EFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts.
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
you have 2 labs at the forefront (Anthropic/OpenAI), Google closely behind, xAI/Meta/half a dozen chinese companies all within 6-12 months. There is plenty of competition and price of equally intelligent tokens rapidly drop whenever a new intelligence level is achieved.
Unless the leading company uses a model to nefariously take over or neutralize another company, I don't really see a monopoly happening in the next 3 years.
I was focusing on a theoretical dynamic analysis of competition (Would a monopoly make having a competitor easier or harder?) but you are right: practically, there are many players, and they are diverse enough in their values and interest to allow collusion.
We could be wrong: each of those could give birth to as many Basilisks (not sure I have a better name for those conscious, invisible, omni-present, self-serving monsters that so many people imagine will emerge) that coordinate and maintain collusion somehow, but classic economics (complementarity, competition, etc.) points at disruption and lowering costs.
I don't disagree but in this day/age figuring out who the customers are is fairly trivial with "AI" and then simple marketing campaign will at least point the right eyes to the right place. Unless there is large moat switching will happen (it is already happening across the industry which is why we are hearing about the death of SaaS all that jazz...)
Private companies should have the freedom to ban/censor whatever content on their platforms they want. I’d prefer if they don’t, but we shouldn’t force governments to prevent companies from creating their own rules about how people can use their own software
Governments however should not interfere with citizen’s freedom of speech - there should be no fines/arrests for insulting politicians. Otherwise those governments are actually authoritarian and repressive.
Allowing private companies to do anything they want, when there are only a few large private companies, makes them a shadow state. Europe is much more willing to restrict companies from becoming shadow states. If they make a law that says bank transfers must be used for large payments (or if that becomes de facto true) they also make a law that says banks must give accounts to everyone.
Germany – Robert Habeck insult raids (2024–2025): Multiple citizens faced police raids, investigations, fines, or suspended sentences (jail risk if violated) for online posts calling Green politician Robert Habeck derogatory names like "idiot" or "moron," or sharing mocking memes, under Section 188 enhancing penalties for insulting politicians.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
Germany – Friedrich Merz "Pinocchio" case (2025–2026): A pensioner faced criminal investigation (potential fine or jail under Section 188) for a Facebook post calling Chancellor Friedrich Merz "Pinocchio," prosecuted as an insult likely to impair a politician's public duties.
https://www.facebook.com/60minutes/posts/dozens-of-police-te...
Germany – Ricarda Lang insult investigation (2024–2025): A citizen was investigated (potential fine/jail) for an online post calling politician Ricarda Lang "fat," charged as criminal insult under Section 185 protecting officials from derogatory remarks.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...
Robert Habeck was NOT arrested, he and his friends were investigated in the broader case of neo-nazi propaganda which they were spreading as well. Unless you consider neo-nazi freedom of speech, of course.
The Pinocchio case meant exactly one official letter sent to that guy, lol "arrests". The investigation was dropped and everybody criticized the investigation.
Ricarda Lang case was a request to the well-known network Gab to identify who insulted the politician, because in Germany insults are a crime. Maybe in the US insulting is a popular free speech pastime, but this is not US. Gab refused to identify the person and that was that.
So, again, I can see when we are spreading lies to support some ideology, but they are just that: lies.
Re the other cases: in a good democracy, insulting politicians should not be a crime and there should be no investigations for someone insulting a politician.
That is your POV. I fear that democracy erodes when there's insults, belittling, ... instead of exchange of arguments and the contest of ideas. Because at some point insults turn into ugly actions. Whether it's Charlie Kirk or Melissa Hortman.
There is a reason the founding fathers put freedom of speech as the first amendment
Insults should absolutely be protected speech.
In countries that make insulting politicians illegal, all a politician has to do to become a dictator is say that speech criticizing them/their behavior is insulting and therefore illegal
Would you like if Trump arrested anybody who insulted him?
I mean that's why it's called free speech. Probably the most famous case the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) fought for was to make sure Nazi's could hold a rally and march through Skokie, Illinois, USA an area famous for being predominantly Jewish.
> Multiple citizens faced police raids, investigations, fines, or suspended sentences (jail risk if violated) for online posts calling Green politician Robert Habeck derogatory names like "idiot" or "moron," or sharing mocking memes [...]
The police raids were done because of the posted Nazi images, NOT because of the Habeck insults.
You may not like this sources, but both the tomato throwers to the green visor crowds agree they are losing money. How and when they make up the difference is up to speculation
The comment was with reference to inference, not total P&L.
Of course they are losing money in total. They are not, however, losing money per marginal token.
It’s trivial to see this by looking at the market clearing price of advanced open source models and comparing to the inference prices charged by OpenAI.
The closed frontier models seem to sell at a substantial premium to inference on open-source models, so that does suggest that there is a decent margin to the inference. The training is where they're losing money, and the bull case is that every model makes money eventually, but the models keep getting bigger or at least more expensive to train, so they're borrowing money to make even more money later (which does need to converge somehow, i.e. they can't just keep shooting larger until the market can't actually afford to pay for the training). The bear case is that this is basically just a treadmill to stay on the frontier where they can make that premium (if the big labs ever stop they'll quickly get caught up by cheaper or even open-source models and lose their edge), in which case it's probably never going to actually become sustainable.
> If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it seems to be about 50% — lower than the norm for software companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than many industries.
for what it's worth many solopreneurs on the X/twitter solopreneur committee were reporting their uploads to TikTok were failing, and I saw at least one conservative complaining that their (conservative political) videos were not uploading to TikTok either
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
reply