Or for short, The Aristocrats

Yeah, but they never really systematically subsidised fares as such, except for some one-off bonuses to attract divers and stuff like that, in the sense that they didn’t systematically pay drivers more than people were paying per ride. They subsidised it in the sense that the cut they took didn’t cover their development costs, servers, marketing, etc. But those costs don’t increase linearly per customer and they also plateau as the software stack matures, so there’s a path to just raising prices and getting to profit, and each additional customer brought them closer to profit even while the subsidies existed.

OpenAI and Anthropic are paying something like 10x the amount for inference as they get from subscriptions, let alone free usage and training costs. So each new customer is taking them further from being profitable. And if they jacked up the prices 10x, so that the basic subscriptions were a few hundred and the pro ones a few thousand a month, they would still be in the position that Uber was when they were doing the subsidies for their infrastructure. I think it’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t be acquiring customers very quickly at those prices.

That’s got nothing to do with how expensive it is to serve models to customers which is what was being discussed.

Who gives a fuck about voters lol, this war is unpopular in the US too. As if they care what we think about stuff.

The cost of inference has passed the cost of training quite a while ago and it’s by far the majority of expenses

I think they mean the company since they’re the most famous example of subsidising the product to gain market share and their name is invoked all the time in discussions of AI economics

We are still in the Uber-subsidized part of the relationship.

It’s not comparable, the costs for Uber are fixed development costs which decrease per customer with more customers. AI is strictly more expensive the more users there are since the cost is per use. The financial outlook for the industry is very bad, it will probably never be profitable except maybe in some extremely niche situations.

I don’t feel they went hard enough on him, but there might well be something to that

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I actually liked a lot of the food I had when I lived in the UK. Not necessarily all the cuisine as such (although plenty of it is fine), but I found in general that supermarkets had really good quality produce and ingredients for very decent prices, and I love cheddar and various other British staples. An English breakfast is great too, and I know this picture isn’t representative.

But Australia and NZ have really perfected pies and sausage rolls, and they’re far more of an everyday thing. You can get pretty decent ones basically anywhere. I moved to the UK after a couple years in France, where the food was of course great, but I was really looking forward to being able to finally get a good sausage roll. So you can imagine my disappointment when I couldn’t.

A single diode a micrometer away from anything else is not suddenly a transformer without which a 400 um² antenna stops working.

They’re fabricating micrometer components with a 90 nm process. That’s pretty well in the classical regime. If they’re seeing substantial tunneling at that scale it would be rather noteworthy to say the least.

i remember there was a diode and transistor that were literally completely seperated from the traces of the rest of the chip, and yet they were functional pieces and the chip wouldnt work if you removed them.

If that was true they would be getting the Nobel in physics for discovering some incredible new quantum phenomena, it would be front-page news everywhere. I highly doubt it’s true.

Frustratingly, that article you linked doesn’t actually link to the paper. But it is in Nature Communications. That’s a respectable journal but not that prestigious, and it publishes a lot of over hyped stuff. Not that any journal doesn’t. But if they had really found new physics with AI chip design that would go to Science, Nature, or maybe PRL.

Edit: ah, I found it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1

Chip design isn’t at all my specialty so take my opinion about this with a grain of salt. But I think it’s notable that

Prior works in nanophotonics have demonstrated the class of inverse methods for specific dielectric-based passive structures through gradient based optimizations such as adjoint method

So, there are already known algorithmic approaches to solving for these. I think it’s also notable that these are for signal transformation and antennae, relatively simple operations.

This seems like a vaguely useful result but I don’t expect it’ll be breaking any new ground any time soon.

they have no idea, haha, they got very offended over there when I told them I was disappointed to find they were so shit compared to NZ ones

Their sausage rolls pale compared to their oceanic descendants too.

Well said.

lmao is this the english version of the flying lotus copypasta

No, I understand just fine, we have income taxes here too, they’re just lower. This means that the tax system is fairer because richer people pay more. It also means that people are more incentivised to work, to contribute to the economy, and to invest. I don’t really see what something being taxed a first or second time has to do with anything. What matters is the overall tax burden, which although hard to calculate exactly, is lower here for the large majority of people but distributed more towards richer people - not those with more income but those with more wealth. It may be true that Americans would freak out about such a thing, but that is merely due to quasireligious ideas about taxation from national myth propaganda, not about the actual effect it would have on their lives, and it reveals fundamental defects in the American character.

If you could save 5,000 more but pay 2,000 more, why wouldn’t you want to take that deal? Putting it under your mattress and pretending you don’t have it is the worst idea, the wealth tax is less than the interest rate, so you can always just buy bonds and at least not lose any money like you would holding cash.

So I actually currently live in a country which has this. Income taxes are correspondingly very low and public services are extremely good. So it’s not just that I would be okay with it, I am very satisfied with the arrangement, yes. You seem preoccupied with some kind of religious sanctity of your “savings account” without actually considering what the implications of such a policy are, that’s too bad.

Nope, not only is it not stupid, it is pretty much the best possible taxation system unless your explicit goal is to keep poor people poor and rich people rich.