You’re right that people can and do max out the expensive plans. Its very difficult to say how often. I just think a majority of anthropics customers are businesses, who often pay per token for easier scaling etc. According to the company, enterprise employees use about $150-$250 per month, (possibly max plans have similar use, which would support your view) but thats in API tokens which they probably have big margins on, so it’s less likely anthropic are burning money on inference. If you want to convince me otherwise, its not enough to say that it can happen, it has to be frequent enough to outweigh the B2B sales. They are however likely losing money overall due to training costs etc.

looks inside

But if you use the $100 a month Claude Max plan, and you would use it to the weekly limit by going full ‘agentic coding’ (so almost no human in the loop) you would use an amount of tokens that would cost you more than $1000 at API-pricing.

If I watch 600 movies every day on my netflix subscription I am using more energy than I pay them for. Obviously everyone is like me. Therefore they are losing money overall.

Wait, their (netflix) earnings say they made a profit last quarter. But my calculations were waterproof!

Probably anthropic are not net positive, but they are not spending 10x what people pay them for tokens.

Let he who flosses each and every day poke the first gum!

And don’t say “turn your piss into gold” because it’s sold out already.

oh thats propaganda. thats factory farm propaganda on my timeline. 💔

Agreed on all points.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions

4% of global warming to date. Flying will still be possible (and not uncommon) in a net zero world. Maybe americans will have to take the train to see their relatives, but they could just DACCS if they love TSA controls so much.

Did age well

charged with […] not having a valid boat registration

I LOL:ed

??? Arizona has a democrat governor and Phoenix has a democrat mayor.

In my collection I have the perfect response meme for this which would explain everything but I couldn’t find it and now the lost meme is no longer funny to me.

I think this makes sense from the commission’s point of view. If the EU fines google and washington hears of it, that could be the start another trade war with the US. People will really care about that and blame the commission even if they acted reasonably. If they block the fine normies will not care and they can go on with their jobs as usual. I think its wrong to assume google will not go crying to trump if they get fined and beg him to impose more tarriffs (which we all know trump hates doing /s), so if you are in favor of the very much deserved fine you have to accept the risk of a trade war too. Politics sucks man.

Did anyone here actually read the article? I think it was pretty reasonable and am worried that the future of LLMs/AI will be determined largely by people who hold very, very different fundamental values than me regarding compassion and equity. I think part of my worry comes from people (often on the left and from the US, but I am biased in what parts of the internet I frequent) dismissing AI as a fad which will soon go away and which will certainly not have a large impact on the world for a long while.

Give me one argument for that statement which cannot be equally applied to communism, anarchism or islamism by MAGA diehards to justify killing innocent people.

I don’t mean to start a full argument since I sense we have quite different views, but maybe you could tell me where I go wrong here. Say for the argument the entire Trump admin is fascist. I think there are still many places to break the chain of fascism before you get to anthropics models. (I use this definition of fascism). I think:

1. Primary purpose of the DoD is to defend the US and allies against actual invasions of actual land, everything else is just stupid shit the political system allows for and incentivizes. I don’t think this primary purpose, setting aside BS random wars, is fascist so I don’t think the organization is fascist either.
2. I’m not certain that contractors of the DoD, which is not inherently fascist but which is for the argument said to be controlled at the top by fascists, become members of the ideology or heavily associated with it when they take contracts, or when they later live up to those contracts. You claim “when a private sector company provides services to a government that is obtusely fascist, it itself becomes a tool in which fascist power is concentrated.”. I think this is far too general and strong to be true. Is the department of agriculture a tool where fascist power is concentrated? Is a farmer who cooperates with the USDA a tool where fascist power is concentrated? Is the corn they produce also that, as an analogy to the LLM? The DoD facilitates a lot of horrible stuff, but do the reach of the assumed fascist Trump admin only goes as far as they can order changes within the DoD and within the DoD’s contracted corporations, it doesn’t spread like fire does.
3. Anthropic has quite a lot of transparency with what “values” they try to get their models to espouse, and the models are generally politically neutral. Regarding your claim that “when a private sector company provides services to a government that is obtusely fascist, it itself becomes a tool in which fascist power is concentrated”: it’s an entirely different thing to be a tool of fascism than to be fascist. Anthropic being a tool in which fascist power is concentrated doesn’t give me any reason that said fascism would “spread” (however such a thing could even happen) to their models.

So in my view the chain between Trump Admin->DoD->Anthropic->Claude Sonnet 4.6, and in the opposite direction, is pretty weak and not enough that I would call the model fascist. I think this is especially true now that the use of the model is being phased out (?). That’s in the “readily espouses or promotes views connected to fascism” and in the “any usage is directly funding fascist organizations in a major way” senses I feel that a model could be described as fascist (or AI in general could be).

