r/BetterOffline

>[C]ompany representatives assured attendees [OpenAI] would not release the solutions all at once—an assurance OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum says the company is “not aware of”—and, worried by how the community might react, sought advice on how to publish the findings.

>"We are working to responsibly release the next math results from our model, drawing on advice and public recommendations from the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study to inform how we release these results. We have not set a release time,” said McCallum.

Of course, just hours after this article was published, OpenAI dumped 377 "proofs" on github. But don't worry about the burden created by dumping 377 slop papers on weary mathematicians laps for them to make sense of. OpenAI has it covered:

>To promote scientific transparency and openness, we are also publishing additional details about how we obtained the results in the repository. These include 10 summaries of the model’s reasoning, estimations of compute spent in terms of Pro usage on ChatGPT, and statistics about the number of attempted problems.

Wow, that will be really helpful! And they didn't even mention that they also included 10 (excerpts) of the original prompts!

https://archive.ph/m51FF

Another take on the whole mess: https://gizmodo.com/openai-dumps-377-new-math-results-on-github-publishes-hand-wringing-blog-post-2000822613

Hey, a long-time lurker and an Ed fan here. I love the financial breakdowns, and I have been listening to the podcast since the entire AI craze started. I have, however, been struggling with doubts about the core assumptions that most financial analysis of AI is built upon, which is the profit as the preliminary driver of this technology and, even if forgotten by the market itself, a key metric on which we can predict its survival.

It's been already years, as we've been waiting for investors to suddenly realize that AI is going nowhere and the investments may be better used elsewhere. As 2026 is coming to an end, this increasingly starts to sound the same way as "we will replace all software engineers in 6 months". Except, software engineers are actually being laid off right now (I am worried about my own SW position too), and at least to some extent these layoffs are attributable to AI (even if to AI spending and not the tech itself).

I feel like we are misinterpreting the situation. This is not about profit anymore, or any pragmatic capitalist goal. Look at the people investing in it and people building it, they are all fucking nutjobs. They will replace us with AI even if it's not doing a better job than us, or doing it cheaper. They seem to be deliberately building a very particular kind of future, that I still cannot figure out. But what I can say for sure, is that the people of Bay Area, the VCs, the US government (be it red or blue corrupt cabinet) are all in on it. The point has never been to automate human labor and make more money. I don't know if they are that stupid to not realize that less employment = less consumers, but I would bet that they all know that. It's an apocalypse cult, and the destruction and havoc they wreck is entirely deliberate.

If my assessment is right, will profit margins matter at the end of the day? We keep hoping the liberal myth of fundamental, natural market forces, that have to be reckoned with at the end of the day. However, market entirely depends on a bunch of agreements, and these agreements can be collectively reconsidered when there is a bigger fish to catch than profit margins. They can bankrupt Anthropic and OpenAI if they go underwater, and investors will simply write off the expenses. Nobody said that the data center investments and loans ever had to be paid off in dividends. It might turn out that they were buying not an AI product, and all of it is just a charity for a world they have been building for themselves.

How can market forces prevail, when every actor is ideologically swayed by AI psychosis? Money don't have the capacity to literally end ever since the gold standard was abolished. Considering the virtual nature of capital in this day and age, I feel like the way we are going now is not as unsustainable as we assume.

Please tell me that it's my depression talking, and I'm fundamentally wrong about this.

Even by the eccentric norms of Silicon Valley, Anthropic is a very strange company indeed.

One of its seven founders has been camping out at the Vatican, hoping to persuade the Pope that its software is conscious.

It wants to put in place protections for the “welfare” of chatbots, a step towards legal personhood. Anthropic is also a noisy promoter of the idea that the End is Nigh, brought about by a killer superintelligent AI.

It’s like the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult went into business. And when the going gets weird, to misquote Hunter S Thompson, the weird IPO.

While arch-rival OpenAI, from which Anthropic broke away, has postponed its public flotation, Anthropic is racing towards one, in what could be the biggest share offer in history. Parts of its prospectus leaked last week.

The question here is not whether people find AI useful, or even whether Anthropic has created some real business, which it has.

The problem is whether it is a business that’s worth $2tn (£1.5tn), Anthropic’s modest valuation of itself, and whether it will go broke trying to get there.

AI is proving very expensive to operate. This is not a classic, low-marginal-cost software business, like a Microsoft or an Airbnb. Costs scale with users, and with more sophisticated jobs, the costs rise exponentially. Only in niches like software development can Anthropic control these costs.

In fact, AI can become ubiquitous in our economy without anyone making money from it directly at all, and this is the gamble China has made.

Anthropic vows to spend $518bn on infrastructure.

Ominously, 80pc of this is already tied up in non-cancellable contracts, which means it’s on the hook for over $400bn worth of deals that it can’t get out of.

