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
the fact that the majority opinion on this thread seemingly does not even agree with Claude (which scores ~88% on MMLU (a measure of reading comprehension)) is a topic worth discussing
No, it really isn't, because the disagreement in interpretation stems from the obvious fact that Claude isn't aware of all the other blatantly illegal acts that the Trump administration is currently performing.
Yes, it's impractically high: we exhale about 1kg of carbon daily, so your plants collectively need to be getting about 1kg heavier daily to absorb that.
It's an order of magnitude worse than that, plants are mostly water, not carbon. They'll gain tens of kilos per day.
If you can feed off your house plants alone, then you have a chance of closing the carbon loop. This was tried (e.g. biosphere2) and it's extremely hard even at the industrial scale.
People don’t need to eat 10’s of kilos of plants per day which should suggest your off by an order of magnitude.
Chemistry means converting 1kg of CO2 > O2 would mean removing ~273 grams of carbon. Hydrogen and Wet vs dry weight more than offsets this, but you’re at closer to 2kg than tens of kilos.
This still assumes an air tight system where people never leave home, so plants can make a difference long before they are a 1:1 replacement.
I don't know what portion of a typical plants mass is carbon, and your 273 grams of carbon number is right (the 1kg number is CO2), but I don't think "people don't need to eat 10's of kilos of plants per day" actually justifies your claim about their density or invalidates GPs claim as to how much plant-mass you need to offset what you eat.
We don't just eat random (average) parts of plants, we eat selected ones, primarily things like fruits and bulbs that plants store energy in. If you just tried to eat, say, lettuce... at 2000 calories per day you would need roughly 14kgs [1, 2]. Which is surprisingly close to GPs 10s of kg number all things considered.
Either way, growing 2kg of plant/day or 20kg of plant/day... seems impractical to me. There's also the issue that if you equalize CO2 levels with the outdoors during the day as you open doors and windows, you're going to make night worse as both you and the plants output CO2 during the night.
> We don’t just eat random (average) parts of plants, we eat selected ones
We can’t digest cellulose which throws off the calculations based on what calories are available to us. The question was the minimums not the worst case. Obviously most carbon sequestered by trees isn’t available to us a calories.
In a closed environment simply eating plants wouldn’t result in the correct carbon balance long term. We would need to breakdown our waste via microbes, fungi, or burning.
Yeah it was sort of a joke, but having houseplants will make some difference. Not that they would be practical to absorb all the CO2 in the air. On the downside, keeping indoor plants healthy does take some ongoing time and effort and isn't everyone's cup of tea.
this ignores "system balance" and assumes "closed system" no? In other words, no one says that plants alone will compensate.. but instead they tip a system in a more favorable direction.. Plus some people really respond to house plants in lots of complimentary positive ways.
If I decide to improve my skills and negotiate a 2x raise with my employer or another employer I don’t want to have to be limited by some additional bureaucracy trying to tell me what my employment contract should be
Not once in my life have I heard or seen unions imterfering in any way or form with negotiations with an employer for better than union conditions. Unions negotiate global basics and of course allow better individual contracts.
Is it actually common for high-performing union members to have better deals? In my (limited) experience, the unions tend to advocate for the long-term membership, who are often below-average performers.
Yes. Usually wage ranges are negotiated. Negotiate before you join the company and make sure you understand your contract. If you are not sure, ask your union's representative or, of course, a lawyer specialized in labour law. Labour law is complex and you definitely want a specialist to answer your questions.
Don't trust the first google hits, especially if you are in the US. Disinformation by union busters is very common around here.
"The maximum player salary is based on the number of years that player has played and the total of the salary cap. The maximum salary of a player with 6 or fewer years of experience is either $25,500,000 or 25% of the total salary cap (projected for 2017–18), whichever is greater. For a player with 7–9 years of experience, the maximum is $30,600,000 or 30% of the cap, and for a player with 10+ years of experience, the maximum is $35,700,000 or 35% of the cap.[19][33] There is an exception to this rule: a player is able to sign a contract for 105% of his previous contract, even if the new contract is higher than the league limit.[34]"
Aren't unions overwhelmingly the driving force behind senority-based pay? Honest question. Like, I think teacher's unions are strongly against pay-for-performance.
I don’t want seniority based pay. I want value based pay.
If I join a company and day one I’m the top performer I’d want to negotiate a better package for myself and I don’t want other people meddling in my negotiation unless I explicitly hire them to
At the exon 101 level, that sounds much more like a job for insurance, savings, or gov’t. (There are generally much lower deadweight losses from transfers compared to keeping people working jobs that are no longer economically net positive.) The better pro-union arguments I know are about balancing negotiating leverage due to many fewer employers than workers.
In a system that is hyper focused in growth like US and even more Silicon Valley, unions don’t seem to make a lot of sense for neither party. And the proof is there, huge businesses and astronomical salaries.
I would say though this only benefits part of the society and comes with huge drawbacks too.
You should read the article. He talks about how worker leverage has dissipated, making it not-so-easy to negotiate that 2X raise versus in the past. It's kind of the point.
See also, the surge in recent tech layoffs (which he cites in the article).
If worker leverage has dissipated then IMO that’s because they’re providing less relative value. If you can provide your employer more value they will pay you more
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