Think about it in comparison to a real-life taxi or Uber and the math is surprisingly strong.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
> True but, can't you kind of say the same about phones?
No, at least not at the flagship $1k+ market Apple competes in. Maybe for $120 motos, but apple is competing in an entirely different market segment. They're absolutely not commodities - apple charges a premium with strong margins and a differentiated product. They have regulars who upgrade (bi-)yearly, regardless of the features and price and necessity. They literally have a subscription program for iPhones.
> The market for an apple branded TV...
They already have the most profitable part of the TV market. They sell an expensive add-on to TVs that offer over-the-top subscriptions and software services. The remaining panel is sold nearly at-cost on the assumption that the underpowered processor inside will serve you ads instead. They're expensive to ship, tough to stock, and high-end ones worth selling are a niche market.
Apple sells computer monitors, which are pretty close to TVs in terms of "commodity" status, and the products are like 2x the cost of their closest competitor spec wise. That should be a clear indicator on the potential and costs for even bigger screens.
> Who would have guess headphones would do so well before they did so well?
Well, they bought beats who certainly helped prove the market for headphones expensive headphones from a recognizable brand (to say nothing of Bose, Sony, etc who had sold headphones for a generation prior).
Idk I generally think “magic numbers” are just extra effort. The main annoyance is adding if statements everywhere on version number instead of checking the data field you need being present.
It also really depends on the scope of the issue. Protos really excel at “rolling” updates and continuous changes instead of fixed APIs. For example, MicroserviceA calls MicroserviceB, but the teams do deployments different times of the week. Constant rolling of the version number for each change is annoying vs just checking for the new feature. Especially if you could have several active versions at a time.
It also frees you from actually propagating a single version number everywhere. If you own a bunch of API endpoints, you either need to put the version in the URL, which impacts every endpoint at once, or you need to put it in the request/response of every one.
I think this is only a problem if you’re using a weak data interchange library that can’t use the schema number field to discriminate a union. Because you really shouldn’t have to write that if statement yourself.
To be fair, when he suggested $600Bn in spend by 2028, it’s obvious they won’t actually be spending that. That would exceed their yearly revenue each year. They just don’t have that money. This feels like less of an indictment of AI spend, and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor.
For comparison, Google said $250b, Microsoft said $80b, but Apple has said $600bn. Meta currently spends ~$100bn.
>and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor.
Even that's debatable because he walked back on the number shortly after
>Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.
And somehow he never lied? Or he wasn't trying to brown nose? Because it literally has to be a lie if he changed his story and it's hard to deny that he appears to be trying to curry favor.
It would be debatable if we didn't have the Commander in Chief we have now is very blatant and open about demanding things and providing political favor in return constantly
I feel like proportionality is related also to the scale. If a student pirates a textbook, I’d agree that 100x is excessive, but this is a corporation handsomely profiting off of mass piracy.
It’s crazy to imagine, but there was surely a document or slack message thread discussing where to get thousands of books, and they just decided to pirate them and that was OK. This was entirely a decision based on ease or cost, not based on the assumption it was legal. Piracy can result in jail time IIRC, so honestly it’s lucky the employee who suggested this, or took the action avoided direct legal liability.
Oh and I’m pretty sure other companies (meta) are in litigation over this issue, and the publishers knew that settlement below the full legal limit would limit future revenue.
Investment is debt lol. Maybe you can make the argument that you're increasing the equity value but you do have to eventually prove you're able to make money right? Maybe you don't, this system is pretty messed up after all.
As long as you have more money coming in than your costs, then it's technically a profit even if that money comes from investments.
It's not the same as debt from a loan, because people are buying a percentage stake in the company. If the value of the company happens to go to zero there's nothing left to pay.
But yeah, the amount of investment a company attracts should have something to do with the perception that it'll operate at a profit at some point
Definitely OpenAI. They’re not profitable and their core product is expensive to serve. They also have the disadvantage that their better models and features (eg agents, research, CoT, etc) are more expensive, but are better hooks to prove utility to new users - fundamentally they need a method to cheapen the cost of serving free users better features. Google can afford to see how it shakes out and the impact to OpenAI.
