AlvaBuddha

Ex-McKinsey senior expert. IIT grad. Building games solo. Centrist. Rationalist.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

The strength of a rationalist lies in the ability to be more confused by fiction than reality.

@grok - run a critical adversarial fact check of the claim (stemming from a few reddit posts and repeated across "news" media) that a mid-sized Indian services firm laid off 70 developers and retained only 8, citing fable. In case of absence of evidence, analyse probability of pure fiction vs AI-washing a business downturn decision.

Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I would love to stand corrected.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

It's no longer blind faith if you can talk to it constantly, and it keeps replying back with excessive mind-numbing verbosity, logically and unequivocally establishing its superiority.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@robinhanson Have you launched a poll on UAP hypotheses? Aliens vs new non-intelligence-driven scientific phenomenon vs unrecognized instance of known phenomenon vs military testing of various assets.

Idly curious to know your probability assessments here.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

My game dev triggered Fable's safety guardrails... is unfortunately no longer worth bragging about.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@ponnappa Even among IC players, in a blind test, it's not obvious from just their tech & strategy & founder capabilities which of Ford vs GM vs Studebaker (which most people wouldn't have heard of), would win.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@ponnappa The Engines That Move Markets is a fantastic book. When IC engines came up, steam engines were well established. Electric motors were new, glitzy and seemed just as good. IC engines were the dark horse which only became obvious winners after several real race wins.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

Great pitch for PLTR's new Nvidia-powered stack. But the 30% equity comment is ridiculous. AWS, the power companies, and Palantir itself don't take equity either. You can't price a general-purpose input on outcomes you don't control or can't attribute.

"No value" isn't supported by demand, and there's enough anecdotal evidence both ways. New tech just runs a wide band of outcomes.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.

Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.

His exact words:

"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."

He literally said the entire frontier AI business model is intellectual property extraction dressed up as a subscription.

Then he also destroyed the pricing model with a single question that Silicon Valley still refuses to answer:

"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

That question breaks the industry.

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models truly delivered the productivity gains the labs claim, they would take equity or a share of the profit they generate. They would not sell access by the million tokens.

Token pricing is itself the CONFESSION that the product cannot produce reliable value at scale. If it did, they would price for the value. But they price for the compute because that is what they are actually selling.

Karp went even further...

He called the entire arrangement "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."

American businesses are transferring the alpha of their operations, meaning the workflows, the customer data, the strategy memos, the internal models that make them competitive, directly into the training pipelines of a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Once those labs retrain, the customer's own edge becomes the next enterprise product sold back to their competitors.

And the part the AI industry does not want anyone thinking about:

Every enterprise running its confidential documents, its customer conversations, and its financial models through a frontier model is potentially teaching that model HOW to replace them.

The vendor collects the token fee AND the compounding intelligence about that customer's business. That is the mechanism. And that is why Karp used the word "stealing."

He claims this is why every executive he meets is furious in private and silent in public. Nobody wants to be the CEO who called out the labs and then discovered their next competitor was built on their own leaked workflows.

The entire AI industry has been priced for perfection on one assumption:

That frontier labs produce durable, defensible value that justifies infinite compute spend.

But Karp just told us that the customers do not believe that assumption anymore. They believe they are being taxed without benefit, watched without consent, and copied without recourse.

The moment enterprises stop believing, the whole valuation stack shakes.

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

Thanks for keeping us safe Claude Fable 5!

[Siva @ergodicthought]

$250M is easy if Indian IT industry dared to come together and pitch in to de-risk an existential crisis. Infosys alone bought back shares worth ~$200M in Nov 2025.

Why are Indian model makers having to pitch global VCs? The market is in India, and the capital is too!

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@banglani I won't even get into the neurodivergent thought process here. In such contexts, either you're exceptional enough that any meetings are formalities, or you learn to act "normal", or you die poor.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@banglani On one hand, you always want your VCs/ Clients/ Judges to be well fed, for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, it sucks to see someone eating, and smell food, when you're simultaneously hungry and nauseous due to stress (as some founders might be).

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@tszzl Data center designers are rewarded for maximizing power & water consumption, aren't they?

We are just a few hops away from CO2-maxxing. Brave New World.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@ponnappa Side-note: My consulting hind-brain, on the occasions when it still fires up, feels like Siri Keeton from Blindsight. IYKYK.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@ponnappa Wondering if somebody I knew might have either drafted or signed off on this weird exhibit.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.

So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.

“Look I made this awesome product prototype”. Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues.

“Look I generated a contract”. Yes but you didn’t verify all the terms before it goes out to the counterparty and didn’t have to wire up all the past contracts to work with.

The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a *ton* to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@ergodicthought A $1,000 farce is a joke.
A $1 million farce is a bold bet.
A $1 billion farce is prescient culture-setting.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@robinhanson @cremieuxrecueil Generally I would agree, but there's an intrinsic value to human-generated content. I want to read @robinhanson's thoughts.

Value of thoughts (independent of content):
Your > Your undergrad intern > An AI responding to your prompt.

Run a poll on it if you disagree.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

A mental model for working with coding agents is that they're blind squirrels running into a maze and bumping into walls. You must place the walls (verifiable constraints) strategically so that they end up in the general region you want them in.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@tszzl Asimov understood context pollution and good context management better than today's token-maxxers.

[AlvaBuddha @Alva_Buddha]

@tszzl Asimov understood context pollution and good context management better than today's token-maxxers.