OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.

I think Apple understands that the moat in AI is the UX, something that historically they've been very good at. The model is a commodity and I suspect they will quite happily go with another provider if Google doesn't work or buy a company in the inevitable AI fire sale if they can see a good fit.

In my experience you typically need less people if using a Cloud Provider than in-house (or the same number of people can handle more instances) due to increased leverage. Whether you can maximize what you get via leverage depends on how good your team is.

US companies typically like to minimize headcount (either through accounting tricks or outsourcing) so usually using a Cloud Provider wins out for this reason alone. It's not how much money you spend, it's how it looks on the balance sheet ;)

OpenAI IMHO is a dead company at this point. They are overvalued relative to the fundamentals and don't appear to have any way of getting the numbers to work in the timeframe that their investors will expect. They are throwing stuff against the wall in the hope something sticks.

They are almost certainly looking for a bag holder. This will either be the retail investor via an IPO or the Federal government via "we are too big to fail".

I don't think that would have succeeded against Samsung and the Nexus phones.

But TBH I think going with Android would have a better move than what Elop did.

The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to iPhone and Android for it to matter.

Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystems, Nokia was beyond saving.

You'll be buried under so many environmental impact lawsuits that any burn will take years (if ever) to happen.

The insidious part is that commercial real estate in California is paying the same rates as they were when the building was built, despite the fact that the value of the building has increased many times since and the building "changing" ownership many times since.

The second insidious part is that because of the enhancements to the tax code over the years it's possible to continue to pay 1978 property tax rates in perpetuity, and even pass those rates on to your descendants. You can even transfer those super low rates to a new property in some cases.

New buyers get screwed because they will be paying at today's rates. So you could be paying 10x more property tax as your neighbor for the same city services.

Example: New construction in Santa Clarita (north Los Angeles county) $800k 3 bedroom town house. Even with ~50% down you are still looking around $4k+ per month in payments, with 25% of that amount being property tax.

You'll also likely be paying more due to Mello-Roos and with HOA and home insurance on top of that. Plus it's unlikely at this point you'll be able to get fire insurance.

Good luck trying to make the numbers work on the country medium income of ~$100k.

(And don't ask how someone on medium income can put 50% down on a $800k home).

Until someone is willing to grab the nettle and fix the property tax situation to be fair and equitable to everyone then California cities are eventually going to run out of money to maintain infrastructure.

Cinemas and concerts are in the same boats.

With the cost of essentials through the roof spending $$$ for a night out is now a periodic luxury rather than every Saturday night.

Usually (but not always) these workers come into the US on a H-1B visa.

The AIs take a look at the state of things and realize the KPIs will improve considerably if homo sapiens are removed from the picture. Cue "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" type future.

OR:

The AIs take a look and decide that keeping homo sapiens around makes things much more fun and interesting. They take over running things in a benevolent manner in collaboration with homo sapiens. At that point we end up with 'The Culture'.

Either end-state is bad for the billionaire/investor/VC class.

In the first you'll be a fed into the meat grinder just like everyone else. In the second the AIs, will do a much better job of resource allocation, will perform a decapitation strike on that demographic to capture the resources, and capitalism will largely be extinct from that point onwards.

Some are significantly better than others.

The further you go beyond senior engineer, the wider the audience, but you start developing the skills at the 1-1 level.

Copyright doesn't protect general concepts, methods, or common knowledge. So you could write a program that is remarkably similar to another one and not infringe copyright. Just like you can write a book with the same plot as another without infringing copyright.

Plus given that most programming languages have a finite grammar and a limited number of ways to express general concepts, the individual bits of code that make up most programs are probably not sufficiently original to be copyrightable in themselves.

Dokku looks great but what is the value of using it over "run your container" platforms like Google Cloud Run, Digital Ocean App Platform, or Fargate.