Concentrating power in anything has issues. But especially in an answer machine. Imagine one person has power over those companies they can change reality in ways we never thought possible.
Didn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...
Replace Tokens with Gas, or water or healthcare or anything - and it's foolish. You shouldn't let the seller dictate what amount you need of something.
Smart engineers are figuring out how to best use their tokens - as tokenmaxing is just as silly as gasmaxing your car.
What do you get out of it that a csv or access to another service that allows you to do readonly access does this give you that you’d trust. What happens when they hallucinate a payment with an extra digit in it. This will be seen as another example of tech companies acting out of touch.
At some point there needs to be a check if it's a real human... But it's a cat and mouse game - any way we create to keep bots off gets a work around by clever engineers.
My understanding is stats canada gets offered a lot of money for this data after being anonymized. A lot of employers might not ask questions if someone had really good data they could use to help market their product. Especially politically aligned think tanks
I’d love to see the new cap table of this company. My guess is this will be terrible for spacex employees and gains xai a lifeline. My guess is this helps Elon get to trillion dollar status before any changes the tax structure…
My reasoning is xai has no moat … except in lawsuits, and spacex has one of the biggest moats in history. And they aren’t valued into this equation.
At the moment the biggest hope I have is there’s client side tech that protects us from these dark patterns. But I suspect they’ll have their own dark patterns to make them profitable.
Next you'll say Star wars didn't take place a long long time ago /s
It was a fun story / movie even if it's mostly fiction. I'm more concerned about the number of scams / cons that exploded in the last 12 years or so. This seems small potatoes in comparison.
I wouldn't write them off yet - but if their funding dries up and there's no more money to support their spending habits this will seem like a great prediction. Giving away stuff that's usually expensive for free is a great way to get numbers - It worked for facebook, uber and many others but it doesn't mean you'll become a profitable company.
Anyone with enough money can buy users - example they could start an airline tomorrow where flights are free and get a lot of riders - but if they don't figure out how to monetize, it'll be a very short experiment.
What if it was an un-social media. Like undo what happened over the last 5(or more) years in social media… may be interesting or just concentrate power in another company.
I hack on Local LLMs, AI, iOS, RaspberryPi, UX and whatever other tool gets the job done.
I teach / give presentations on LLMs for non technical people including Agentic / Vibe Coding.