- >but it turns out that not burning through VC cash on ping-pong tables and "growth at all costs" actually works.
This is at least a little disingenuous (or ill-thought-out), when you account for the fact the company is a spin-off/subsidiary of a large & successful Italian agency. While I'm certain these things helped keep the business sustainable, the fact of the matter is that the company was still incubated rather than bootstrapped. The only real difference is that it was incubated by its parent company, rather than by the VC industry.
- Reddit has been an absolute dumpster fire from the get-go. Its Wikipedia page has one of the largest “controversies” sections of any publicly listed company. Many of the controversies are so significant they have their own Wikipedia page.
- I think this article is "why startups died pre-2020", rather than "why startups die [now]".
Lots of this article relates to the reasons startups died when cash was freely available - both from VCs and from the markets you were trying to find product in. For example, if you started an online learning company in March 2020, you'd have hit product right away (along with a thousand competitors), and been lathered with cash from every direction. But three years later, all of those startups were struggling, and I don't know of _any_ that survived. That's not a case of the business owners in 1000 discrete companies giving up. That's the entire world economy reverting back to in-person learning, and the disappearance of the ultra-low interest rates for the company to fall back on while it pivots.
In 2025, founders need to be acutely aware of exogenous factors, as they can be business-obliterating events without the social safety net of 0-1% IR.
- The site is back up, but it feels fairly silly that a platform that has inserted itself as a single point of failure has an architecture that's got single points of failure.
The other companies working at that scale have all sensibly split off into geographical regions & product verticals with redundancy & it's rare that "absolutely all of AWS everywhere is offline". This is two total global outages in as many weeks from Cloudflare, and a third "mostly global outage" the week before.
- Given that the author describes the company as prompt, communicative and professional, I think it’s fair to assume there was more contact than the four events in the top of the article.
- It’s a fundamental principle of modern economics that humans are assumed to act in their own economic interests - for which they need to know how and where to be economically productive.
- The AI agents don’t appear to know how & where to be economically productive. That still appears to be a uniquely human domain of expertise.
So the human is there to decide which job is economically productive to take on. The AI is there to execute the day-to-day tasks involved in the job.
It’s symbiotic. The human doesn’t labour unnecessarily. The AI has some avenue of productive output & revenue generating opportunity for OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever.
- While I think this is good advice in general, I don’t think your statement that “there is no process to create scalable software” holds true.
The uk gov development service reliably implements huge systems over and over again, and those systems go out to tens of millions from day 1. As a rule of thumb, the parts of the uk govt digital suite that suck are the parts the development service haven’t been assigned to yet.
The Swift banking org launches reliable features to hundreds of millions of users.
There’s honestly loads of instances of organisations reliably implementing robust and scalable software without starting with tens of users.
- I’d always wanted the World War 2 channel on YouTube to do something like this. They’ve produced incredibly actuate moving borders of every day of WWII for their videos. They’d be a useful historical tool if they were published as an interactive map.
- It’s subtly incorrect. R/w permissions for example are described incorrectly on some nodes.
- I think it’s reasonable to say that different approaches to learning is some kind of spectrum, but that contemporary fine tuning isn’t on that spectrum at all.
- Well for starters, the software that runs on planes.
- The English Crown is another example. The King is a person who embodies The Crown, but The Crown itself is a discrete abstract legal entity, which is really a form of deity, but is afforded rights of a person (excluding death rights), and the legal status of a corporation. It’s also entirely above the law while being constrained by Parliament.
- The curation process is an automated auction
- > But I've been told by Eric Schmidt and others that AGI is just around the corner—by year's end even
It was this time last year we were told “2025 will be the year of the agent”, with suggestions that the general population would be booking their vacations and managing their tax returns via Agents.
We’re 7 weeks from the end of the year, and although there are a few notable use cases in coding and math research, agents haven’t shown to be meaningfully disruptive of most people’s economic activity.
Something most people agree is AGI might arrive in the near future, but there’s still a huge effort required to diffuse that technology & its benefits throughout the economy.
- It depends on the definition of "near", but there's a sizeable population within ~40km, which is a reasonable distance for an offshore wind-farm.
Almost the entire Mediterranean is >500m depth within just a few km of the shore, and that's half a billion people. All of the eastern seaboard of the North+South American continent is available at 100km distance (another 100-200mn people). Most of west Africa, all of Australia, and almost all of the western flank of the Pacific.
Maybe a quarter of all people live within 40-50km of a 500m deep sea. Definitely a large TAM.
- >and OpenAI can lose 11 billion in a quarter and Microsoft still backs them.
For Microsoft, and the other hyperscalers supporting OpenAI, they're all absolutely dependent on OpenAI's success. They can realistically survive through the difficult times, if the bubble bursts because of a minor player - for example if Coreweave or Mistral shuts down. But if the bubble bursts because the most visible symbol of AI's future collapses, the value-destruction for Microsoft's shareholders will be 100x larger than OpenAI's quarterly losses. The question for Microsoft is literally as fundamental as "do we want to wipe $1tn off our market cap, or eat $11bn losses per quarter for a few years?" and the answer is pretty straightforward.
Altman has played an absolute blinder by making the success of his company a near-existential issue for several of the largest companies to have ever existed.
- I’m not sure this article is especially helpful. It’s addressed to the attendees of COP, but the attendees of COP already believe (almost unanimously) that adaptation has equal importance to mitigation. And it’s one of the only forums where poorer & disaffected nations are given a real opportunity.
I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP.
The piece seems unnecessarily broadly combative and contrarian.
- The lead bank in OpenAI’s IPO will take something like 4-5% of the biggest IPO in history.
In the 1% scenario, JPM could be looking at tens of billions on the upside, if this loan secures them the lead.
So with this technique, you can definitively say "Redacted-file-A is definitely a redacted version of Origin-file-A". Super useful for identifying forgeries in a stack of otherwise legitimate files.
Also good for for saying "the date on origin-file-B is 1993, and the file you've presented as evidence is provable as origin-file-b, so you definitely know of [whatever event] in 1993".