I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.

There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.

There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.

Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.

Totally different concept. But don't take my word for it:

> "Rent-seeking" is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.[0]

> In economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to.

Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.

Not really! Sorry to harp on this, but there are two ways one model could outperform another:

1) It adheres to your strategy better

2) It improvises

If the prompt was "maximize money, here's inspiration" improvising is fine. If the prompt was "implement the strategy," improvising is failure.

Right now you have a leaderboard; you don’t yet have a benchmark, because you can’t tell whether high P&L reflects correctness.

1. Prompt adherence: how well the models follow your stated strategy

2. Decision quality: how well models do on judgment calls that aren’t explicitly in the strategy

Candidly, since you haven’t shared the strategy, there’s no way for me to evaluate either (1) or (2). A model’s performance could be coming from the quality of your strategy, the model itself, or an interaction between the two, and I can’t disentangle that from what you’ve provided.

So as presented, the benchmark is basically useless to me for evaluating models (not because it’s pointless overall, but because I can’t tell what it’s actually measuring without seeing the strategy).

A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:

- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.

- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.

So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.

From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:

Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]

Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]

For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]

The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.13230

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9119633/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7021583/

It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.

So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.

Models trained in 2025 don’t ship until 2026/7. That means the $3bn in 2025 training costs show up as expense now, while the revenue comes later. Treating that as a straight loss is just confused.

OAI’s projected $5bn 2025 loss is mostly training spend. If you don’t separate that out with future revenues, you’re misreading the business.

And yes, inference gross margins are positive. No idea why the author pretends they aren’t.

That said, it does make it easier to claim progress...

This isn't Anaconda, they didn't do a bait and switch to screw their core users. It isn't sinful for devs to try and earn a living.

Tools that do many things and tools that do a small number of things are still tools.

> "do we really even need a body at all anymore?"

It's a legitimate question. What's so special about the body and why do we need to have one? Would life be better or worse without bodies?

Deep down I think everyone's answer has more to do with spirituality than anything else. There isn't a single objectively correct response.