still have control of the PBC due to higher power voting shares). The biggest question is how much equity in the PBC Microsoft will get.
Related to Judge Mehta's recent ruling on remedies for Google's monopoly status, I'm reminded of Bill Gates' quote that software companies should not be valued as highly as traditional companies, because the rules change so quickly (i.e. OpenAI's rise).
My understanding is that Pangram is the best out of all of the AI detectors and if there is a better one I'm happy to switch to it. And it's easier to point to them than to give explicit sentences and examples about why it reads so AI-generated (and since you want it, it's these sentences in particular: "The message was unambiguous: energy is finite, security is earned, and comfort has a cost.", "That template is being applied again today — and markets have accepted it.", "One country never made the West’s mistake.", etc.)
Reading through it again, there are so many emdashes. And don't get me wrong, I was a liberal user of emdashes before AI! But just like, if your job is to communicate your thoughts to a wide audience at least respect their intelligence enough and not rely on crutches just to get an article out against a deadline.