OpenAI already exploring and experimenting with different ad modalities privately. They’re also have a much better brand, so they might be able to avoid too much churn of customers.
> Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.
NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.
NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
> And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.
I’m going to concur with others here. It’s not irrecoverable. And the future isn’t yet written.
China has had the fortune (even eclipsing the US) of being a giant market of burgeoning consumers and massive amount of labor. The US first won this economic opportunity partially through immigration and a well-timed WW2 victory. Now its chinas turn to wield consumerism.
That said, China also has the misfortune of a serious risk for population collapse due, in part, to the prior 1 child policy. They’re aging faster than the US and others nations, and that will dramatically shift their economic output, consumption, and of course strain government resources. They also don’t have a culture of immigration like the US to slow the change. It would take a major global shift to see large immigration into China. There are other major economic risks they face, like their real estate debt, but the population collapse does pose a significant threat to stunt or reverse their ascendance.
TLDR: China could be the next Japan, not the next US.
But of course China is still going to be able to look at the response of nearly every other modernized nation and see how they deal with population drop first. That still puts them at a major advantage over other nations even after they peak. China is in an absolute prime position going into the future, they just gotta hold onto competent leaders for a few generations, and from my (admittedly limited) view they are doing a better job than most.
This is one of the most classically 2025 era political actions. It stems from a lawsuit originating from Elon Musk, where he fired people for criticizing him in their personal, off-work time (the legal question was if the government has the power to investigate complaints). Now the end-result is that the laws protecting workers are essentially nullified in the 5th circuit. But only the 5th circuit (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi). This came from the famously partisan 5th circuit which is stacked with right wing activist judges - and the decision was made by 2/3 trump-appointed judges and 3/3 republican-appointed judges.
Without the legal protection of unions or even the ability to generally get strong labor protections, it’s likely that society will be forced to renegotiate how labor protections and bargaining will work, or provide new laws to govern it. The idea that unions and collective bargaining will just be over is a fantasy of the mega corp CEOs. Either we’ll see a future SCOTUS revive the laws and board, or it’s yet another institution that needs to be rebuilt post trump/project-2025.
> It stems from a lawsuit originating from Elon Musk, where he fired people for criticizing him in their personal, off-work time.
Workers certainly have the right to quit based on Elon Musk's off-work comments. Why should Musk have less right to free association? If my gardener keeps calling me an asshole even when he's not working for me, should I need a separate justification to fire him? How many people could I hire without losing my freedom to associate?
Bad analogy. Gardeners are not typically w2 employees, and domestic servants are excluded from the NLRA anyway. If you're talking about a gardener at your hotel where you are the manager, then yeah they should be able to complain about how your bad behavior impacts their work and the business.
> Workers certainly have the right to quit based on Elon Musk's off-work comments. Why should Musk have less right to free association?
I think we need to stop pretending that some random Joe and the richest man on earth are an apples to apples comparison. It's pretty clear that individual rights that are fine when exercised by a regular person with regular-person power can turn into tyranny when exercised by someone with extraordinary power.
To given an extreme example to prove the point: the First Amendment would be dead letter if extremely wealthy person were allowed to control all the businesses in the country and was allowed to fire anyone who criticized him on their personal time.
Musk is the richest man on Earth, he should have extra constraints on his behavior, due the the power his wealth gives him.
Power. We passed laws creating labor protections because we recognized that labor has a power imbalance with the bosses and that prior to federal protections this turned into straight up violence (bosses literally machine-gunning down labor protestors).
>If my gardener keeps calling me an asshole even when he's not working for me
It is a true factual statement, leon is an asshole. Also, since when does leon's freedoms trump mine? leon's free association gains precedent over my freedom of speech?
Where does it stop? Let's say I associate myself with a religion that leon doesn't like. You know the one that leon likes to salute in public. leon's free association gains precedent over my freedom of religion, too?
Did you think that Google would just casually allow their business to be disrupted without using the technology to improve the business and also protecting their revenue?
Both Meta and Google have indicated that they see Generative AI as a way to vertically integrate within the ad space, disrupting marketing teams, copyrighters, and other jobs who monitor or improve ad performance.
Also FWIW, I would suspect that the majority of Google engineers don't work on an ad system, and probably don't even work on a profitable product line.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
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