Interesting post. I think there is a large distinction between “vc backable” startups and the rest (sushi restaurants, tire shops). Successful startups ride an exponential technological, regulatory or social trend and create massive amounts of value very quickly, reaching massive markets that would otherwise be underserved. (most also fail). Here’s a great essay by Paul Graham https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
I disagree with consumers only being “mildly priviledged by competition” because the alternative would be monopoly or oligopoly and arbitrary pricing power by incumbents (there’s a reason why antitrust suits happen all the time). Deel v Rippling is an almost comically bad situation, but prices are almost certainly lower and pressure to create a better product far higher than in a counterfactual world where Deel did not exist. As another example, consider Delve, Scytale and the other automated compliance providers following Vanta. Delve costs half as much and certifies SOC 2 twice as fast. Scytale provides other features, like providing in house auditors instead of just referrals. No two companies are exactly alike, and a company usually earns the right to exist by being different in a crucial way (different vertical, different pricing, different features, different secret etc)
michaelwaves
One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed revolutionary, drunk single father who raises a daughter and fights neonazis. The mom is in Mexico though.
“It may actually be more affordable to build some kinds of high cost-per-kg structures (e.g. datacenters...”
There is a company called Starcloud attempting to do exactly this (recently they launched their first H100). A lot of critics say the heat dissipation through radiation is an issue (radiation is the least effective form of thermal transfer), so their core IP is essentially giant expandable heatsinks.
Benefits:No fresh water needed
Frees up space on land
Solar powered
Cons:
Latency
Maintenance
Harder to stop the AIs by force
Probably just marking up gpt 4o API costs? gpt 4o costs $2.50/M input and $10/M output tokens, assuming 10k in and 10k out per hour that’s 0.125/hour. Maybe double or triple that for tool calls but there’s no way it should be 0.07/minute. I guess they also charge for infrastructure like servers to run tools and orchestrate everything and connect to phones.
That is a great point. I don’t think I have too much data on this or know where to find it publicly (tips/intros to voice AI people would be appreciated!). I spoke to an early engineer at a voice agent company that helps medical providers call big insurers to claim insurance. A big problem they had was optimizing the AI to not be too friendly and random (“how was your weekend”==tokens set on fire) but also not be overly terse and impolite. Funnily enough, on the insurer’s side they also use AI to detect and ban AI callers (so I guess this helps them efficiently deny claims?).
Great work! I for one would be sad if we lobtomized our AI friends to maximize their productivity. I’m curious if emotion features in gemmascope SAEs activate more often/strongly than other models, or if gemma has more coherent emotion persona vectors