The guy that sold his Bitcoin for pizza, did multiple transactions (detailed in that forum thread), not one. Somehow this part is lost to history when the story gets told.

He liquidated tens of thousands of Bitcoins.

The tally is a lot closer to ~$4 billion at $82k per coin.

Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.

China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.

It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.

The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.

It's super simple.

Gigantic hyper margin ad network = artificial subsidization of cost for various tiers = put the boot on the neck of Chinese competitors. There's no scenario where they can compete with what advertising margins make possible in terms of artificially lowering prices charged.

OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.

They're not going to need a government bailout, they're going to be a spigot of cash production.

Every single thread on HN keeps saying the same ridiculous thing, going on a year now. It's like they've never heard of advertising, which SV specializes in. It's like they're oblivious to the fact that every mega platform with so many users becomes an ad goldmine, and GPT's context positioning is even richer than search.

Don't travel through the US.

See: what they did with personal computers and smartphones. They have access to Fable and Astra right now, and they're not interested what-so-ever despite what these systems can now do. Instead they'll promptly go vaporize $50k on a giant pile of metal garbage (autos) that will rapidly depreciate. They have no practical use for Fable as is.

For the same reason people didn't rush off to their local public library to teach themselves JavaScript to acquire a better life for the cost of renting library books. They can't easily go against their restraints, their biological potential. To do so is extraordinarily taxing.

Originators generate most of the extreme wealth, and extreme outcomes. Mimics can be exceptionally successful however, most doctors are mimics for example, they won't ever originate anything.

Amplifiers are the teachers, they - ideally - shuttle what works to the mimics for reproduction across society. The mimics are largely just trying to keep up with the Joneses. They go out of their way to not risk anything most of the time. They're ideally following pre-set paths to biological success. It's why mass, rapid de-industrialization for one example is such a wipeout, the mimics don't adapt very quickly, they followed the path they were told would work and then they feel betrayed, they become like abandoned programs and don't know what to do next.

As a system you don't want too much of your population in the originator category: it's very expensive and highly prone to spectacular failure. You want the extreme majority of your biological entities following successful paths that have already been proven to work.

Humans aren't special, we're animals. Apply the patterns accordingly.

Nobody will hate AI more than the con-artists in academia pumping out fake papers by the zillions that are all about to be wiped out.

You pad the text.

Oh, my god.

It's like it was made by the world's most anal-retentive Wordpress theme builder. They went over it a thousand times until it was perfectly optimized, no distinguishing marks, no stray tiny misalignments, no single-use stylings.

The path to substantial profitability for Anthropic is questionable. The Chinese LLMs threaten them by far the most of the three major US LLMs. The money for Anthropic is certainly not in $20-$200 subscriptions. And they don't have anywhere near the consumer potential that GPT does, in terms of unleashing an ad spigot. So how far will the API money scale while being undercut by China.

OpenAI has to fight with Google for the ad business, they're specifically building Gemini to focus on consumer + search. Anthropic's business looks cute next to Google's search ad business (which is entirely at risk in this inflection). Meta looks like the biggest potential loser right now, ad dollars will be sucked out of the rotting Facebook network (not Instagram) and redirected to the rapidly expanding, hyper rich context LLM interaction. Advertising on Facebook will feel like running dumb banner ads on Excite in a few years, compared to what GPT will know about its users.

People that think Chinese LLMs are a general threat, don't understand consumer destination services, which is what GPT's future is. China currently has nothing to threaten with in that realm. There is half a trillion dollars of advertising up for grabs.

The US is going to debase itself endlessly through spend-print-spend-print. At some point they may load up enough debt that the economy suffers a gradual heat death, in the style of Japan, wherein too much of your national capital is going to debt maintenance, sitting in a low yield blackhole sucking the dynamism out of your system (instead of going to productive use, business expansion, R&D, et al).

There's absolutely nothing particularly interesting or special about the direction the US is going. It's very, very, very easy to see what's coming and has been for ~20 years (since Bush nearly doubled the size of the Federal Government and blew up our finances with simultaneous tax cuts + massive spending expansion, we've never turned back from the bleed).

Gold has gone up ~10x since the early Bush years precisely because of the USD debasement, that's the reduction in value in the dollar being represented in the ultimate store of value. All of it has been remarkably predictable. I've been chirping about it forever here and there's nothing special about my insight either, this stuff is plain as day national econ 101.

If GM does something (or fails to do something) to their vehicle that causes me to crash, they're liable for the crash.

If someone cuts my brake lines (alters my vehicle) and I crash my car and kill someone, the person that cut the lines is responsible. I have to prove the context of course, and or an investigator has to do so.

And the responsible entity may refuse to pay up, may refuse to take responsibility. None of that is new either.

If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.

And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.

The bar will be raised + it'll turn out to require a lot more time & effort than is currently thought to produce something of good quality (even with Fable 6 et al). The smaller utility programs are easy for AI to turn out.

The Internet didn't stop expanding in 2000-2001. Everything got drastically larger over the following two decades. The multiples on earnings did implode for ~15 years however. MSFT stock for one example went nowhere during that time and compressed down to a near single digit PE.

AI will be a minimum of 10x larger in most every regard 20 years out. That has nothing to do with shorter-term multiples given to these companies in relation to the hyper fast growth they have been riding early in the boom.

Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).