Coding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
Uber doesn't have to convert hundreds of millions of users to a paid plan - it was paid to begin with. Much easier to raise prices from a low base than to raise them from $0. When push came to shove, Uber also cut payments to drivers and replaced them with a tip screen. Is Nvidia going to accept tip annuities on ChatGPT responses instead of full payment on its chips?
Most importantly, Uber did not have fast-depreciating cars on its balance sheet - OAI meanwhile is planning to spend the GDP of a mid-size nation on owning fast-depreciating datacenters, which they deem necessary to cope with the demand for their services.
The strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.
There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:
1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.
2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.
3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.
Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?
Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
An argument I've heard is that by legalizing betting, it can be more easily monitored with regulation and reduce the amount of black market betting. People still bet when it's illegal, it just becomes harder to track, which makes it easier for gamblers to interfere with outcomes without detection.
It sounds kind of similar to the legalization of certain recreational drugs. For example, alcohol prohibition resulted in a massive black market with organized criminal gangs, and many places realized it's better to regulate it rather than prohibit it.
I think for gambling, we need better regulations, and the Australian government seems to think so too.
Almost nobody was betting in the black market before the legalization. Sure you obviously had some people, but friction was big enough where it was not worth it. Right now, there isn’t a single game where people are talking about the bets they made in NA.
Nothing should be black and white. Even for alcohol and drug abuse, we should look at each and evaluate.
I don't know about Australia but there was an enormous amount of black market sports gambling in the USA before it was widely legalized. People who were unaware of this were just oblivious or led very sheltered lives. Broad legalization may have been a net negative for society but it's a complex issue.
define enormous? before it was legalized I knew one mate that was a gambler. I don’t have a friend anymore who does not sports gamble, hardly have relatives that don’t sports gamble. die-hard fans of teams now don’t give a hoot if the team wins (especially in the regular season)… not saying this is not a complicated issue but to say market was enormous is very much removed from reality
Yep it's hard to build a large liquid market for both sides of the bet without a central platform being legal. Look at polymarket as another example of things that people wouldn't bet on if a (legal in some countries) platform didn't exist.
Very few people gambled illegally. Putting some gangster out of business (Lol if you actually believe that) at the cost of addicting the entire working class to throwing away their money is bad math!
Illegal gambling has been rife for a very long time - the bookie down the pub taking bets on horses, games, whatever
Add to that that the Costigan Commission (1984) and the Fitzgerald Inquiry (1989) proved that illegal gambling was the foundational "river of gold" for organised crime in Australia.
But your original claim was 'very few gambled illegally' which the historical record contradicts.
The Costigan and Fitzgerald inquiries showed illegal gambling wasn't just widespread - the profits funded other organised crime including the heroin trade.
We can debate whether legalisation was net positive without rewriting that history.
> The race track, it appears, is a great meeting place for criminals. The
Costigan Royal Commission (Australia 1984), the Connor Inquiry (Victoria 1983), the Moffit Royal Commission (New South Wales 1974) and the Fitzgerald Inquiry (Queensland 1989) revealed that a vast network of SP bookmakers exists throughout Australia. They found the monetary flow in the industry huge, and as such has the potential to finance many other illegal activities.
> Mr Justice Moffit warned that there was evidence to indicate that SP syndicates were in contact with major heroin smugglers and domestic drug distributors (New South Wales 1974).
> Connor estimated that the annual turnover for SP bookmaking was $1800 million in New South Wales and $1000 million in Victoria. Connor has said of illegal
bookmaking:
>> Illegal bookmaking is a multimillion dollar industry run by people who can get up to forty or fifty telephones and who, if their telephones are closed
down, can get them in new premises a week later. Illegal bookmakers prosper, making millions of illegal dollars, simply because they do not pay income tax or betting taxes
(Victoria 1983a, vol. 2, ch. 14).[0]
McMillen, J. (1996). "Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation."