In addition, almost half of Anthropic’s revenue is channelled through two rivals: Amazon and Google. They may have plans of their own, the prospectus admits, noting this “creates complex dynamics that could give rise to conflicts of interest and adversely affect our access to compute”.

They may do to Anthropic what Microsoft did to Netscape 30 years ago. By controlling the distribution channel, it made a free and quite reasonable alternative in front of consumers before they could see the Netscape product.

All this means that Anthropic not only needs overall demand for AI to rise, it must be able to capture much of that demand in the form of paying customers.

Today, however, features and innovations are rapidly copied within weeks. Free, open-weights models that don’t divulge your company secrets to OpenAI or Anthropic suddenly look much more attractive. As I noted recently, Anthropic could find itself in the position of selling mineral water at $1,000 a bottle, just as everyone is getting a household tap.

Dario Amodei’s gamble is to tie up the competition in red tape – or making open alternatives illegal to use – but so far this has not impressed Team Trump.

In fact, many key indicators are going the wrong way for Anthropic and OpenAI.

Spending on AI has actually declined every month since July, notes Ara Kharazian, the lead economist at payment processor Ramp.

Kharazian attributes this to intense pricing competition between OpenAI and Anthropic.

This indicates that demand and revenue are diverging: both companies would rather see wallets loosen, not tighten. Analysts at Gartner have estimated that businesses will bin 40pc of AI agents as firms hit problems; the AI is too unreliable and creates vast new areas of risk.

Bain & Company estimates that AI needs up to $6tn in revenue by 2031 to fund existing commitments to break even.

For the infrastructure build-out to pay off, the world needs to be spending 9pc of US annual GDP today on AI in 2030. Bain sees nothing on offer today that will entice paying customers to generate that level of demand. Squinting at it optimistically, it estimates the AI industry will be $4.2tn short of wiping its face.

At this point, we are entitled to ask whether a speculative bubble is what the world really needs right now. Populations are on the move. Income growth has flatlined for a generation. Having printed money to keep things ticking along, the central banks are out of options.

Much of the AI bubble today is financed by shadow banking, or private credit, which the Bank of England has warned about, and many of the financing deals are circular. The rising cost of securitising these vast infrastructure bets is another ominous sign.

The last thing business needs is for money to become scarcer and more expensive. In its annual report in June, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned of the lasting damage to the global economy if the bubble implodes.

“A repricing of risk this time, whether triggered by higher interest rates or an AI bust, has the potential to be similarly disruptive by triggering a corporate credit freeze with wider implications for aggregate investment.”

That means bridges and hospitals don’t get built, and the real economy is starved of the capital it needs to invest.

The winter could be long and cold for everyone, and a precursor to political realignments we can’t even begin to imagine.

Actually some people already died, Sam. Or have you already forgotten the Tumbler Ridge Shooting?

>Asked specifically where he diverges from Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”

I love it when tech bros tell me what the world should accept from them. Really drives home how the Oligarchs think of the rest of us.

>“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’” said Altman. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”

Orders of magnitude? These dudes love throwing out numbers but refuse to show their math. What possible evidence could he use to support his claim? Oh yeah, the ChatBot companies are run by conmen, and they just pull this shit out of their asses and expect you to believe them.

At least he is acknowledging that his tech will be used for hacking and scamming people. I guess the mass shootings fall under the umbrella of "other bad things that will happen."

There is a lot going on with the LLM businesses. The financial aspects are extensively & comprehensively covered, especially all the great work Ed has done.

The major AI labs have been in the news for "AI Safety/Security" and how they must ✨💅pace the frontier💅✨. Most of this narrative I believe, serves two purposes:

1. Kill competition from open weight models and inference providers that host them. These models usually cost anywhere between 1/100th to 1/50th of the latest Claude Doopus or Claude Table offering.
2. To ensure that LLMs and their output isn't perceived as substandard (which has greatly been the case, as of late), as it won't justify the absurd capex.

The future of AI Labs hinges on them maintaining exclusivity in this space, and by the mass incomprehension that this technology is ✨💅general intelligence💅✨ when it's anything but.

All this has caused AI-boosters to be extra confrontational and loud, even on the internet, like here on Reddit. It's not just the anti-LLM crowd they seem to be after this time. It's also the LLM users who refuse to use the latest and greatest Claude Doopus Table model, or buy 5-10 $200 Pro Max subscriptions to LLMs for making a single page website slop.

There is a side, especially on the enterprise, where I believe cracks are starting to show more prominently.

