It’s really not even so different. “AI” in the current LLM-era just tricks people into thinking it’s something fundamentally different because it can string together words in a more coherent sentence than we’re used to.

At its core, though, the whole premise of the comment you’ve replied to is the argument that knowledge is dangerous and I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s a bad argument.

Tbh it’s probably more straightforward than that. Kill a $2B government program to so private interests can collect $4B on the same (or worse) previously subsidized services.

I don't know if there's a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.

My understanding is that it’s the latter. AFAIK it takes something like 3-5 years to get a fab going if you already know what you’re doing, so it would not only be wildly expensive but you’re also gambling that RAM won’t come back down to a reasonable supply/demand in the next 5-10 years to break even on the whole process.

There’s also the fact that it wouldn’t really make sense for Valve unless they wanted to make a huge pivot in their whole business. Entry costs aside, manufacturing RAM is not really something a company can just do as a “side gig”. Valve is only like 400 people, so it wouldn’t be Valve just “starting to produce RAM” but rather Valve turning itself into a RAM manufacturer that also distributes video games.

I played with it at work for the afternoon when I noticed I had access. It was fine. Sure, it was an improvement, but it wasn’t so good that it could end the world. It was basically just more of the same for anyone familiar with coding agents.

That’s wishful thinking at best. Banks have your money invested in the AI bubble right now. If anything, they’re already working to disqualify purchases made by AI from being considered fraud.

Most business laws are just pay-to-play regulation anyways

Useless? If we can get everyone to use this thing, we can finally invent the internet from Johnny Mnemonic!

It does, actually. From the article:

Anthropic’s confidential filing will give regulators a period to look over the company’s financial disclosures before the AI firm’s investor prospectus becomes public. Filing confidentially has become common for major firms, with SpaceX approaching its IPO in the same manner. […] “This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” Anthropic said.

Modern browsers are basically an OS of their own at this point. And, in fairness, for many users their actual OS is effectively just a means by which they access a browser. This is not even mentioning something like Chrome OS.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea or that it should be this way, but it is where we are.

I know this is fun to point and say about MS, but not really the case here IMO. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish describes the MS strategy for creating/maintaining a monopoly - but GitHub nearly is a monopoly. Extinguishing it only takes themselves out of the competition.

This is just plain old mismanagement if you ask me, and ostensibly a victim of the current AI craze.

The rich who benefit from this don’t care. They have enough wealth that it doesn’t matter. We could all be starving to death, fighting each other scraps of bread in the street, and they’d believe we deserve it.

If anything, that would drive prices down so they could build their next vacation home for pennies on the dollar.

Which ones have you guessing? It feels a little insane to read compared to the standard 2 letter abbreviation, but they’re all pretty clear to me.