This academic study explains that SP bookmaking was a "submerged" culture. It operated through "runners" in pubs and massive illegal telephone exchanges. If you weren't a "punter" or part of that specific working-class pub culture, the infrastructure was invisible by design to avoid police detection. (unfortunately I cannot link you to a direct copy - but https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97802039935... )
Dont be dense, we are talking about "very few" in the context of draft kings which prints more money in 1 week than black market gambling has in years. The turnover in legal sports gambling in america is over 100b a year, this is larger than the gdp of most countries.
my grandma is not going to be looking for a black market bookie. some percentage of people will be no matter what though if you make penalties really severe you will significantly thin out this crowd.
without gambling though, pat mahomes would be making less money that I am making…
> without gambling though, pat mahomes would be making less money that I am making…
It's not like he was broke when it was just beer and crypto ads. He made 10 million dollars his rookie year in the NFL before SCOTUS federally legalized gambling.
Gambling addiction impacts those around the person. They may deprive their dependents of opportunity and care. They may gamble away savings and require further support from the public purse. They may even steal (e.g. taking money from loved ones).
In many non-US countries, we consider the second-order effects due to having inviolable public safety nets. People who are their own victims due to vice are still afforded care because they’re still humans and citizens. That’s why we try to dissuade falling into those vices in the first place.
Meanwhile we keep truly destructive things like alcohol legalized...
For the freedom of normal folks to have 1 beer, 25% of the population is drinking 78% of the consumed alcohol.[1]
And before anyone brings up that myth there is no beneficial dose of alcohol. Even in the pro-wine studies it's been found that the benefit was just the fact it was grapes and that eating/drinking the grapes without fermentation is superior.
As an avid follower of pro CSGO and CS2, I don’t doubt any of that. You’ll note I don’t advocate to ban gambling.
However, vices all come with negative aspects and it’s on us to discuss what the right overall balance is. IMO, when it comes to sports gambling advertisement, it’s way too freely available and normalised.
I’d also like to see a dramatic reduction of pokies (there’s an ABCA article from 2020 that I can’t currently find covering how much money Aussies saved by not being able to play them during lockdown, it’s staggering), but simultaneously fear for the mass closure of sports clubs and other third space venues if it were to happen. It’s a balancing act.
But at least for pokies, they’re deliberately walled away from the restaurant areas, etc. With TV ads, any easily-influenced kid watching their sporting heroes is exposed to this. It’s normalised along watching the sport itself. It’s no surprise there’s a direct conduit from that to young adults having gambling problems.
They don't mention a twinkle that many task runners seem keen to omit: how do you handle things where there are human steps involved and not everything is automated? How do you track what has worked and what is still left to do if things go sidesways?
I built baker (https://github.com/coezbek/baker) for this some time ago (pre-LLM mostly). It uses markdown with embedded bash and ruby commands to give you a checklist which is run both automated for commands or with human in the loop for things which aren't automated (like login to some admin panel and generate that key, copy it here).
The checklist gets checked off both by human actions (you confirm that you did it) and automated e.g. success bash command runs. So you keep a markdown artifact on where you are in your project and can continue later.
You can wrap commands to run via SSH (of course clunkier than what scotty here does, but you can select a port for SSH).
I already commented about Expect elsewhere in this thread, so I should probably pipe down, but thought it might be worth it here as well because Expect has been handling these kinds of exceptions and control transfers/flows with the full power of a robust programming language for decades. You might have a look at it for ideas and inspiration.
Looks neat, thx. It is really interesting how many facets the same kind of issue can produce. I think using expect from baker is a great way to deal with some steps that are hard to automate otherwise.
This is such a neat idea. I am going to adopt this for my own workflows as well, right now I just write private blog entries for stuff I do that I may forget how to do later (provisioning a server, networking, caddy setup, etc etc)
Not sure if anything like that already exists, but if not, I would suggest building it on top of marimo rather than jupyter, given its approach to cells getting recalculated based on changes in their dependencies.
OpenRouter is valued at >$500m and processes >$100m/year, 5% of which goes to them. Not that large compared to e.g. OpenAI, but it's the largest that doesn't produce its own models & with the largest selection I'm aware of.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
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