This is my third ever Q4 as a CTO, and it's the same thing I brace for, like every Q4 before it - soon, it will be budget season for enterprise, and it's exactly when AI companies are trying to slip an annual contract with free vendor lock-in™ to get a slice of our 2027 spend. My read based on the last few weeks, is that rising API prices mean that a significant lot of the LLM-wrapper companies are more desperate for cash than ever, like wasps just before the frost sets in.

I have an inbox full of invites from (very likely overpaid) sales execs to try out various LLM wrappers, proudly mentioning how their "solution" is powered by the latest Claude Doopus Table five point something.

I wouldn't want any of these things anywhere near a product I am responsible for. Besides the vendor lock-in™, the user experience is something I can only describe as grotesque, even for an ✨💅Agentic AI-native💅✨ product. We went from a chat integrated into a right panel, to getting rid of the code editor itself, or making it read-only. Any "solution" that tries to take away control & information from the user, is anything but a "solution".

An example I always highlight was a sales executive who found out what transpacific flight I was on, and subsequently got his seat changed to be right next to me, and used the "opportunity" to demo his Claude wrapper (because isolating a lone woman on a 14 hour flight while casually flirting with her is quite a sales strategy, amirite?🥰).

This piece of vibe coded hot garbage was just the disaster it sounds like - a Claude Doopus ✨💅agent💅✨ that interviews real humans on a videoconferencing call, and returns "insights". Who did it interview? What did it ask them? How did it arrive at its "insights"? Based on what data? Locked behind the "Enterprise" Plan at best, hidden away at worst.

Suffice to say, I would be among the small group of people outside those working in the AI Labs themselves, with free access to the latest Claude/GPT models. This especially matters because the same people who tell me that I'm making a mistake by not mindlessly adopting LLMs are the ones without the same amount of access that I have, or the same capacity to evaluate its output.

Here's a verbatim-quoted, unsurprising response, I received sometime in the last 72 hours, when I mentioned that my engineering department has an anti-LLM psychosis culture, citing risks with cognitive debt as primary,

>The plan is to eventually completely replace humans and hence an autonomous agent would be taking in the cognitive debt in its cognitive memory. So it's only a very short term risk. Humans can simply never come even close to frontier models super intelligence. Those who have such rules against LLM use will never be able to take advantage of the power LLM would provide and would be way behind and lose the game.

Whose plan is it? Certainly one that looks like it's from Reddit user "Adjective-Noun-1234".

What even is a "cognitive memory" in a "super intelligence" that has to be regularly stripped off all working context to avoid sabotaging its own efficacy?

What's the road that I have been hearing since the last two years that I will be "way behind" on?

Lastly, what "game" are we playing? If winning the game is the equivalent of lighting a sum greater than my entire software development team's budget on fire, perhaps I'd be glad losing whatever "game" this is.

I have been contacted by leadership in many small & mid-sized companies to help fix the tech side of their product, after they let ✨💅AI agents💅✨ do all the software dev, especially under the instructions of non-tech teams.

I have my own product offering to look after, first & foremost, but these paid consultancy requests usually cost me less than an hour or two of my time weekly, and I get to see first hand, all the consequences of an ✨💅AI-first engineering culture💅✨. The first question I often get is - "Which AI agent will you use to fix it?" (Sure, let's use a blowtorch to clear out an oil spill)

Looking back at all the mess I have been asked to fix by the same people who parroted & paraded that I will be "losing the game", I'm quite confident that the opposite is true.

Hello all,

I rarely give much insight into the future of the show, but wanted to share some upcoming episodes (in no specific order):

• Steve Burke of GamersNexus on circular financing.
• Tom Dotan on Oracle and Larry Ellison.
• Nick Devor on Coinbase's Trading Cards and the overall prediction markets.
• Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times on Why You Should Care About Bonds.
• Nick Nemeth and Sam Koppelman on Private Credit.
• Paul Kedrosky and Ed Elson on the post-mid-terms economy.

Monologues will continue as ever, but I'm excited to start planning out and broadening what the show is about.

I'm also working on confirming a few really exciting guests for CES.

Long story short, Amazon makes data center propaganda.

> Amazon Web Services’ CEO Matt Garman said that communities would decide how to prioritize funds across “education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy preservation, and local priorities.”

> Laying out other community commitments, Amazon also promised to ensure data centers wouldn’t increase power bills or wipe out local water supplies. Regarding the latter, Amazon promised to be “water positive” by 2030, while claiming that 75 percent of projects have already met this goal.

However, this is all in the face of the backlash they have gotten, and obviously they don't care about environmental damage.

> However, advocates at Stand.Earth—a global nonprofit that’s been fighting for environmental protections in communities hosting data centers—told Ars that Amazon is the one being “misleading” by spreading “corporate propaganda.” Seemingly in crisis mode as billions of dollars in data center projects have been blocked nationwide, Amazon’s promised donations represent “a flailing attempt at damage control for the harm its data center build-out has already caused,” Stand.Earth said.

