That's what was thought, but maybe not -- only one of the three so far looks Epicurean, which is not what was expected. Maybe it's a fluke, but historians are buzzing a bit about whether it might be broader than expected.
Except there's lots of competition for creating that surplus, including from open source locally-hosted LLMs, and while it's behind the frontier it's not that far behind the frontier.
The dumping -> non-competitive price increases playbook is historically very, very rare, and relies on a monopoly (or in a few cases oligopoly) with large externally-enforced barriers to entry. The oligopoly case is highly unstable and doesn't last, and besides we don't have notable barriers to entry; we have both market competitors and locally-hosted imperfect substitute goods.
There's essentially no reason to believe the dynamic you're predicting could succeed here, because we lack all the conditions that make it more likely to succeed, and it's very rare anyway.
You don't know the actual margins -- you only know the API rate. If their API rate has huge margins and the average subscriber isn't coming anywhere close to their limits, the subscription can be very profitable. If they're only near peak capacity in peak working hours (when API traffic is most active) and subscription 5h limits help them redistribute a lot of use outside peak hours when they've got spare capacity, that alone could make a massive difference in profitability.
It'd have been interesting for them to discuss it, but from what I understand it looks like MCAS is probably an entirely separate thing (that can also be triggered by COVID), but because of the overlap in symptoms, many people who assumed they have long COVID actually had MCAS. And even after teasing those two out, there may be more conditions in the long COVID bucket.
I'm sure there are things local models are good enough at in non-coding work, but for anything complex I do not find this to be the case.
I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.
People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
We use about two orders of magnitude more water (each!) on corn and alfalfa than on data centers as of 2023, and while we're ramping data centers up fast, it'll still be an order of magnitude at the 2030 data center estimates (which may heavily overestimate, now that there's so much opposition popping up).
If our water rights system required farmers to actually pay anything approaching market rates for the water they used, it actually would be a serious answer!
Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.
If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.
Hmm? There are a number of top AI people who make this exact point, though, and are trying to drive things toward elevating thinking. There's more that can be done, but quite a bit is a user mindset issue that's just going to have to shake out over time.
No, not at all. You're taxed on equity at fair market value when it vests. It's only after that when you get taxed at a lower rate on the capital gains.