To analogize again, I don’t think a Bernie supporter working in the DoD is automatically a fascist and certainly don’t think that purchasing an old TV from them is supporting fascism (or that the TV is fascist, even if they had previously used it in their office at the DoD).

The book thing I’m not sure how you connect to fascism? It might be ultra-bad, it might be copyright infringement, but it doesn’t feel like fascism to me beyond surface level comparisons to book burning.

Could you elaborate on why this is? How are anthropics models fascism?

That’s true. My point was that the article is claiming that since the share of GDP which is consumer spending decreased, total consumer spending also decreased. But since GDP per capita increased at the same time, the actual total consumer spending per person increased (the 7 percentage point decrease does not outweigh the doubling of real GDP per capita). This could be misleading in its own right, with the richest spending more and the median spending less even in total numbers, but the article doesn’t claim that. It claims that total spending has gone down, which is just not true.

This reads like a lazily written article to me. The em dashes don’t increase my enthusiasm. Just in the opening I noticed:

Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% today. technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consume

Of course, real GDP per capita more than doubled in this time period which means consumer spending also doubled (more since it increased by 7pp). Is most of this billionaire yachts? I have no clue, but if you want to convince me you should try to not claim total amounts when you mean relative amounts.

A physical bookstore in 2000 took in $100 from a book sale and distributed it roughly like this: about 60% went to labor (store staff, publisher employees, authors), 30% went to capital (owner profit, rent), and 10% covered other costs. The money circulated locally through wages.

Amazon today takes in that same $100. The distribution looks fundamentally different: warehouse and tech labor receives roughly 25%, Amazon’s infrastructure and profit captures around 55%, and the remainder flows to publishers and authors. Labor’s share of that transaction dropped by more than half.

… unless you count the publisher and authors like you did for the 2000s data, in which case it decreased from 60% to 45%. And that’s persumably not counting the manufacturing of server farms, refinement of minerals, purchase of the actual reading tablet. Amazon has high margins but not 55% margins.

The labor share of US GDP fell from approximately 64% in 1980 to around 58% today — a 6-percentage-point shift. Applied to a $28 trillion economy, that gap represents roughly $1.7 trillion per year that once flowed to workers but now flows to capital.

Once again, since the GDP per capita has doubled the labor dollars per person has actually increased. The label for the $1.7 trillion is similarly misleading, those dollars never “once flowed to workers”, they just would have if the economy had grown without any changes to its composition.

If I were the author of the article, perhaps I would say that since 1980, real median wages have only grown by about 20% which seems very slight given the technological improvements made in that time. But how much of that 20% increase would have been possible without technological improvement, and how much has the quality of the things people spend their money on grown in that time? No clue, that’s beyond the thinking budget I have for this article.

EDIT: I’ve decided I’m not going to be overly charitable towards the article since it got an overall positive response from here. I’m very certain the article was written partially or fully by an LLM, and that it was written to advertise the portfolio of whoever wrote it. The article doesn’t make a good effort to make an argument capable of convincing anyone who doesn’t already agree with the thesis. The counter arguments are bunched up at the end and barely countered at all:

Absolute living standards have genuinely improved. Longer lifespans, better medicines, access to information that would have cost thousands of dollars in library fees

Free services — Google Search, Wikipedia, WhatsApp — create enormous value that doesn’t show up in GDP at all. The consumption ceiling argument partially breaks down for digital goods with near-zero marginal cost.

So does the article’s author actually think technological improvements have failed to benefit regular people? They don’t seem interested in arguing these benefits are fake, or outweighed by negative aspects. If they want to argue that the 1% have captured most of the growth that technology has given, their article doesn’t support that. It gives a lot of explanations why this might happen but the first part meant to cement that it does happen is based on unfounded conclusions which the “What This Isn’t Saying” part then lists reasons not to trust.

I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:

• Generating example solutions to maths and physics problems I encounter in my coursework, so I can learn how to solve similar problems in the future instead of getting stuck. The generated solutions, if they come up with the right answer, are almost always correct and if I wonder about something I simply ask.
• Writing really quick solutions to random problems I have in python or bash scripts, like “convert this csv file to this random format my personal finance application uses for import”.
• Helping me when coding, in a general way I think genuinely increases my productivity while I really understand what I push to main. I don’t send anything I could not have written on my own (yes, I see the limitations in my judgement here).
• Asking things where multiple duckduckgo searches might be needed. E.g. “Whats the history of EU+US sanctions on Iran, when and why were they imposed/tightened and how did that correlate with Iranian GDP per capita?”

What does this cost me? I don’t pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:

• What I study (not very personal to me)
• Generally what kinds of problems I want to solve with code (I try to keep my requests pretty general; not very personal)
• The code I write and work on (already open source so I don’t care)
• Random searches (I’m still thinking about the impact of this tbh, I think I feel the things I ask to search for are general enough that I don’t care)

There’s also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I’ve read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don’t know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.