> Most problematic, Stand.Earth suggested, is Amazon’s plan to back a power plant that experts expect will become the largest source of US climate pollution. Glaringly, Amazon’s data center commitments don’t mention the power plant and scarcely address pollution, apart from promising to exclusively rely on back-up generators that use the lowest possible emissions.

> “For all the claims Amazon makes about investing in carbon-free energy, it conveniently leaves out that it is constructing the single-largest source of climate emissions in the United States in Pecos, Texas,” Stand.Earth said. “Communities will face 33 million tons of harmful air pollution every year—with the power plant using the same amount of energy needed to run more than 1.9 million homes.”

> Although Amazon emphasized that most generators only run for “roughly 10 hours per year,” Stand.Earth cited cases where “Amazon data centers ran on diesel back-up power for days at a time.”

Let us also recall that the total CapEx Amazon has spent on AI, has been very large, at $220bn, and this is a trivial amount in comparison. Of course as we all know they've gotten just about no returns from their investments, but this is a sunken cost fallacy and there's no way out.

It’s well known that corporations and groups have paid people to sit around astroturfing all day, and in general we know just how insidious and effective fake grassroots movements can be in manipulating public opinion.

The thing that actually worries me about LLMs is that they’re practically purpose built for astroturfing - it’s trivial to configure and fine tune them to write in specific styles and push certain ideas, and and that was the case early on for them. And you don’t need anything near a frontier model to be convincing to a non-trivial number of people. Basically the next stage of algorithmic/targeted content.

What concerns me is that there’s a lack of insight into how LLMs are being used to “organically” spread ideas/shape opinions. But like, do we have any idea what the PR firms that were astroturfing before LLMs are doing now? To what extent AI companies are using their own resources to sell themselves and AI in general? Or steer conversations on social media away from topics they want to keep on the down low? Or derailing actual exchanges to prevent certain ideas or information from spreading organically?

Why must we constantly entertain the delusions of these people? Over and over again, it's just nonsense.

We should also embrace more mortgage backed securities, which are of course the global future commodity.

> The statement, titled the “Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science,” begins by recognizing science and technology’s benefits to society then goes on to encourage research that integrates artificial intelligence. (The statement calls it “super intelligence,” given President Donald Trump’s recent executive order renaming the technology.)

> Michael Kratsios, head of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, spearheaded the vision statement, which also says the participating countries welcome the “growing field of metascience,” a term that describes the study of the scientific process itself.

> “Super intelligence applied to science will be an incredible force for democratization of research and breakthrough developments,” he plans to say.

> “The landscape has changed everywhere, the ground is moving beneath our feet, and we must all reinvigorate our research enterprise and lay new foundations for knowledge, innovation and prosperity,” Kratsios is expected to say in his remarks.

Yes, person who doesn't understand science talks about science. As the article mentions, the US has taken many efforts to directly undermine science.

> In September, the National Science Foundation announced that it would establish an Office of Metascience (OMS), charged with evaluating new approaches to funding and identifying which award mechanisms lead to the best scientific outcomes.

> “Through the OMS, NSF will become a learning, self-improving institution that tries new approaches, measures their effects, admits candidly when they do not work, and scales them when they succeed,” the agency’s acting director Brian Stone wrote in a letter.

> The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to make drastic cuts to federal funding for scientific research. Its proposed budget for the 2027 fiscal year would, for example, cut funding for the National Science Foundation by about half.

Not sure where the global part of this is. It's just the US coercing everyone to take part in their own delusions. It also seems we must take RSI rhetoric everywhere now.

> In September, the National Science Foundation announced that it would establish an Office of Metascience (OMS), charged with evaluating new approaches to funding and identifying which award mechanisms lead to the best scientific outcomes.

> “Through the OMS, NSF will become a learning, self-improving institution that tries new approaches, measures their effects, admits candidly when they do not work, and scales them when they succeed,” the agency’s acting director Brian Stone wrote in a letter.

I suppose a system in decline tries its best to present as capable and forward looking. The worse off one is, the more peacocking one ends up doing. But reading this is genuinely tiring. I'd have preferred flat earthers to this.

A really good talk about how the news around Mythos and the hype that followed did not show the reality of their claims. Out of 79 reported vulnerabilities - 14 of them were not really a bug and 15 were already fixed in the latest code, only 20 something worth looking at. In that 20 "real" bugs, numerous only worked under assumption of an already malicious actor being present or an untrusted device installed.

Another key thing that he talks about is leaky bots. "Anything it tells you, it will tell someone else" - same bugs ( public or non public ) being reported by different people can cause discomfort in terms of who gets the credit for it.