Is anthropic using ads ? Is mistral using ads ? Is déepseek using ads ?

Google, meta, and amazon, sure, of course.

It's interesting that the "every company" part is only open ai... They're now part of the "bad guys spying on you to display ads." At least it's a viable business model, maybe they can recoup capex and yearly losses in a couple decades instead of a couple centuries.

It's unfortunately very possible that someone else is filling the "bring underage girls to rich guys" part (seriously, we have to "teach this fantasy out" for most little boys) ; but it might be someone more discrete, with a smaller network, and who will not merge the "socialite businessmen" persona with the "pimp for the rich" persona.

Also, it might be an anomaly that one person has a very big network ; maybe it's usually more of a "small adjacent networks".

So it would be like asking "who replaced pablo escobar or bernard madoff". The answer is (unfortunately) very likely not "no-one" ; but it might very well be "not one".

To be fair with OP, the hype about what the tool is "supposed" to be doing ("your accountants will rebuild the ERP over the week end, you don't need programmers, etc...") is setting a dev up for frustration.

Personnaly, I'm trying to learn the "make it write the plan, fix the plan, break it down even more, etc..." loops that are necessary; but I haven't had a use case (yet?) where the total time spent developing the thing was radically shorter.

LLMs make wonders on bootstrapping a greenfield project. Unfortunately, you tend to only do this only once ;)

> LLMs make wonders on bootstrapping a greenfield project. Unfortunately, you tend to only do this only once ;)

This is why LLMs look so impressive in demos. Demos are nearly always greenfield, small in scale, and as long as it launches, it looks successful.

> Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots

Has "people posing as bots" ever appeared in cyberpunk stories ?

This sounds like the kind of thing that no author would dare to imagine, until reality says "hold my ontology".

The mechanical turk?

Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ? When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than MS licenses" ?

> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

That.

Also, am I the only one to remember when SpaceX was supposed to pivot to transporting people from cities to cities, given how cheap and reusable and sure BFF/Starship was going to be ?

Or how we were all going to earn money by pooling our full self driving cars in a network of robo taxis ?

In all seriousness, what is the number of "unrealized sci-fi pipe dreams" that is acceptable from the owner a company ? Or, to be fair, what is the acceptable ratio of "pipe dreams" / "actually impressive stuff actually delivered (reusable rockets, starlink, decent EVs, etc...)" ?

> which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive)

What do you mean, "people" ? I'm pretty sure Musk is only expecting to send self-assembling Optimus robots [1] to do the whole manufacturing.

[1] "pre-order now, expected delivery any time soon"

(Oh, those times where you try to be sarcastic and realize: "wait, maybe that's the actual plan".)

> Cost went up at least 25-fold,

I would love to write an email that start with "I can reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)

I really doubt bots are using legitimate IDs.

The target for those age verification schemes (beyond actually preventing the kids' brains from being rotten by American ad supported skinner boxes) is probably to make schemes like IRA [1] just slightly more complicated. (I said "more complicated", I did not say "impossible" - I very much know that bot factories will find their ways around any kind of verification ; part of being on the defensive side of a conflict is about not giving up.)

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_clou...

I think GP was concerned with forbidden speech more than bots, so solutions differ there.

I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers.

Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)

Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks)

He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?

Fiber is much much less of a cost and technical challenge compared to transfering GWs of power. Unless the customer cannot handle up to 100ms latency, it's totally logical to place the data centers close to the power source, or vice versa (power source close to the data center).